The fact that you, or I, or any living creature, is here at all is a series of astonishing strokes of luck stretching back more than 4 billion years.

One of the biggest hurdles was the very first one: How did life emerge from a primordial soup of stuff that very much wasn’t alive?

A radical new study, published in Science Advances, suggests that this unlikely threshold may actually have been crossed not once, but twice.