引言在过去二十年间,尤其是在过去几年中,全世界对前寒武纪古生物学的兴趣有显著增加。比以前,现在在这个领域中有了许多实际工作者,汇集了许多新资料,提出了许多新概念,由于这种现实活动的结果,有关前寒武纪生命存在的问题,十年前已是普遍但很少提出的问题,不久以前都提出来了。现在的问题不是前寒武纪生命证据的存在问题,而在于它说明什么?它告诉我们有关早期生物演化过程中一些什么?生物圈发展和早期环境演化之间的相互影响如何?虽然这个领域还是处在形成阶段,但朝着解决这些问题的方向已有了很大进展。现在已大量记述了这些进展,有广泛的评论文章(例如格 INTRODUCTION Over the past two decades, and especially in the last few years, there has been a marked increase in global interest in Precambrian paleontology. More than before, there are now many practical workers in this field, bringing together many new sources of information and putting forward many new concepts. As a result of this real-life activity, questions about Precambrian life existed ten years ago The problems that are widespread but seldom raised have been raised not long ago. The question now is not the existence of Precambrian evidence of life, but rather what does it say? What does it tell us about what is going on in the early stage of the biological evolution? How is the interaction between the development of the biosphere and the evolution of the early stage of the environment? At the formative stage, great progress has been made toward resolving these problems. Much has now been written about these developments, with a wide range of commentary (eg