• The world’s oldest known vertebrates had two pairs of eyes Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Reddit Flipboard Email The earliest ancestors of all backboned animals, including humans, may have viewed the world with four eyes, not just two. • The remnants of those extra eyes persist in the human brain today as the pineal organ, which is deep inside our brain, regulating our sleep cycle, but no longer forms images. • Early vertebrates “had eyes like we do, but not just eyes like we do. • They had four eyes,” the study co-author, Jakob Vinther at the University of Bristol, explained to us in an interview. • “That’s quite amazing to think that our ancestors were swimming around in the ocean like half a billion years ago, and used four eyes to see the world. • They probably had a much greater field of view.” The Kunming region in China is famous for the exceptional preservation of the fossil deposits from the early Cambrian period.
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