alt Hacker NewsUsually choanoflagellates are considered the nearest non-animal protist to animals. These guys aren't so far off, and maybe shared an ancestor capable of multicellularity, but they're probably not ancestors of animals. So my non-expert guess is that this pattern of embryo-like division is convergent. If not, the evolutionary tree is about to get shuffled big time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choanozoa and the containing group, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holozoa
Edit: folks, there actually is some interesting science here if you can avoid getting hung up on the silly title.
Many choanoflagellates are colonial, so they exhibit a primitive form of multicellularity that differs from true multicellularity by the lack of differentiation between cells.
It is likely that the ancestor of all choanoflagellates was already colonial.
The fact that Chromosphaera is also multicellular for the initial part of its life and it also shows differentiation in at least 2 kinds of cells does not imply that it is more closely related to the animals than the choanoflagellates.
Also in some choanoflagellates, differentiation in 2 kinds of cells has been observed and it has been verified that the same genes are involved in multicellularity, both in animals and in choanoflagellates.
See e.g. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/452185v1
So this new discovery just pushes back the origin of the mulicellularity of the animal type, from the common ancestor of animals and choanoflagellates to the ancestor of all opisthokonts more closely related to humans than to mushrooms.
(Opisthokonts are a group of living beings composed of animals, fungi and their relatives, which are characterized by cells that swim using one posterior flagellum, like the human sperm cells.)
It is likely that the split between the opisthokonts related to animals and the opisthokonts related to fungi has arisen because the former have remained in marine environments while the latter have adapted to continental environments, so in order to survive desiccation the ancestors of fungi have acquired a cell wall made of chitin that has protected their cells but which has caused the loss of their mobility, leading to the difference in lifestyles, where animals move around finding and eating their food, while the fungal spores are spread passively by wind and then they grow into their food.