Why not? After all, isn't it suggested that the first living item came from a chemical substance somehow becoming biological matter, and isn't it the "biological" matter that is supposed to contain "life'? Somehow emerging, jumping, combining from non-living matter (dead, perhaps?) to a one-celled organism which then morphed to apes and humans.
Well, let's take this step by step.
First, the universe as we know it started about 13.7 billion years ago, but the Earth and sun weren't formed until about 4.5 billion years ago. So the universe is about three times as old as the sun and Earth.
Next, one of the big things we have found out over the last 200 years or so is that life is a chemical process. So the distinction between 'chemical' and 'biological' is one of degree of complexity and not in something 'extra' that is added in to get life.
So, no, it isn't 'biological matter that contains life', but life *is* a complex collection of mutually interacting chemical reactions.
Next, the early one-celled living things were very simple bacteria. It took about 2 billion years before *complex* single-celled organisms formed (complex, in this context, means having things like nuclei and organelles inside of the cells).
After the development of complex cells, it was yet another billion years or so before *multi-cellular* life arose. Once *that* happened, it was a fairly short time period of 7-800 million years for apes to develop. Humans have only been around a couple hundred thousand years.
So, saying that those single celled organisms 'morphed' into apes and humans is rather a distortion.
So are you speaking of biological evolution, rather than chemical strata, as if, perhaps, the mountains, lakes, minerals, did not come about in stages gradually, but these are not living, only the first biological matter that turned up from chemical substance (a unicell) first has life. Isn't that right? I appreciate reading your responses, and now that you mention the origin of the universe, apparently many are still pondering over the emergence of the first live unicell. While others wonder if "life" may have dropped wittingly or unwittingly from outer space (i.e., the universe beyond the earth).
Well, that is a possibility, but there are some constraints on this. First of all, we don't know of any life elsewhere, so that alone makes this hypothesis questionable (but still possible).
Second, the very early universe was deficient in several of the basic atoms required to make the chemicals of life: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulphur, iron, etc. These were not produced in the initial heat of the 'Big Bang' (which only produced the lighter elements--through processes we understand). Instead, these heavier elements had to be formed in the cores of stars and then distributed by explosions of those stars. But the process of stars going through this cycle takes billions of years.
So, *at least* a few billion years are required for the first generation of stars to form and build up the basic elements required for life. In fact, the sun is a *third* generation star. Now, is it *possible* that some second generation stars had planets that allowed life to form? Maybe. We don't fully understand the requirements for life to form, so it is *possible*.
The other big problem with this is that the distances between stars is *huge* and life would be relatively scarce no matter what. So the likelihood of life forming somewhere else and 'dropping' into the gravitational field of the sun, then of the Earth, and actually surviving the process seems less likely than that life formed here.