World’s Oldest Diamonds Revealed to be Polishing Grit

LiveScience reported that scientists at the University of California, Riverside have discovered that 4.3-billion-year-old diamonds — previously seen as evidence of the Earth’s first continents — are only fragments of polishing grit.

As quoted in the market news:

In 2007, an international team first reported discovering the tiny gems, which hid in pockets inside zircon crystals from Western Australia’s Jack Hills, in the journal Nature. But it turns out that the gems weren’t actually diamonds, but polishing paste, smushed into hairs’-width cracks when the zircons were prepared for laboratory tests, according to a study published online in the Feb. 1, 2014, edition of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Click here to read the full LiveScience report.