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A new discovery has sent the current theory of human evolution into a serious wobble.

For nearly 100 years, scientists have thought a sponge was the first type of animal on the planet, but now a new technique has revealed we could all be descended from jelly.

The US scientists behind the revelation say they have used our genes to find this out.

Genes pass on physical characteristics from parent to child through the generations.

The team from Vanderbilt and Wisconsin-Madison universities have been studying the genes of different animals and organisms dating back thousands of years.

By finding those with the closest resemblance to humans and following their path back through time, scientists can use this to work out where we all came from.

And now the team doing the work believe the earliest form of animal life on Earth was very similar to today's comb jellies.

So we all started out life as jelly - kind of!