tarchon said:I wouldn't completely rule out the possibility that the pre-lunar Earth already had a reasonably evolved surface. It would have been a fair bit smaller at the time. A couple hundred million years might be enough for some sort of primitive life to emerge.
Except that this was merely the most dramatic example of a regular occurance back then. There simply was not time for it to happen until afterward. The Earth's age was only a couple hundred million years old at the time, anyway.