Ettema’s team placed the origin of Eukarya within the Archaea, not beside it. If correct, that meant we were back to a two-limb tree of life, neither of which is the limb we have long cherished as our own. That meant we ourselves are descended from archaeans, a separate form of life, unimagined before 1977. (There are intricate complications to this scenario, involving horizontal gene transfer of bacterial genes into our archaean ancestors before our lineage even began,
