As to the end of the Boring Billion, Junyao Kang has an answer: nitrates.
The Boring Billion was when prokaryotes and (1342 Mya) chloroplasts sat around the ponds being pond scum and doing little else. Eukaryotes are the life we care about, heading toward Ediacara. Usually the palaeos have been looking into phosphour, as the press-release notes. I'd actually thought that eukies started 1650 Mya but . . .
Anyway Nanjing University (and Virginia Tech) went up north to the craton there, which was a seabed starting from 1000 Mya. They noted (elsewhere) the eu-eu-karyotes starting 820 Mya. In North China the nitrates start 800 Mya.
They're part of the "Fralin Life Sciences Institute’s Global Change Center" which points to an alliance with the antinitrogen movement (coauthor Rachel Reid looking particularly sus here). So the research is a spinoff of politics. I'll just say I hope that the findings are peer-reviewed.
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