I agree. The scientific article is interesting, but the press report has a lot of misleading parts. Another:
> Since the 1970s, life has traditionally been divided into three domains: multicelled organisms, such as plants and animals, and the two domains of single-celled life, bacteria and archaea.
There are a lot of unicellular Eukaryotes. For example in this graphic, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Filogenia_Cavalier-Sm... the big orange blob is made of unicellular and almost unicellular Eukaryotes. Plants, Animals and Fungus are the small blobs in the corners.
I've found this stuff fascinating ever since I saw the stromatolites [1] at Shark Bay in Australia. They evolved 3.5 thousand million years ago. That's closer to the formation of the earth (4.5Gya) than now. It was thousands of millions more years before even cellular life, let alone multicellular life formed, and we know so little about it.
There's so much to read about this root end of the taxonomic tree, but unfortunately scientists seem to be pretty unsure about everything.
Or, in the 2 billion years since the common ancestor, it had plenty of time to evolve those genes like we did. There was an article in SciAm about living fossils recently and how inappropriate that term really is.
Sloppy sentence. As far as we know, all life shares a common ancestor with us, even bacteria, fungi, and plants.