The atmosphere of Early Earth is widely speculated to have been reducing. The Miller–Urey experiment, related to some hypotheses for the origin of life, entailed reactions in a reducing atmosphere composed of a mixed atmosphere of methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide.  Some hypotheses for the origin of life invoke a reducing atmosphere consisting of hydrogen cyanide (HCN).  Experiments show that HCN can polymerize in the presence of ammonia to give a variety of products including amino acids. The same principle applies to  Mars, Venus and Titan.
Cyanobacteria are suspected to be the first photoautotrophs that evolved oxygenic photosynthesis, which over the latter half of the Archaen eon eventually depleted all reductants in the Earth's oceans, terrestrial surface and atmsophere, gradually increasing the oxygen concentration in the atmosphere, changing it to what is known as an oxidizing atmosphere. This rising oxygen initially led to a 300 million-year-long ice age that devastated the then-mostly anaerobe-dominated biosphere, forcing the surviving anaerobic colonies to evolve into symbiotic microbial mats with the newly evolved aerobes. Some aerobic bacteria eventually became endosymbiont within other anaerobes (likely archaea), and the resultant symbiogenesis led to the evolution of a completely new lineage of life — the eukaryotes, who took advantage of mitochondrial aerobic respiration to power their cellular activities, allowing life to thrive and evolve into ever more complex forms. The increased oxygen in the atmosphere also eventually created the ozone layer, which shielded away harmful ionizing ultraviolet radiation that otherwise would have photodissociated away surface water and rendered life impossible on land and the ocean surface.
In contrast to the hypothesized early reducing atmosphere, evidence exists that Hadean atmospheric oxygen levels were similar to those of today. These results suggests prebiotic building blocks were delivered from elsewhere in the galaxy. The results however do not run contrary to existing theories on life's journey from anaerobic to aerobic organisms. The results quantify the nature of gas molecules containing carbon, hydrogen, and sulphur in the earliest atmosphere, but they shed no light on the much later rise of free oxygen in the air.