Creationism Refuted - Neanderthal Cannibals From 35,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

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Neanderthal at the Goyet Cave.

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Neandertal women and children were the victims of selective cannibalism at Goyet | CNRS

he evidence presented in my last blog post suggested that, at least in the earlier phases of contact between anatomically modern humans moving out of Africa and the indigenous Neanderthals, interactions could be relatively peaceful, involving exchanges not only of DNA but also of technology and culture.

That may not always have been the case, however, as new evidence from the Troisième caverne of Goyet in Belgium suggests. Research just published in Scientific Reports by an international team including researchers from CNRS, the University of Bordeaux, and Aix-Marseille University indicates that, between 41,000 and 45,000 years ago, when Neanderthals were close to disappearing from Western Europe, a group consisting largely of non-local females and juveniles was taken to the Goyet site, butchered, and consumed. The broader background to this violence may have included growing territorial pressures, dwindling populations, or the increasing presence of Homo sapiens in nearby regions, but the precise cause remains unknown.

So, while we cannot know exactly what triggered this episode, and while the coincidence with the arrival of Homo sapiens may or may not be significant, isotope analysis does show that those who were cannibalised were outsiders rather than members of the local population.

“Primitive” people were actually just humans like you and me. pic.twitter.com/NXGQm0sYCW

— Answers in Genesis (@AiG) April 13, 2026

For creationists, Neanderthals have always been a problem. It used to be common for them to claim that Neanderthals were known from just a single specimen later shown to be a pathological modern human suffering from arthritis. That falsehood has become harder and harder to sustain now that we have numerous specimens from across Eurasia, as well as sequenced Neanderthal genomes. The fallback position now seems to be to insist that Neanderthals fit neatly into Genesis because they were simply part of “human kind”.

Ken Ham, the creationist head of Answers in Genesis, with his characteristically casual regard for the truth and his obvious personal stake in presenting Bible-literalist mythology as history and science, has recently claimed that Neanderthals and Denisovans were descendants of Adam and Eve. What he does not explain, of course, is how he compresses the archaeological timescale of their existence, and their divergence into distinct lineages with markedly different genomes, into the 6,000 to 10,000 years allowed by creationist dogma. Like so many of Ham’s claims, it is aimed at an audience eager to have its prejudices confirmed and unlikely to fact-check anything for fear of discovering that it has been misled.

Like so much else in the history of life on Earth, and especially in the evolutionary history of our own species, all of this took place in that immense span of time before creationists imagine their small tribal god conjured up a small flat planet under a solid dome, conveniently centred on the Middle East.

The factual evidence, of course, tells a very different story: one based on testable, verifiable data, not on the campfire tales of Bronze Age herders who knew no better.

And in this case, that evidence shows that something, whether the increasing presence of modern Homo sapiens, the breakdown of Neanderthal society as their numbers declined, or some other factor entirely, led one Neanderthal group in what is now Belgium to capture outsiders, mainly women and children, bring them back to the Goyet site, and consume them.

Refuting Creationism - Neanderthals And Modern Humans Lived Together - 120,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals shared technology and behavior

Credit: Efrat Bakshitz

Archaeological examination of the Tinshemet Cave floor.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Neanderthal and Homo sapiens Interactions in the Mid-Middle Palaeolithic (130,000–80,000 years ago) | EUROPEAN FRIENDS OF THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY

Neanderthals are a persistent thorn in the side of creationism because they show that human origins are far older, messier and more interesting than the simplistic creation myths in the Bible. Genetic evidence shows that people outside Africa still carry a small but significant inheritance from Neanderthals, demonstrating that human ancestry was shaped not by descent from a single primordial couple, but by repeated episodes of migration, divergence and interbreeding between distinct human populations. There is even evidence that early Homo sapiens were interbreeding with Neanderthals as long as 100,000 years ago.

Now, new research by archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University, excavating at Tinshemet Cave in central Israel, suggests that the relationship between Neanderthals and early modern humans in the Levant, between about 130,000 and 80,000 years ago, involved far more than occasional contact. Their evidence indicates sustained interaction, shared technologies, similar hunting strategies and parallel ritual behaviour, including formal burial practices. The team have just published their findings in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. What emerges is a picture of different human groups living in close contact, exchanging ideas and behaviours to such an extent that their cultural differences became increasingly blurred.

The researchers reached this conclusion by integrating evidence from four main areas: stone-tool production, hunting strategies, symbolic behaviour and social complexity. Particularly striking is the clustering of burials at Tinshemet Cave, which suggests that the cave may have served as a repeated burial site, perhaps even an early cemetery. The placement of objects such as stone tools, animal bones and pieces of ochre in graves points to shared ritual practices and symbolic behaviour, hinting at a level of social and cultural complexity that creationist caricatures of early humans simply cannot accommodate.

Refuting Creationism - More on the Domestication of Dogs - Long Before 'Creation Week'

Artist’s impression of a human and their canine companion near a settlement in Ice Age Switzerland.

Credit: Oliver Uberti, Nature.

Cover picture for The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic

Canine companions: revealing the genetic history of our first friends | Crick

This is the second of my posts on the domestication of dogs and on why the facts are so awkward for creationists. It concerns research by a team led by Anders Bergström and Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Crick Institute, London, working with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a large international network of collaborators.

The team have shown that the domestication of dogs had already begun well before the invention of farming, when humans in Europe still lived in nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers. At that stage, dogs would have been hunting companions, sentinel guards for encampments, and perhaps even family pets, long before they were adapted for the many tasks later associated with farming, such as herding livestock and guarding flocks. Their findings are published in Nature.

This establishes dogs as the first domestic animals and suggests that the human-dog relationship may have helped lay the groundwork for later animal husbandry and selective breeding.

The story of the domestication of dogs from wolves is something in which I have long taken a special interest, and it was that interest which led me to write two books with fictionalised accounts of how it may have happened - The Girl and the Wolf and its sequel, The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic.

Biologically, of course, this evolved symbiotic relationship between two species is exactly the sort of outcome the Theory of Evolution leads us to expect. But, embarrassingly for creationists, it also tells a story rooted in deep time, for which creationism has no credible explanation. Worse still for biblical literalists, it makes a mockery of the claim that God created all animals for the benefit of humankind, because that claim presupposes that animals created by an omniscient, omnipotent designer would already be fit for purpose and would not need extensive modification by human selective breeding.

The researchers reached their conclusions by analysing DNA from 216 canid skeletal remains, including 181 pre-Neolithic samples - that is, from before approximately 10,000 years ago. These remains came from sites across Europe and nearby regions, including Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland.

Creationists previously had a little wriggle room when the earliest indisputable domestic dog was thought to date to about 10,900 years ago. They could at least pretend that dogs appeared during their imaginary ‘Creation Week’ or shortly afterwards. That pretence is now no longer sustainable. This study shows that the ancestry of later dogs was already established before 14,200 years ago, and probably earlier still.

Creationism Refuted - Earliest Domestic Dogs - 6,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Cover picture for The Girl and the Wolf

Oldest genetic evidence for domestic dogs identified in Europe and Türkiye | University of Oxford

Artistic reconstruction of Pınarbaşı c. 15,800 years ago based on evidence from archaeological excavations by University of Liverpool.

(c) Kathryn Killackey

This is the first of two blog posts on a pair of recent papers published in Nature on the earliest known domestic dogs and what they tell us about when grey wolves first entered into a domestic relationship with humans. Together, these studies push the earliest firm genetic evidence for dogs back[1] about 10,900 years ago, showing that dog populations were already present in western Eurasia during the Late Upper Palaeolithic. For creationists committed to a young Earth and to the simplistic Bronze Age origin myths of the Bible, that is yet another awkward fact: dogs were already on their way to becoming humanity’s first domestic animal long before their preferred chronology even allows for the Earth to exist. [1.1]

Since then, of course, dogs have been systematically modified by selective breeding to suit the many roles humans have found for them. That alone sits uneasily with the claim that a perfect creator made all animals ready-made for human benefit. But what makes these papers especially interesting to me is not only that they create yet another problem for creationist superstition, but that they touch directly on the background to two novels I have recently published, in which the domestication of wolves forms part of the story.

The first of these books, The Girl and the Wolf, tells the story of Almora, a child of the Drognai clan, who is raised alongside a wolf cub, Sharma, who becomes her inseparable companion. When Almora meets one of the last Neanderthals, Tanu, and they fall in love, Sharma plays a crucial part in bringing them together. The kindness of Almora’s mother, Shana, in rescuing and raising the starving cub becomes the small act from which a much larger change in human history begins.

In the sequel, The Way of The Wolf: A Stone Age Epic, Almora and Sharma have become the stuff of legend, their story spreading far beyond the lands of the Drognai. When Almora’s daughter, Shana — herself of mixed Neanderthal and modern human ancestry — chooses to leave the clan because of the tensions her family’s presence has caused, Almora, Tanu and a small band of Drognai go with her to a distant land. There they discover a people who have taken the legend of Almora and Sharma to heart and formed a close relationship with a pack of tame wolves, a relationship that has helped carry them through hardship into a period of hunting success and prosperity.

These books are fiction, of course, because we cannot know exactly how wolves became domesticated. What we can say is that the current evidence points to a long and complex process rather than a single moment of “invention”. The broad consensus is that some wolves probably began by exploiting scraps around human camps, while humans gradually came to recognise their value as sentinels, scavengers and hunting partners. The rest, as they say, is history.

And according to the first of these two new papers, that history was already under way deep in the Late Ice Age. One study generated nuclear and mitochondrial genomes from canid remains from Pınarbaşı in Türkiye, dated to 15,800 years ago, and from Gough’s Cave in Somerset, dated to 14,300 years ago, and concluded that a genetically homogeneous dog population was already widely distributed across Europe and Anatolia by at least 14,300 years ago. The second study analysed 216 canid remains from Europe and found its oldest dog genome in a 14,200-year-old specimen from Kesslerloch in Switzerland, showing that European dogs were already genetically distinct by then. [1.1]

Refuting Creationism - How Humans Caused 'Warrior' Wheat to Evolve.

Early farming unintentionally bred highly competitive "warrior" wheat, study finds | Biosciences | The University of Sheffield

One of the more embarrassing questions you can ask a creationist is this: if an omniscient, perfect god created all living things for the benefit of humankind, as the biblical creation myth claims, why have humans had to modify almost all our domesticated animals and cultivated crops to make them fit for purpose? In many cases, we have altered them so extensively that they are barely recognisable as the same species as their wild ancestors.

The story of how humans domesticated wild species and gradually modified them is, in effect, a textbook example of evolution in progress. Sometimes this happened through conscious selective breeding, but often it was an unintended consequence of domestication itself. Wheat, for example, evolved grains that were more firmly attached to the stalk. This meant fewer grains were lost when harvested and carried back to camp for communal use, so the plants whose seeds stayed attached were more likely to have those seeds planted again, whether deliberately or accidentally, around early hunter-gatherer encampments.

Another example in wheat is the evolution of taller plants with more upright leaves. As humans began planting wheat more densely, they created an environment in which the more aggressive plants literally overshadowed their neighbours and captured a greater share of the sunlight. In this struggle for existence, the plants best suited to the human-made environment were the ones most likely to survive and become the parents of the next generation.

That is the conclusion of a research group led by Dr Yixiang Shan and Professor Colin Osborne of the University of Sheffield, working in collaboration with colleagues from the Autonomous University of Madrid, Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain, and Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Their findings are published in Current Biology.

Malevolent Design - How Epigenetics Helps Pancreatic Cancer To Spread

Representation of KLF5 expression patterns in lab-grown human pancreatic cancer cells (left) and their patterns of migration from the primary tumor (right). Credit: Andrew Feinberg laboratory, Johns Hopkins Medicine. Originally published in Molecular Cancer.

Growth of Spreading Pancreatic Cancer Fueled By “Under-Appreciated” Epigenetic Changes | Johns Hopkins Medicine

A new paper in Molecular Cancer from Johns Hopkins Medicine describes yet another discovery that should be deeply uncomfortable for Intelligent Design creationists. The researchers found that the spread of pancreatic cancer is driven not chiefly by fresh mutations in DNA sequence, but by epigenetic reprogramming — changes in chromatin organisation and gene activity. In particular, they identified KLF5 as a major driver of metastatic growth, with higher expression in most metastatic lesions than in the matched primary tumours. The paper in Molecular Cancer shows that KLF5 promotes metastatic proliferation through epigenetic modifier genes including NCAPD2 and MTHFD1, helping switch on programmes involved in migration, plasticity and invasion. [1]

What makes this especially important is that epigenetics is not some magical extra layer of “specified information” inserted into life by a supernatural designer. Its roots are ancient. In bacteria, DNA methylation is a major form of epigenetic regulation, involved in gene expression, chromosome replication and DNA repair. In archaea, histone-based chromatin already exists in a form strikingly similar to that of eukaryotes, and studies show that chromatin architecture and its role in regulating gene expression long predate complex multicellular life. In other words, the basic machinery was already there in simpler organisms, doing ordinary cellular housekeeping long before animals and plants ever appeared. [2]

Multicellular organisms did not receive a brand-new control system from an intelligent agent; they inherited this ancient molecular toolkit and elaborated it. As multicellularity evolved, epigenetic regulation expanded and became central to cell differentiation, allowing cells with the same DNA to adopt different stable identities by opening some regions of the genome and closing others. Work on the transition from unicellular to multicellular states in Dictyostelium, for example, shows that chromatin reorganisation and histone modifications are closely tied to the shift into multicellularity, while evolutionary reviews note that epigenetic diversity expanded rapidly with multicellular life and that epigenetic marks are crucial in development and long-lived cell lineages. [3]

And that is exactly why this Johns Hopkins work is such bad news for ID creationists. The same ancient, repurposed system that multicellular organisms rely on for cell specialisation can also be subverted to drive one of the deadliest features of cancer: metastasis. That is what evolved systems do. They are modified from older parts, good enough to work, but never perfect and never immune to catastrophic failure. What this study reveals is not elegant, flawless engineering, but the vulnerability of a historically evolved regulatory system — one that natural selection adapted for development and tissue specialisation, but which disease can hijack with lethal consequences. That is entirely consistent with evolution, and profoundly at odds with the notion of a competent, benevolent designer. [1]

Refuting Creationism - Origin Of Western Europeans - Thousand Of Years Before The Mythical Flood

The Hunter-gatherer life-style persisted in Netherlands and Belgium until about 2,500 BCE

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Map indicating hunter-gatherer ancestry proportions across Europe 4500–2500 BCE. Darker is more.

New research into ancient DNA sheds light on key phase in European prehistory - University of Huddersfield

This second post on discoveries made by international teams of palaeontologists and geneticists, including scientists from the University of Huddersfield’s Archaeogenetics Research Group, examines the genetic evidence for the ancestry of modern western Europeans. As so often happens in research into human origins and archaeology, the findings are not what creationists keep hoping for: not a scrap of evidence that the creation myths in the Bible contain even a grain of historical truth. Instead, the team’s findings, published in Nature, add yet more evidence for a deep, complex and thoroughly non-biblical human past.

As usual, the evidence sits squarely at odds with those childish fairy tales of magical creation and a recent global population reset caused by a genocidal flood. The study shows that farming practices were reaching parts of western Europe long before biblical chronology allows for such events, and that there is no sign of the extreme genetic bottleneck such a story would require. On the contrary, both the archaeological and genetic evidence point to continuity across the period, with farming introduced unevenly into the region and with women of Early European Farmer ancestry from the Near East marrying into local hunter-gatherer communities.

Nor are these findings any comfort to far-right white supremacists who fantasise about Europeans as some sort of ancient “pure race”. Research led by scientists including Dr Maria Pala, Professor Martin B. Richards and Dr Ceiridwen J. Edwards of the University of Huddersfield shows that modern Europeans carry ancestry from multiple distinct populations: indigenous hunter-gatherers, Neolithic farmers ultimately derived from the Near East, and later pastoralist groups associated with the Eurasian steppe. In other words, the population history of Europe is one of movement, mixture and cultural exchange, not racial purity.

The team also found that the hunter-gatherer way of life persisted in what are now Belgium and the Netherlands for thousands of years longer than in most other parts of Europe. Rather than being rapidly replaced, these communities retained high levels of hunter-gatherer ancestry well into the Neolithic, apparently because the wetland, riverine and coastal environments allowed them to adopt some farming practices without abandoning their existing lifeways.

Refuting Creationism - Modern Humans Reached Australia 50,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-Generated imaginative reconstruction of first humans arriving in Sahul

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The migration of the first settlers to Sahul 60,000 years ago.

Photo: Helen Farr and Erich Fisher.

New genetic research supports “long chronology” for first settlement of Sahul - University of Huddersfield

Two recent papers by teams that included members of the Archaeogenetics Research Group at the University of Huddersfield, UK, show how modern DNA extraction and sequencing techniques are adding yet another independent line of evidence in support of the Theory of Evolution and against creationism. Together, they reveal the ancient and complex origins of modern humans, in stark contradiction to the simplistic Bronze Age origin myths of the Bible.

The first of these papers, published last November (2025), and available open access in Science Advances, examines human migration into Australia and lends support to the ‘long chronology’ hypothesis for the earliest settlement of Sahul, the Ice Age landmass that united Australia, New Guinea and nearby islands.

The second paper examines the more recent population history of Western Europe. That will be the subject of my next blog post.

According to the long chronology hypothesis, humans first reached Sahul around 60,000 years ago, whereas the short chronology hypothesis places their arrival between about 45,000 and 50,000 years ago. Either date is, of course, utterly incompatible with the childish notion of magical creation just 6,000-10,000 years ago. And unlike geochronological dating methods, which creationists routinely dismiss as fraudulent, flawed or unreliable whenever the results embarrass them, this evidence comes from genetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Because mtDNA is inherited through the female line, it can be used to reconstruct maternal ancestry in remarkable detail.

How Science Works - And Why Religion Doesn't - Changing Its Mind When The Evidence Changes

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Pohlsepia mazonensis PE51727a (part) and PE51727b (counterpart).

Oldest octopus fossil is no octopus at all scans reveal - University of Reading

The excitement creationists may feel on hearing that science has got it wrong yet again because a fossil once classified as the oldest known octopus has now been reidentified, will no doubt be tempered by the awkward fact that the animal it really belonged to lived 300 million years before, according to their beliefs, there was even a universe, let alone life on Earth. As so often, the truth poses no problem for science; it is creationism that stumbles over it.

Far from showing that science is unreliable compared with the supposed ‘eternal truth’ of religion, this revision is a vindication of the scientific method and a demonstration of its self-correcting nature. Unlike religions, which cling to ‘sacred truths’ that, when tested against reality, turn out to be little more than the best guesses and campfire tales of our ignorant and fearful ancestors, science is a method for moving ever closer to the truth. It remains the best tool we have for discovering reality precisely because nothing is sacred except truth itself, and because scientific understanding is always provisional — open to revision whenever new evidence demands it, unlike religions which are doxastically and doctrinally closed to new information.

On this occasion, the fossil re-examined and found not to be what it was once thought to be was the famous Pohlsepia mazonensis, identified as an octopus 25 years ago and even entered in the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest known fossil octopus. Using modern synchrotron imaging to peer inside the fossil and reveal details the original investigators could not see, researchers discovered tiny teeth and other internal features showing that it was not an octopus at all, but a nautiloid — a cephalopod with an external shell. The team recently published their findings in the journal Proceedings of The Royal Society B.

Refuting Creationism - How the Human Eye Evolved

By Rapidreflex - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

1:posterior segment of eyeball 2:ora serrata 3:ciliary muscle 4:ciliary zonules 5:canal of Schlemm 6:pupil 7:anterior chamber 8:cornea 9:iris 10:lens cortex 11:lens nucleus 12:ciliary process 13:conjunctiva 14:inferior oblique muscle 15:inferior rectus muscle 16:medial rectus muscle 17:retinal arteries and veins 18:optic disc 19:dura mater 20:central retinal artery 21:central retinal vein 22:optic nerve 23:vorticose vein 24:bulbar sheath 25:macula 26:fovea 27:sclera 28:choroid 29:superior rectus muscle 30:retina

By Chabacano - References: [1] [2] [3] among others, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Our modern vision evolved from an ancient one-eyed worm creature

A recently published paper in the Cell Press journal, Current Biology, by four palaeontologists — two from the University of Sussex, UK, and two from Lund University, Sweden — delivers yet another solid rebuttal to creationist misrepresentation. It traces the origin of the vertebrate eye back to a worm-like marine creature that lived around 600 million years ago, neatly demolishing the old creationist claim that something as complex as the eye could never have evolved by natural means.

One of the favourite dishonest tricks in the creationist repertoire is the quote mine: lifting a sentence from an expert, stripping it of context, and presenting it as though it supports the very position the author was arguing against. Few examples are more shameless than their abuse of a passage from Darwin's On the Origin of Species. In typical Darwinian style, he first states what appears to be a serious objection to his theory, then immediately explains why it is not a real objection at all. The part creationists love to quote, from page 100, is this:

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

Presented on its own, this is supposed to fool the unwary into thinking Darwin admitted defeat — as though he had conceded that evolution could not explain the eye and that modern creationists were right all along with their talk of 'irreducible complexity'. But, as usual, the deception depends entirely on stopping before the very next sentence, where Darwin wrote:

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Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (p. 100). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.

So Darwin was not conceding the point at all; he was doing the exact opposite. He was saying that the apparent absurdity disappears once we recognise that useful intermediate stages can and do exist. In other words, the creationist quote mine works only by concealing Darwin's actual argument.

And now, more than 160 years later, the evidence Darwin lacked has arrived in abundance. He could not have known the developmental genetics, the comparative anatomy, the fossil evidence, or the evolutionary history that modern biology has uncovered. Creationists have no such excuse. They are not merely repeating an old objection; they are repeating one that has been answered again and again, and now answered yet again by evidence tracing the deep evolutionary roots of the vertebrate eye itself.

So this discovery matters not simply because it adds another detail to the history of life, but because it exposes the intellectual bankruptcy of the creationist argument. The eye is not a problem for evolution. It is a triumph of evolution — a structure whose history is precisely the sort of gradual, functional modification Darwin predicted. The real problem lies not with evolutionary theory, but with those who continue to misquote Darwin and mislead their audiences in the hope that no one will bother to read past the sentence they have carefully amputated from its context.

An account of how the researchers arrived at their conclusion is given in an article in The Conversation by two of the four scientists involved. Their article is reproduced below under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Transitional Fossils From Before The Cambrian 'Explosion'

A newly-discovered fossil from the Jiangchuan biota.

Credit: Gaorong Li.

Reconstruction of Jiangchuan biota

Credit: Xiaodong Wang.

Spectacular fossil treasure trove pushes back origins of complex animals | University of Oxford

A paper just published in Science by a team of palaeontologists from Oxford and Yunnan universities should, if creationists were honest enough and sufficiently knowledgeable to understand it, finally lay to rest two favourite canards they use to attack Darwinian evolution: the so-called Cambrian Explosion and their misrepresentation of Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of punctuated equilibrium.

The Cambrian Explosion is a favourite target for creationists, who exploit the word “explosion” to misrepresent it as the sudden appearance of multicellular life with multiple body plans, supposedly without ancestry, and therefore as a single act of supernatural creation. The fact that it happened some 535 million years ago is usually dismissed with the standard creationist repertoire: claims that scientists are inventing the dates, relying on “flawed” dating techniques, or, more bizarrely still, failing to take account of some unspecified change in radioactive decay rates that just happens to make 6,000–10,000 years look like 535 million.

But that fallacy was based on very limited data, especially the fossils from the Burgess Shale, which provided only a narrow snapshot of living organisms at one time and place. From evidence such as this, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge developed the idea of punctuated equilibrium, in which long periods of relative stasis in the fossil record are interrupted by comparatively short episodes of more rapid evolutionary change. Creationists eagerly seized on this, dishonestly presenting it as though Gould had somehow replaced Darwinism and proved Darwin wrong. In reality, it did no such thing. It was not a rejection of evolution, nor of common descent, nor of natural selection, but a discussion within evolutionary biology about the pattern and tempo with which evolutionary change appears in the fossil record.

Darwin, of course, never claimed that evolution must proceed at a constant, steady rate. On the contrary, his theory makes it clear that changing environments drive evolutionary change, so more rapid evolution during periods of environmental upheaval is entirely consistent with Darwinian evolution and, indeed, a vindication of it. The appearance of long stasis followed by apparently abrupt change can also be exaggerated by the incompleteness of the geological record, in which spans of thousands of years may appear almost instantaneous when compressed into a thin layer of rock.

However, the notion that the Cambrian Explosion was a sudden event without ancestry has been steadily dismantled by discoveries pushing the origins of Cambrian-type biota back towards the Ediacaran, together with evidence that some Ediacaran organisms were already capable of movement. What emerges is not a miraculous burst of creation, but a clear evolutionary progression from the Ediacaran into the Cambrian.

Now this new paper strengthens that case by showing that complex body plans existed much earlier than previously thought, and by presenting evidence of gradual Darwinian evolution from the Ediacaran into the Cambrian.

The evidence comes from a treasure trove of fossils, the Jiangchuan Biota in Yunnan Province, southwest China, where more than 700 fossil specimens were recovered from rocks dated to between 554 and 539 million years old. Among the more surprising finds is a deuterostome — part of the broad group that includes vertebrates such as fish and humans.

Malevolent Design - How Brain Cells Promote Brain Cancer

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Scientists uncover hidden cells fuelling brain cancer — and a drug that could stop them - McMaster News

Scientists at McMaster University and The Hospital for Sick Children have discovered how a type of brain cell that normally supports healthy brain function can instead go rogue, helping glioblastoma grow and spread. Their findings were recently published in the Cell Press journal Neuron. The prognosis for glioblastoma remains grim, with survival often measured in months.

As putative examples of intelligent design, cells like these should be acutely embarrassing for any creationist willing to follow the evidence where it leads, because within the ID creationist paradigm the only logical conclusion is that the designer is malevolent. By contrast, as examples of how evolution produces workable but imperfect, error-prone systems, they are entirely consistent with the Theory of Evolution and yet another vindication of the science.

Glioblastoma is not simply a mass of malignant cells, but an organised ecosystem sustained by a network of interacting cells. In that sense, it is indistinguishable from the sort of irreducibly complex system that Michael J. Behe claims is evidence of intelligent design. What the researchers found is that a type of cell called an oligodendrocyte, normally responsible for supporting and insulating nerve fibres, can switch roles and actively support tumour growth. These helper cells communicate with cancer cells through a specific signalling system, creating conditions in which the tumour can flourish.

The team discovered that a crucial part of this communication system involves cell-surface receptors called CCR5. By blocking this receptor, tumour growth can be significantly slowed. CCR5 is already the target of the anti-HIV medication Maraviroc, a drug that has already been clinically tested and approved, so it offers a potentially promising treatment for glioblastoma, even if not yet a cure.

Refuting Creationism - The Oldest Known Ancestor of Spiders - 500 Million Years Ago

Head of Megachelicerax cousteaui

Credit: Rudy Lerosey-Aubril.

Close up of chelicera

Credit: Rudy Lerosey-Aubril.

A 500-Million-Year-Old Clawed Predator Rewrites the Origin of Spiders and Horseshoe Crabs | Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

Another day, another piece of evidence for creationists to ignore, misrepresent or simply lie about — anything, in fact, except honestly acknowledge that it shows they are wrong. This discovery strikes at the heart of creationism. It not only refutes the notion that Earth is just 6,000–10,000 years old, but also demolishes two favourite creationist misrepresentations: that there are no transitional fossils, and that the Cambrian Explosion was some sudden, magical appearance of multiple body plans with no evolutionary ancestry. Of course, creationists can always fall back on the familiar claim that scientists invented the dates to lure people away from God and convert them to “Darwinism”.

The evidence, published in Nature, is a 500-million-year-old transitional fossil showing that arthropods had already diverged to produce the chelicerate subphylum — the lineage that would eventually give rise to spiders, scorpions and horseshoe crabs. This pushes the earliest known chelicerates back by some 20 million years from the previous oldest example, dated to about 480 million years ago from the Early Ordovician Fezouata Biota of Morocco.

The crucial evidence was the presence of the defining chelicerae, identified by research scientist Rudy Lerosey-Aubril of Harvard University while microscopically cleaning a fossil arthropod that the scientists have named Megachelicerax cousteaui. Chelicerae are the pincer-like, sometimes venomous, foremost appendages that define chelicerates, in contrast to the antennae that are the foremost appendages in insects and many other arthropods.

This shows that chelicerae evolved before chelicerates acquired their later, more familiar body plan with a two-part body and the reduced head appendages that became the eight walking legs of spiders and their relatives. In other words, this fossil captures an intermediate stage between the earlier, multi-segmented arthropods and the later chelicerate body plan. It is, therefore, precisely the sort of transitional form creationists keep claiming does not exist — right up until one is found, at which point they are forced to deny, distort or ignore it.

Refuting Creationism - How New Genetic Information Can Arise Rapidly, Naturally

Lake Malawi cichlids

Source: Wikipedia

A small selection of Lake Malawi cichlids

How ‘supergenes’ help fish evolve into new species | University of Cambridge

Creationists like William A. Dembski constantly reassure their fellow believers that new genetic information cannot arise naturally and therefore requires divine intervention. This claim depends on a misrepresentation of the laws of thermodynamics and a deliberate confusion of information with energy. It is clung to despite the obvious and overwhelming evidence to the contrary, with the same tenacity that creationists bring to their insistence that evolution either does not happen at all or, if it does, must somehow have occurred at an impossibly rapid rate after the Flood to produce such enormous variation within their invented ‘kinds’ from just a single surviving pair.

So now we have yet more contrary evidence for creationists to ignore, this time in the form of an explanation for how the cichlid fishes of Lake Malawi in East Africa were able to evolve into more than 800 species in a fraction of the time it took humans and chimpanzees to diverge from a common ancestor. Readers of this blog with long memories may recall that, back in 2012, I described these fish as a particularly powerful argument against creationism.

The fact of this rapid adaptive radiation, taking place on a timescale that could be independently verified, was already indisputable. What we lacked at the time was a clear understanding of the underlying mechanism that made it possible. That gap has now been filled by researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Antwerp, who have shown that the source of this new genetic information lies in genetic inversions, where an entire section of DNA is inserted in reverse orientation. They have recently published their findings in the journal Science.

During the normal process of meiosis, in which reproductive cells are formed, crossing-over reshuffles genes to produce new combinations in offspring. But when a segment of DNA has been inverted, that section cannot take part properly in the crossing-over process. As a result, the genes within it remain linked together as an intact block, forming what geneticists call a ‘supergene’. These supergenes can then be inherited largely unchanged across generations. The effect is to create barriers to hybridisation much more quickly than would otherwise be possible, effectively isolating a new gene pool within the wider population and allowing new species to evolve far more rapidly than usual, instead of having novel gene combinations continually diluted by interbreeding across the whole population.

Refuting Creationism - How Long-Necked Dinosaurs Refute Intelligent Design.

Uberabatitan ribeiroi

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

Neuquensaurus australis

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

South American long-necked dinosaur could easily stand on two legs

Evolution works only with whatever variation happens to be available at the time, favouring traits that improve reproductive success in the short term. Unlike the imaginary “intelligent designer” of creationist fantasy, evolution has no foresight, no long-term plan, and no concern for what happens once reproduction has been achieved. The result is not elegant perfection, but a patchwork of compromises that work well enough for long enough.

That is why nature is full of structures and processes that serve an immediate purpose while carrying harmful longer-term consequences. Ageing itself is one obvious example, as damage accumulates, repair systems falter, and tissues and organs gradually fail. Cancers and degenerative diseases are others, arising when biological control mechanisms begin to malfunction. A genuinely intelligent designer would have no excuse for such shoddy, failure-prone systems; evolution, by contrast, explains them perfectly.

In humans, physical and reproductive fitness generally peaks in early adulthood, then declines steadily with age, until the very old, if they live that long, may become frail and dependent. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes perfect sense: once genes have been passed on, natural selection becomes progressively less effective at eliminating traits that cause harm later in life. What looks like incompetence from a design perspective is exactly what we should expect from an undirected evolutionary process.

And this is not some recent peculiarity of human biology, but a deep feature of evolution itself. A recent study by researchers from Brazil, Germany and Argentina illustrates the point with two South American sauropod dinosaurs, the Brazilian Uberabatitan and the Argentinean Neuquensaurus. These giant herbivores could apparently rear up on their hind limbs to reach high foliage, and perhaps also gain advantages in defence or display. But that ability came at a cost. As body size increased, so did the mechanical stress on the femur, making the posture progressively more difficult to sustain. In other words, evolution had produced a useful adaptation, but not a perfect one. The benefit came with a built-in structural penalty.

The researchers reached this conclusion by applying computational techniques from mechanical engineering to digital models of sauropod femurs, calculating the stresses imposed by gravity and increasing body mass when the animals reared up. Their results are published, open access, in the journal of the Palaeontological Society, Palaeontology.

Malevolent Design - A Parasitic Fly With All Creationism's Hall Marks for Intelligent Design Is Heading For The USA

Lava of the New World screwworm, Cochliomyia hominivorax.

By John Kucharski - via Wikipedia

The New World screwworm, Cochliomyia hominivorax.

Judy Gallagher, CC BY

An article in The Conversation by Richard Wall, Emeritus Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol, should remind creationists—if they had the wit to understand why—of the theological quagmire into which their favourite leaders have led them.

The Discovery Institute and its fellows, with their reliance on notions such as irreducible complexity and complex specified genetic information, have taken creationism to a point where the only escape lies in three almost equally unacceptable options:

• They can abandon the very arguments they present as proof of intelligent design, and so admit that they have no proof at all.
• They can accept that the designer god they traditionally equate with the god of the Bible and Qur'an is in fact an evil god, relentlessly designing ever more ingenious ways to increase suffering in the world.
• Or they can retreat into theology and Bible-literalist fundamentalism, abandoning any pretence that intelligent design is genuine science rather than simply rebranded creationism, by blaming everything on 'The Fall'. But in doing so they must also admit the existence of some other creative force with powers sufficient to rival their creator god—one to which their god is either powerless or indifferent. That, of course, destroys the basic principle of Judeo-Christian monotheism: a single omnipotent ruling deity. Ironically, the Discovery Institute was established for the very purpose of persuading US legislators and state education officials that intelligent design is real science.

This problem for creationism arises because the notions of irreducible complexity and complex specified genetic information apply just as well—if not better—to parasites and pathogens as they do to those aspects of nature that creationists like to present as evidence of their god's existence and benevolence; in other words, anything that happens to benefit them.

Professor Wall's article concerns a parasitic fly, the New World screwworm, Cochliomyia hominivorax, whose larvae feed on open wounds in cattle and sometimes humans, often with fatal consequences. The fly is currently extending its range northwards through Mexico and has now reached states bordering Texas. His article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - 100 Million Years Of Cuttlefish and Squid Evolution

Top Left: Pygmy squid. Idiosepius sp.
Photo by Keishu Asada
Bottom left: Ram’s horn squid, Spirula spirula. Photo by Dr. Victor Tuset

Top right: Ryukyuan bobtail squid, Euprymna brenneri Photo : Jeff Jolly
Bottom right: Common cuttlefish, Sepia sp.
Photo by Keishu Asada

The intricate ram’s horn squid shell is only about the size of a fingernail. Compared to other cephalopod species, the shell structure has not degraded over time. As part of this study, researchers used transcriptomics which revealed genes supporting biomineralization and regeneration of the shell.

Credit: Catherine Hodges/OIST

100 million years ago, an ‘evolutionary fuse’ was lit in the deep ocean, sparking squid diversification | EurekAlert!

Another day, another gap in evolutionary history closed by scientists doing what scientists do: following the evidence wherever it leads. This time, the gap concerns the origins and diversification of squid and cuttlefish, the decapodiform cephalopods.

An international team led by the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) has now reconstructed a much clearer picture of their history, and their findings are published, open access, in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The study supports a rapid mid-Cretaceous diversification of the major decapodiform lineages around 100 million years ago, followed much later by expansion into coastal habitats after the K–Pg mass extinction. [1]

That is, of course, disastrous for creationism. Creationists need the history of life to be short, simple, and static: a few thousand years, separate acts of special creation, and only trivial shuffling of variation within rigidly defined “kinds”. What this study shows instead is exactly what evolutionary biology has long predicted - deep ancestry, branching descent, ecological change over immense spans of time, and major radiations triggered by changing environmental conditions. In other words, not magic, not fixity, and not “kinds”, but evolution. [1]

The researchers conclude that the ancestors of modern squid and cuttlefish probably originated in the deep ocean, where oxygenated refugia may have allowed them to survive while shallow marine environments became increasingly hostile. Ocean acidification in shallower waters would likely have damaged shell-bearing forms, and the later recovery of coastal ecosystems and coral reefs after the K–Pg event opened up new ecological opportunities. What followed was not the survival of a few immutable “created kinds”, but the adaptive expansion of lineages into newly available habitats. [2]

That matters because it gives the lie to one of creationism’s central evasions: the claim that organisms merely vary within fixed boundaries. The history uncovered here is not one of minor tinkering around the edges. It is one of common ancestry, divergence, persistence through catastrophe, and later radiation into new environments. It is precisely the sort of deep, branching history that creationists have to deny, ignore, or misrepresent because their belief system simply has no room for it. [1]

The team reconstructed this history using genome-scale data, including newly sequenced genomes that helped fill key phylogenetic gaps. Together with data from the Aquatic Symbiosis Genomics Project and other existing resources, this allowed the researchers to produce a robust evolutionary tree covering nearly all recognised decapodiform lineages. Because cephalopod genomes are often very large, this kind of work has only recently become practical with modern sequencing technology and computing power. [1]

So, once again, creationism is refuted not by some special anti-creationist project, but as an incidental consequence of real scientific research. Scientists set out to understand the evolutionary history of a fascinating group of animals, and in doing so they uncovered yet more evidence for common descent, ancient Earth history, and the power of evolution to generate biological diversity. Reality, as usual, has no respect for creationist dogma. [1]

Creationism Refuted - A Possible Ancestor Of All The Apes - From Egypt

Masripithecus moghraensis in Early Miocene Egypt

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest) based on artist's reconstruction.

Masripithecus: A new Miocene ape from Egypt sheds light on the origins of modern apes

Another piece of the rich and complex story of human evolution may have come to light, and it is not quite what researchers had expected. Competing theories have placed the ancestral home of the common ancestor of African and Asian anthropoid apes either in Eurasia or in Africa. This discovery, however, points instead to Egypt, and more broadly to North Africa and the Middle East, as the region in which the pivotal transition from Old World monkeys to the lineage that gave rise to the modern apes may have occurred.

News that this distant ancestor of humans came from Egypt and the wider Middle East may briefly gladden the hearts of creationists desperate for support for the biblical myth of a special creation of humans in that region. That enthusiasm is unlikely to survive contact with the details, however, because this animal lived 17–18 million years ago and was not a human at all, but part of the lineage leading to the common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, gorillas and the Asian apes. Like so much palaeontological evidence, it therefore stands not in support of the Genesis creation myth, but as evidence for Darwinian evolution.

The discovery is described in a recent paper in Science by a research team from the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center in Egypt and the University of Southern California in the USA, led by Mansoura University palaeontologist Hesham Sallam.

The fossil, belonging to a species the team have named Masripithecus moghraensis, was discovered at Wadi Moghra. The generic name combines Masri, the Arabic word for “Egyptian”, with the Greek píthēkos, meaning “ape”, so the name can be read as “Egyptian ape from Moghra”.

Although the find consists only of a lower jaw, it preserves several features not seen in any contemporaneous apes, including exceptionally large canine and premolar teeth, and molars with rounded, heavily textured chewing surfaces, all set in a robust mandible. Taken together, these features suggest a flexible feeder able to eat both fruit and harder foods such as nuts, an adaptation that may have helped it cope with the increasingly seasonal climate of Early Miocene Egypt.

In addition to the sophisticated Bayesian methods that placed Masripithecus earlier in ape evolutionary history than any other known fossil anthropoid, the researchers point out that during the Early Miocene the Egyptian region lay at a geographical crossroads between Eurasia and Africa. At that time, the African and Arabian plates were still moving northwards towards Eurasia, while fluctuating sea levels periodically opened migration routes between the continents. As so often in palaeontology, multiple independent lines of evidence converge on the same conclusion.

Refuting Creationism - Observed Rapid Evolution

Biologists in Europe, the Middle East and U.S. planted 360 small plots of Arabidopsis (above) in various types of climates — from alpine to desert — and left them for five years to evolve or die.

Artist: Emma Vidal
for Moisés Expósito-Alonso/
UC Berkeley

White-flowering Arabidopsis growing in sand at a beach near the Baltic sea. The plant, a member of the mustard family, grows in a broad range of climates, from alpine to desert, and is commonly used in genetic experiments in the lab.

Moisés Expósito-Alonso/UC Berkeley

One-of-a-kind experiment tracked plant evolution in response to climate change at 30 sites worldwide - Berkeley News

You won’t need to spend long on a creationist social media site before someone demands evidence of “observed evolution”, only to shift the goalposts the moment you provide exactly that: measurable changes in allele frequencies within a population in response to environmental change. At that point, they usually abandon the scientific definition of evolution and retreat instead to one of their childish caricatures of it — one species suddenly turning into an unrelated taxon, new structures appearing overnight, or, most absurdly of all, unable to let go of the arrogant assumption that the entire universe has a single purpose - to produce them - a bacterium somehow “becoming human”, as though evolution had a preordained anthropocentric goal.

So we can predict with some confidence how creationists will react to news that science has now published precisely the sort of evidence they keep demanding. In a paper published on 26 March 2026 in the journal Science, a team led by Assistant Professor Moisés Expósito-Alonso of the University of California, Berkeley, reported the results of a remarkable outdoor evolution experiment designed to measure how quickly plants can adapt to changing climates. The researchers planted genetically diverse populations of the common laboratory plant Arabidopsis thaliana across 30 climate zones in Western Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and North America, ranging from the snowy Alps to the heat of the Negev Desert, and tracked the evolutionary changes over five years.

Of course, the purpose of the experiment was not to “test” the Theory of Evolution. Evolutionary theory was the framework on which the entire study was built and by which the results were interpreted. The aim was to observe evolution in real time and discover how quickly plant populations can adapt to climate change — and where the limits of that adaptive capacity may lie.

An early analysis of the first three years of genomic data — covering 12 plots at each of the 30 sites, 360 experiments in total — showed that most populations evolved rapidly in response to their new environments. In many locations, similar genetic changes appeared repeatedly, exactly as one would expect when natural selection favours variants suited to local conditions. In the hottest environments, however, the pattern was different: although some populations showed genetic change, it appeared chaotic rather than predictably adaptive, and these populations subsequently went extinct.

If this pattern proves typical of other plant species, it is deeply concerning, because rising global temperatures are precisely the conditions to which many plants will now need to adapt if they are to avoid climate-driven extinction. The study suggests that rapid adaptation is possible, but also that there may be a tipping point beyond which extreme heat pushes populations past an evolutionary breaking point.

Holy Cow! - Clever Veronika Refutes Creationism

This cow uses tools like a primate—and scientists are stunned | ScienceDaily

If humans evolved intelligence, why are there still creationists?

This is a question that evolutionary biologists struggle to answer, with the best attempt probably by Francis Collins, who explained that "Young Earth Creationism has reached a point of intellectual bankruptcy, both in its science and in its theology". (Francis Collins - The Language of God).

Paradoxically though, creationists often cite human intelligence as evidence for the special creation of mankind, separate from the other animals, who, according to creationist mythology, don't display what they define as evidence of intelligence - love, aesthetic appreciation, creativity, etc, as opposed to science which includes things like tool selection, adaptation and use, as characteristics of intelligence and cognitive ability.

So, it will be interesting to see how creationist explain the following video evidence of intelligence in a cow - namely, the ability to select a tool for an appropriate task and its ability to adapt how it uses that tool for maximal effectiveness.

This evidence comes in the form of a paper in Current Biology by Antonio J. Osuna-Mascaró and Alice M.I. Auersperg of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria:

Refuting Creationism - New Deep Ocean Species Discovered

Collage of the 24 new Amphipod species identified in Clarion-Clipperton Zone

Credit: National Oceanography Centre, Southampton

(A) Generalized body plan of a gammaridean amphipod, (B) Caprella equilibra, (C) family Corophiidae, and (D) Gammarus tigrinus.

Ritter, Carmen J.; Bourne, David G. (2024)[2]

Biodiversity Boost: 24 new deep-sea species discovered in major Pacific research | EurekAlert!

Among the Bible’s more obviously false claims is the one found in the second creation account, where God first creates Adam, then creates all the animals as “help meets” [sic] for him. In the earlier account, all the animals are created before Adam and Eve. In the revised version, however, none of the animals proves suitable for Adam, so God then creates Eve to be his “help meet”.

In virtually every depiction of Adam and Eve, however, both are shown with navels, implying placental reproduction rather than magical creation. Adam was also supposedly created with genitalia, although it is unclear what purpose these served before God created Eve, after his first attempt to provide Adam with companions had failed through, presumably, a lack of foresight.

Leaving aside the implausibility of that story, there is another major problem that creationists never address: if God created all the animals for the benefit of Adam and his descendants, over whom they were supposedly given dominion, why were so many of them hidden away in inaccessible places such as the deep ocean floor, where we are only now becoming aware of them?

For example, a team of 16 experts led by Dr Anna Jażdżewska of the University of Lodz (UL) and Tammy Horton of the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) have just announced the identification of 24 new species of amphipods found in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a 6 million square kilometre region of the Pacific Ocean between Hawai'i and Mexico.

These new species comprise ten new families of predators and scavengers, including a new family (Mirabestiidae), a new superfamily (Mirabestioidea), and two new genera of predators and scavengers, Mirabestia and Pseudolepechinella.

These findings form part of the International Seabed Authority’s Sustainable Seabed Knowledge Initiative (SSKI), which aims to describe 1,000 new species by the end of the decade.

None of these species was known to humans until now, nor do they appear to provide us with any obvious benefit of the kind implied by the Bible’s claim that animals were created for human use. It is almost as though creationism’s creator god forgot what these species were supposedly for and slipped instead into a purposeless, automatic process of generating biodiversity for its own sake — much as biologists understand the undirected natural process of evolution to do.