How Science Works - Scientists Revise The Age Of Mammoth Fossils - But It's Even Worse News For Creationists

AI-generated impression of Columbian mammoths around the sinkhole trap

ChatGPT-6 Astra

The center of the sinkhole has thin laminated sediments and extensive bone galleries. We sampled near here for MS-16-4 and MS-16-5 using metal tubes.

Mahan SA, et al (2026)

Luminescence Data for the Mammoth Site, Black Hills, South Dakota 2016-19 | U.S. Geological Survey

Creationists who seize on revisions in scientific dating as evidence that scientists cannot be trusted might want to read this particular example to the end. A famous mammoth graveyard in South Dakota has indeed been reassessed, and its previously accepted age has been substantially revised. Unfortunately for young-Earth creationism, the revision moves it much further into the past. An age already incompatible with the biblical timetable has become an even greater problem.

In a paper published in Quaternary Research, Shannon A. Mahan and colleagues report new dates for the fossil-bearing sediments at the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, South Dakota. Long associated with an age of approximately 26,000 years, the deposit now yields luminescence ages of roughly 160,000–232,000 years — around six to nine times that familiar estimate. These are dates for the surrounding sediments, rather than direct measurements of each mammoth’s death, but they place the assemblage in a substantially earlier chapter of the Pleistocene.

How can a fossil’s age change so dramatically? A scientific date is a measurement of a particular physical process. Its reliability depends on choosing suitable material, understanding what happened to it after burial, and checking the result against other evidence.

What was dated originally?

The mammoth bones lacked preserved collagen — the protein commonly used for radiocarbon dating bone. Researchers therefore analysed carbon in the bones’ mineral component, apatite. However, interactions with groundwater can alter that carbon after burial. The resulting measurement may reflect later chemical changes rather than the animal’s death, making ancient remains appear much younger. This is a problem with the sample’s history, not evidence that radioactive decay is unreliable.

What does luminescence measure?

The new study dated feldspar grains in the surrounding sediment. Natural background radiation gradually builds up a trapped-electron signal within these minerals. Sufficient exposure to sunlight empties those traps, effectively resetting the clock. After burial, the signal accumulates again. Measuring it, together with the local radiation dose rate, allows researchers to estimate the time since the grains were last exposed to light.

Does that date the mammoths?

It dates sediment burial, rather than an animal’s death directly. The connection depends on geological evidence that the bones and sediment accumulated together. At the Mammoth Site, the main feldspar results place the fossil-bearing deposits approximately 160,000–232,000 years ago, although the detailed chronology still requires refinement.

Why trust a revised date?

Confidence grows through independent checks, not through refusing to change an answer. Here, analyses at two laboratories and comparisons with earlier dating work exposed weaknesses in the accepted chronology. Further uranium-series dating is planned. Revising an interpretation when better evidence becomes available is precisely how science improves its account of the past.

Sources: Mahan and colleagues, Quaternary Research
Phys.org research report.

As described in Sandee Oster’s report for Phys.org, the site contains more than 60 mammoths, predominantly young male Columbian mammoths. The prevailing explanation is that a warm, spring-fed sinkhole became a lethal trap: animals entering the water could not climb back up its steep, slippery sides. Their remains accumulated in the basin. The earlier radiocarbon measurements were problematic because the bones lacked preserved collagen, leaving researchers to analyse bone apatite, whose carbon can be altered by interaction with groundwater.

The new investigation used infrared-stimulated luminescence dating of feldspar grains, with analyses undertaken at two laboratories. This estimates the time since sediment grains were last exposed to sufficient light to reset their dating signal. The researchers also identify thin sediment layers deposited by runoff entering the pond. Uncertainty remains over the detailed chronology, and further uranium-series work is planned.

For creationists, the awkward point is not merely the increased age. It is how the correction was made. Scientists questioned an established interpretation, investigated the limitations of the material previously dated, and tested the chronology using a different physical process. If dates were simply manufactured to produce predetermined answers, why expose the discrepancy and publish a substantial revision? Here, changing the answer is evidence that the answer remains accountable to observations.

Creationism Refuted - Relative Bone Strengths Adds More Evidence Of Human Evolution

Image: Cullen Townsend

On the right is a depiction of an early Homo human ancestor characterized by relatively greater bone strength of the femur in the thigh compared to the humerus in the arm. To the left is a depiction of an older human ancestor, Australopithecus, characterized by more equivalent strength in the bones of the arm and thigh.

Image: Cullen Townsend

Study of bone strength reveals new clues about human evolution | EurekAlert!

One of the persistent problems for creationism is that our ancestors left evidence of their existence millions of years before the supposed biblical “Creation Week”. Worse still for the claim that humans were created separately from the other apes, those ancestors possessed combinations of characteristics that make sense as stages in an evolutionary history. The creationist insistence that a fossil must be either “just an ape” or “fully human” cannot accommodate the very mixtures of ancestral and derived features that evolution predicts.

A new study published in Science Advances adds another piece to this picture. Led by Kristian J. Carlson of the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, the researchers examined CT scans of limb bones from seven fossil hominins, dating from approximately 3.7 million to 1.5 million years ago. By analysing the structure of their bone shafts, they estimated resistance to bending and twisting and compared strength across the limbs.
Bone responds to the mechanical loads placed upon it during life, so its internal structure offers clues to habitual activity. In the sampled Australopithecus individuals, relatively strong upper arms suggest substantial climbing, while the relationship between thigh-bone and shin-bone strength was more human-like. Early Homo, by contrast, showed relatively stronger thighs compared with upper arms, consistent with greater reliance on terrestrial walking. These findings support a change in locomotor behaviour, although seven individuals cannot establish every step or the precise pace of that transition.

The evolutionary significance lies in the combination. Upright walking could coexist with continued use of the trees: acquiring one capability did not require the immediate abandonment of another. An ancestor with this mixture was a functioning animal in its own environment, with no need to anticipate the anatomy or lifestyle of its distant descendants. Evolution has no destination, and modern humans were never a goal towards which these populations were consciously or inevitably progressing.

For young-Earth creationism, the chronological difficulty is equally stark. Even the youngest fossils examined are about 150 times older than a generously extended 10,000-year biblical chronology. Their bone structure provides evidence about how these individuals lived; their geological ages place those lives in a past that the creationist narrative simply does not allow. Together, they present a much more substantial account of human origins than an assertion that fully formed humans appeared by supernatural decree a few thousand years ago.

Refuting Creationism - A Day at Hengistbury Head and Millions of Years of Missing Biblical History.

Hengistbury Head, Dorset, UK

© Bournemouth University 2006 - 2026

I have just spent the day at Hengistbury Head in Dorset, where a visit to the coast brings you face to face with a history that young-Earth creationism cannot accommodate. It’s a place where creationists can take a stroll and see for themselves how far removed from reality the creation account in the Bible is.

Long before anyone made a flint tool here, let alone wrote the stories later collected into Genesis, the sediments beneath this familiar headland were accumulating in environments very different from those we see today.

Refuting Creationism - A Star Is Born - And Rewrites The Story Of The Origin Of Starfish

AI-generate impression of Yujingia glutenotunica.
(Colours and aspects of its living appearance are speculative)

ChatGPT-6 Astra

Artist's impression of Yujingia glutenotunica

Credit: Kaiyue He, et al

A star is born: half billion-year-old fossil rewrites the origin story of starfish | University of Cambridge

One of creationism’s favourite misrepresentations of the fossil record, promulgated By Stephen S. Mayer of the Discovery Institute, is that the Cambrian ‘explosion’ was a sudden creation event, when the major animal groups appeared without evolutionary ancestors, already equipped with their modern body plans. This depends on treating ‘rapid’ in the geological sense as ‘instantaneous’, and overlooking the transitional fossils that reveal how those body plans evolved. A newly described animal from China provides another awkward example for that narrative. And of course the existence of transition fossils themselves are a major problem for creationists who insist that they don't exist because their creation myth can't accommodate them.

Named Yujingia glutenotunica, this small, soft-bodied creature lived approximately 518 million years ago. As described by Kaiyue He and colleagues in their paper in Current Biology, its combination of anatomical features places it close to the common ancestor of two groups that now look remarkably different: the echinoderms, including starfish and sea urchins, and the hemichordates, including acorn worms. Together, these constitute the animal group known as Ambulacraria.

The fossils preserve a digestive tract and feather-like feeding tentacles, together with another set of appendages that may have anchored the animal to the seabed. Crucially, Yujingia possessed an elaborate feeding apparatus without a mineralised skeleton. Its anatomy therefore supports the evolutionary interpretation that specialised feeding structures preceded some of the defining features of later echinoderms.
This is what makes transitional fossils so informative. They need not resemble an animal caught halfway through changing into a modern species, nor must they be demonstrably the direct ancestors of anything alive today. They preserve combinations of characteristics that help scientists reconstruct the order in which evolutionary changes occurred. A fully functioning animal can be transitional in its anatomy: ‘transitional’ describes its relationship to other forms, not an inability to survive until evolution has finished building it.

Creationism Refuted - 55-Million-Year-Old Crocodile Eggshells From Queensland, Australia

AI-generated reconstruction of an early mekosuchine crocodilian beside a lakeshore nest in Eocene Australia

ChatGPT-6 Astra

AI-generated reconstruction of an early mekosuchine crocodilian beside a lakeshore nest in Eocene Australia.

ChatGPT-6 Astra

55 million years: Australia’s oldest crocodile eggshells found in Queensland

A major problem for young-Earth creationists is that so much of Earth’s history occurred millions or billions of years before their biblical chronology allows the planet to have existed. Fossils repeatedly confront them with evidence of animals living, reproducing and evolving in worlds that supposedly never existed. Dismissing this evidence as scientific incompetence or dishonesty does nothing to explain it. Nor does accusing researchers of manipulating dates become an acceptable substitute for evidence simply because the accusation is made in defence of the Bible.

The latest addition to this inconvenient record comes from approximately 55-million-year-old crocodilian eggshells found at Murgon in south-eastern Queensland, Australia. These animals were laying eggs more than 5,000 times further back in time than even a generous 10,000-year creationist chronology permits. The fragments are described in a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by an international team including Michael Stein of the University of New South Wales.

The oldest known crocodilian eggshells from Australia, they are attributed to the mekosuchines, an extinct group with a long evolutionary history in the region. These crocodilians belonged to a different branch of the family tree from Australia’s living saltwater and freshwater crocodiles. Their significance therefore extends beyond their inconvenient age: they help document an ancient crocodilian fauna that cannot simply be equated with the species inhabiting Australia today.

Eggshells also preserve information that bones and teeth alone cannot provide. Their microscopic structure offers clues to reproduction and nesting conditions; in this case, the researchers interpret the evidence as indicating nesting around the margins of an ancient lake. These tiny fragments therefore add another dimension to our understanding of how extinct crocodilians lived and interacted with their environment.

The broader evolutionary picture is one of branching lineages, ecological diversity and eventual extinction over immense spans of time. The eggshells contribute to that picture without, by themselves, revealing every evolutionary relationship or the precise identity of the animal that laid them. That distinction matters: science builds its explanations from what the evidence supports, while leaving room for further discoveries. None of that uncertainty reduces 55 million years to a few thousand.

Michael David Stein, a research associate in UNSW’s School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences and a co-author of the paper, describes the discovery and its significance in an article in The Conversation, reprinted below under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - Scientists Got It Wrong Again - But It's Still Bad News For Creationists

Life reconstruction of Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda

By Gabriel Ugueto.
George, H., et al. (2026) (CC-BY 4.0)

Photograph of the outcrop at locality Z143 where NMT RB462 was collected

Photograph: K. Angielczyk.
George, H., et al. (2026) (CC-BY 4.0)

September: New species of 240-million-year-old prehistoric animal from Tanzania discovered | News and features | University of Bristol

Scientists have revised their understanding of some fossils once thought to include the oldest dinosaurs. Scientists getting it wrong and having to change their minds should be music to creationist ears — until they discover what the revision actually means. The animals concerned still lived hundreds of millions of years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of biblical literalism. A reassessment within the Triassic does nothing to squeeze the history of life into a few thousand years.

Creationists have an almost schizophrenic attitude towards science: On the one hand they claim scientists are not allowed to publish anything which doesn't conform to some assumed scientific orthodoxy; on the other hand they point to scientific disagreement and debate and scientists even changing their mind as evidence that science is unreliable. And they readily use a computer to inform the world via the Internet that science doesn't work, without the slightest appreciation of the irony!

The research, led by Hady George of the University of Bristol and published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, describes a new species of dicynodont from Tanzania: Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda. Despite its name, this herbivore was a member of the mammalian evolutionary lineage, rather than a dinosaur. This discovery extends a genus previously known only from South America into Africa, around 240 million years ago.
<br

Creationism Refuted - The Evolution Of Domestic Dogs Began Long Before 'Creation Week'

Top The Eurasian Grey Wolf. Below a selection of its descendants. Creationists need to explain why this is not macro-evolution even though the scale of the differences between them and wolves is at least as great as that between humans, chimpanzees and gorillas

Various Internet sources

More dogs

Internet sources.

Dogs 10,000 years ago roamed with bands of humans and came in all shapes and sizes

Last November, just as I was finalising the second of my Ice Age Tales novels, two papers appeared in Science examining a subject central to their underlying theme: the long relationship between humans and the wolves whose descendants became domestic dogs. My stories are set some 30,000–40,000 years ago and imagine the beginnings of that relationship. The new research examines later chapters, revealing that substantial diversity among dogs was already established thousands of years before the intensive breeding that produced modern pedigree breeds.

The distinction matters. These papers do not show that domestication began only 11,000 years ago, nor that today’s breeds originated then. One identifies recognisably dog-like skull shapes in specimens dating to about that time, together with considerable variation among early Holocene dogs. The other traces how ancient dog populations moved and mixed alongside human communities over nearly 10,000 years. Both illuminate a prolonged history, rather than a single moment when wolves suddenly became dogs.

Earlier associations between wolves and hunter-gatherers remain possible, although neither paper establishes the particular scenario imagined in my novels. Taming an individual wolf is also different from domesticating a population: domestication involves inherited changes across generations, and behavioural changes need not coincide with readily identifiable changes in skull shape. The earliest stages of this relationship therefore remain difficult to reconstruct.

Dog domestication is, of course, a classic example of evolution under human influence. Its history presents several awkward questions for creationism, especially claims that substantial biological change is impossible and that the natural world fits a chronology of only a few thousand years.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Syphilis - How Did It Survive On The Ark?

[caption]

[credit]

The archeological site of Tequendama 1 at the border of the Sabana de Bogotá, Cundinamarca, Colombia.

© Angélica Triana.

Ancient DNA pushes back record of treponemal disease-causing bacteria by 3,000 years

Creationists who take the biblical Flood story literally have a problem that rarely features in illustrations of Noah’s floating menagerie: what happened to the infectious diseases? Saving their animal hosts would also have provided opportunities to save their pathogens. Conversely, exterminating the hosts would have threatened the survival of the very organisms that depended on them. A supposedly fresh start for life on Earth would therefore require an explanation for why so many ancient infections apparently came along for the ride.

Many pathogens, including those that infect humans are also host-specific, so that begs the question of which of the human passengers were host to the sexually-transmitted diseases, and how, if they were 'righteous' people, did they acquire them? The authors of the tale knew nothing of microorganisms or the germ theory of disease, of course, so saw no reason to explain all that stuff.

A discovery reported in Science on 22 January 2026 gives that question another uncomfortable historical dimension. An international research team has reconstructed a roughly 5,500-year-old genome of Treponema pallidum from human remains at the Tequendama I rock shelter in Colombia. This is the bacterial species whose recognised subspecies cause syphilis, yaws and bejel. The findings are described in a research paper in Science by Davide Bozzi and colleagues.

The ancient bacterium belonged to a previously unknown branch of the family tree, a sister lineage to all the genetically characterised subspecies of T. pallidum. It should therefore not be described simply as a case of modern syphilis in a prehistoric person. Nevertheless, its presence establishes that this group of pathogens was infecting people in South America long before European contact—and before the date commonly assigned to Noah’s genocidal flood.

The evolutionary history reaches further back still. The researchers’ molecular-clock analysis estimates that the ancient lineage and the other known lineages shared a common ancestor approximately 13,700 years ago. That estimate carries substantial uncertainty, with a range of roughly 6,800–20,600 years, but its central value places this ancestral population well before even the more generous versions of the usual young-Earth creationist chronology. These are estimates reconstructed from genetic evidence, not dates obtained by adding together the supposed lifespans of biblical patriarchs.

The Flood problem deserves careful examination. Genesis is ambiguous on the point. On the one hand it describes the destruction of terrestrial, air-breathing life; on the other hand it specifically refers to all living substance being destroyed. Although the authors were unaware of microorganisms so were not writing a microbiology textbook, a supposedly omniscient, creator god would not have been constrained by the ignorance of primitive pastoralists. But then these obligate parasites would not have survived the destruction of their hosts outside the ark, so the question of what 'life' the Bible is referring to become moot. If you subscribe to the Ark myth, you have to accept that any survivors must have been carried in the Ark.

The discovery of an ancient relative of syphilis does not establish that the particular Colombian lineage survived to the present. But neither qualification explains how the surviving branches of an ancient, host-associated pathogen could have persisted through the alleged destruction of their hosts outside the Ark. Within that narrative, infected passengers or another explicitly justified means of survival would be needed. Simply overlooking the pathogens does not solve the problem.

There appears to be no way to avoid the conclusion that, if the Ark myth were true, Noah and his family must have been carrying the obligate, species-specific sexually-transmitted diseases, syphilis, gonorrhoea and chlamydia as well as pubic lice and an assortment of intestinal worms.

Evolution, meanwhile, supplies the framework that makes the discovery intelligible: common ancestry, branching descent and genetic change over time. The scientists can place an unfamiliar ancient genome within a family tree and investigate when its lineage diverged from its relatives. There is no need to invent a separate creation event for each disease, or a miraculous rescue operation to carry ancient infections across an otherwise universal catastrophe. There is a history to reconstruct—and the evidence is preserved in the DNA.

Unintelligent Design - How The Immune System Can Go Rogue And Cause Premature Ageing

AI-generated image

ChatGPT-6 Astra

Reversing hallmarks of rapid aging by silencing a cellular alarm system

Photo credit: Eitan Moses

How the Immune System Rewrites Rapid Aging

One of the difficulties creationists have with presenting the immune system as evidence of intelligent design is explaining why something supposedly designed to protect us so often contributes to our illnesses. A defence system that can turn the body's own damaged DNA into a trigger for further damage is hardly an obvious example of competent, benevolent engineering. It is, however, entirely understandable as a product of evolution: a collection of mechanisms favoured for their benefits, constrained by their history, and carrying costs that natural selection has never eliminated.

Research from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem provides a revealing example. In a paper published in Genes & Development, Marva Bergman and colleagues investigated how a DNA-sensing protein called cGAS contributes to disorders involving defective DNA repair; the body's response to genetic damage can itself become an important source of harm.

The underlying problem is straightforward. DNA appearing in the fluid surrounding a cell's nucleus can be a warning of infection. cGAS helps detect it and activates an inflammatory defence response. But the DNA need not belong to a virus: damaged cells can expose their own DNA to the same sensor. Consequently, an alarm that normally helps protect against infection can sustain inflammation even when there is no invading organism to fight. The response then risks damaging the very tissues it ordinarily helps defend.

The researchers modelled two human DNA-repair disorders, ataxia-telangiectasia and Bloom syndrome, in turquoise killifish, Nothobranchius furzeri. In the ataxia-telangiectasia model, disrupting the gene for cGAS partially alleviated reproductive defects, cellular senescence in the liver, and inflammation in the cerebellum. Several measures of genome instability also improved, consistent with cGAS having additional effects inside the nucleus, beyond its familiar inflammatory role.

There was, however, a crucial complication: losing cGAS in fish without the underlying repair defect made pathology and genome instability worse. This was therefore no demonstration that the immune system contains a universally dispensable component, nor a discovery that switching off one gene reverses normal ageing. The same protein could be beneficial or harmful depending on the biological circumstances.

That is precisely where the evolutionary explanation becomes useful. A sensor that responds to DNA in an unusual location offers a broadly effective means of detecting danger, but that signal does not identify the DNA's origin with certainty. Such a system needs safeguards and regulation, and its usefulness does not guarantee that those safeguards will work under every condition. Natural selection can preserve a mechanism whose overall benefits outweigh its costs; it cannot anticipate every future mutation or guarantee freedom from disease.

The study did not test the evolutionary history of cGAS, but its findings illustrate the kind of context-dependent compromise evolution produces. For intelligent-design advocates, the awkward question is why an allegedly perfect designer would make protection and self-inflicted damage so intimately connected. For evolutionary biology, the useful question is how that connection works—and whether understanding it can help us reduce the harm.

This is just one example of how the human body is not a work of perfect design, but the product of sub-optimal compromises constrained by contingent history and lacking in foresight, where additional layers of complexity are not hallmarks of intelligent design that creationists like to imagine, but of the need for controls and compensations for problems created by earlier iterations of the evolutionary cycle. Many more are explained in my book, The Body Of Evidence: How The Human Body Refutes Intelligent Design

Refuting Creationism - Bigamous Beetles Have Better Babies - Observed Evolution Over 15 Years

Red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum.

By Udo Schmidt from Deutschland Tribolium castaneum (Herbst, 1797) CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum

Source: Wikipedia - Public Domain, Link

How sex can help save species from extinction | UEA

One of the recurring claims of creationist apologetics is that mutations condemn living populations to relentless genetic deterioration — a supposedly inevitable decline which evolution cannot overcome. What this argument neglects is that mutations do not operate in isolation: selection influences which genetic variants pass to subsequent generations. Now, a long-running experiment with red flour beetles has provided direct genomic evidence that competition for mates can help remove harmful variants, leaving populations more resistant to extinction.

The research, led by Michael D. Pointer, of the University of East Anglia Department of Biological Sciences, described in a report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), also addresses an interesting evolutionary question: why is sexual reproduction so widespread despite its considerable costs? Finding mates takes time and energy, competition can be costly, and reproduction requires contributions from individuals which do not themselves produce eggs. One possible compensating benefit is that competition for reproductive success helps prevent damaging mutations from accumulating.

The researchers tested this idea using populations of the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, maintained under stronger or weaker sexual selection. After 156 generations, whole-genome sequencing showed that populations exposed to stronger sexual selection carried fewer genetic variants predicted to be harmful. Their overall genetic diversity, however, remained comparable. Selection had reduced the burden of damaging variants without a corresponding reduction in variation across the genome.

The distinction matters. Genetic diversity is often used as an indicator of a population’s prospects, but the amount of variation cannot tell us everything about its effects. In this experiment, the estimated burden of harmful variants was a better predictor of extinction under inbreeding than diversity alone. Populations could retain similar amounts of genetic variation while differing in their vulnerability to genetic stress.

Creationism Refuted - The Evidence That Wouldn't Be There If The Bible Were True - Climate Change Over 130,000 Years

AI-generated image showing sediment accumulating over time on an Australian lakebed.

ChatGPT-6 Astra

Getty Images

Australia’s ancient rainfall patterns more complex than previously believed – News

For creationists who attribute much of Earth’s sedimentary record to a single, year-long global flood, the difficulty goes well beyond explaining how so much sediment accumulated. They also need to explain why natural archives preserve evidence of changing environments over periods vastly longer than their preferred age of the entire Universe. Producing layers of mud is one thing; reproducing a dated history of changing climate is quite another.

A new study by Alexander F. Wall and colleagues, published in Quaternary Science Reviews brings that problem into focus. The researchers analysed 69 natural palaeoenvironmental archives from tropical Australia, collectively spanning the past 130,000 years. Their purpose was to reassess how the complexity of rainfall patterns changed through the last glacial cycle.

Their conclusion challenges the suggestion that rainfall became uniquely variable and geographically patchy during the Holocene, the geological epoch encompassing approximately the past 11,700 years. Older records generally preserve less detail, so their apparent simplicity may reflect the limitations of the surviving evidence. A blurred photograph does not establish that the landscape it depicts contained fewer features.

The relevance to creationism is straightforward, although testing the biblical flood story was no part of the researchers’ purpose, but like almost all science, they did that incidentally, simply by revealing the facts. A flood can erode older deposits, transport fossils and produce successive sediment layers. None of those observations, however, demonstrates that it can reproduce the chronology and environmental history reconstructed from natural archives. A credible alternative would have to account for the ages, the sequence of environmental changes and the differences between locations together. Simply labelling everything “Flood sediment” supplies no such explanation.

How We Know The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People - More Evidence From The James Webb Space Telescope.

IC 348, a star-forming region. It is blanketed in thick clouds of gas and dust, millions of kilometres across, that form swirling patterns. Bright stars are scattered throughout the clouds, with the densest cluster situated in the centre of the scene. Each is crowned with six long points created by the optics of the telescope’s mirrors. In the upper right, a couple of hidden stars blast out long, glowing jets of material.

ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, K. Luhman, C. Alves De Oliveira, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)

Webb reveals stunning panorama of star formation | ESA/Webb

No sooner do I show the comparison between the Bible's author's description of the universe with the reality science is revealing, than ESA/Webb produce another batch of images as though to reinforce the conclusion that the authors of the Bible were writing from a position of primitive ignorance.

So, I'm pleased to be able to share those images here so that fair-minded, objective people can decide whether the rest of the Bible should be read in the light of that understanding, and treated accordingly:

Creationism Refuted - Dino Dung Tells Us More Than The Bible's Ignorant Authors Ever Could

Artist's impression of a tyrannosaur preying on an ancient diving bird.

Credit: Andrey Atuchin

The fossil feather preserved in dinosaur poop.

Credit: O’Connor, et al. (2026))

A fossil feather preserved inside dinosaur poop could help explain why birds survived the mass extinction - Field Museum

Creationism’s problems with the fossil record now extend even to dinosaur droppings. A small piece of fossilised dung from Montana preserves evidence of a meal eaten some 66 million years ago — long before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of young-Earth creationism. Within it are feathers that may help illuminate why some ancient birds disappeared while the ancestors of today’s birds survived. As, reported in Current Biology, researchers led by Field Museum palaeontologist Jingmai O’Connor, examining a coprolite — fossilised faeces — from the Hell Creek Formation found exceptionally preserved feathers alongside fish scales and bones belonging to a hesperornithiform, an extinct diving bird.

The feathers combine structures associated with waterproofing in modern aquatic birds with smaller, simpler, fuzzy body feathers. The researchers suggest that differences in insulation, feather replacement through moulting, or both might have influenced which bird lineages survived the cold conditions following the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact. Hesperornithiforms disappeared; the lineage containing all living birds survived. This remains a hypothesis, however: one coprolite cannot establish why entire groups became extinct. The distinction between the observed feathers and the proposed explanation is central to the Field Museum’s account of the findings.

For creationists, the difficulty goes beyond the date. This combination of ancestral and more derived features makes sense within an evolutionary family tree, in which different characteristics change at different rates. Evolution does not require every part of an animal to move together along some imaginary ladder from ‘primitive’ to ‘advanced’. Nor does an extinct bird need to be a direct ancestor of living species to preserve evidence of the evolutionary history they share. There is also a useful lesson here about adaptation. A feature that works adequately in one environment may become a liability when conditions change. Evolution has no foresight: natural selection cannot prepare organisms for an asteroid impact millions of years in the future. Survival depends on the circumstances organisms encounter and the characteristics they already possess, with chance also playing its part. What makes this discovery particularly telling is how an apparently unpromising object can yield evidence against which explanations can be tested. Scientists can investigate both the history of feathers and the unresolved details of extinction without invoking a designer. The uncertainty concerns which natural factors mattered most — and further fossils may help resolve it. Even a dinosaur’s discarded meal can contribute to that process.

Malevolent Design - Creationists Plagued By Ancient Parasites

AI-generated image of an Ancient Baikal settlement hit by plague

ChatGPT-6 Astra

WARNING!

If prompted, DO NOT 'click here to continue'.
A rogue advertiser (AwayTravel) is linking to a potentially dangerous site!

Two of the occupants of this grave were full siblings: a brother (aged 7-9 years old) and a sister (aged 9-11 years old) from whom plague DNA was identified. Not enough of the remains of the third individual were preserved to be able to be able to analyse them as well.

Photo: Vladimiri Bazaliiskii.

Oldest strains of plague caused deadly outbreaks 5,500 years ago – University of Copenhagen

For creationists who insist that biological complexity requires an intelligent designer, plague presents an awkward question: what, exactly, was the designer trying to achieve? A parasitic bacterium capable of causing fatal disease in children is certainly biologically impressive. Whether it is evidence of benevolent intelligence is another matter entirely, but it appears to conform to creationists 'proof' of intelligent design - irreducible complexity and complex specified genetic information, both of which ID proponents insist can only be created by an intelligent designer.

Research published in Nature reveals that early strains of Yersinia pestis, the plague bacterium, were already causing deadly outbreaks among hunter-gatherers around Lake Baikal in Siberia approximately 5,500 years ago. These were small, mobile communities: crowded agricultural settlements were evidently not a prerequisite for devastating plague outbreaks.

Researchers detected plague DNA in 18 of 46 individuals examined from four cemeteries. Combined with radiocarbon dating, burial evidence and reconstructed family relationships, the findings point to outbreaks that killed members of the same families, with a particularly striking impact on children. That detection rate is a proportion of the sampled dead, of course, not a measurement of the mortality rate in the living population.

The evolutionary details are especially revealing. These early strains lacked some of the adaptations associated with efficient flea-borne transmission in later plague. Nevertheless, they could cause lethal disease. They also possessed a gene locus encoding a superantigen — a substance capable of provoking excessive immune activation — which is absent from later plague strains. Its contribution to their lethality remains a hypothesis, but the changing genetic repertoire exposes a pathogen with an evolutionary history, rather than an organism equipped from the outset with one fixed set of features.

For intelligent design advocates, this creates a familiar difficulty. If useful biological machinery demonstrates a designer’s foresight, why should machinery that helps pathogens exploit their hosts be exempt from the same argument? Invoking a “Fall” supplies a theological explanation, but it does not establish a biological mechanism or account for the particular genetic changes revealed by ancient DNA.

Refuting Creationism - Norwegian Fossil Shows Complex Organisms - 560 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Charnia, one of the oldest 3D Ediacaran fossils found

Stratigraphic context of the Kommagnes Charnia specimen. A, photograph (facing north) of the eastern part of the cliff, with the site of the float block marked by a star. B, stratigraphic log of the left side of A, marking the stratigraphic range from which the float block could have originated.

From: Veenma, Y.P., et al. (2026)

One of the oldest known 3D animal fossils found in Norwegian sheep field | University of Cambridge

Creationists have a major problem with the so-called Cambrian Explosion, some 535 million years ago. On the one hand, they insist it was a sudden moment of creation in which multiple different body-plans were magically created without ancestry; on the other hand, they deny there was any history before 6,000-10,000 years ago. Clearly both views can't be right; However, both views can be wrong.

And for creationists of both camps, the Ediacaran presents and even bigger problem: not only did it precede the Cambrian, but it shows that complex body-plans had already evolved. This problem just got a lot more acute with the discovery of an exceptionally well-preserved fossil in a sheep field in Arctic Norway, in approximately 560 million year old rocks, of a fossils of Charnia, a branching, frond-like organism that lived during the Ediacaran Period, well before the Cambrian began. These organisms inhabited an ancient seabed hundreds of millions of years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of young-Earth creationism.

As a paper published in Palaeontology by researchers led by Dr Yorick Veenma reports, this is the first confirmed fossil of Charnia to be found in Scandinavia. It was found alongside other Ediacaran fossils and is a rare three-dimensional specimen which preserves anatomical details normally obscured in flattened impression.

Despite its superficial resemblance to a fern, Charnia was no plant. It belonged to the rangeomorphs, an extinct group generally interpreted as early animals, although their precise relationships to living animal groups remain debated. We need not claim that Charnia was a direct ancestor of any particular Cambrian animal to appreciate its significance: large organisms with elaborate body structures already existed before the diversification that creationists so often misrepresent as an instantaneous act of creation.

How We Know the Bible is Wrong - It Is Written In The Stars

Montage of early images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope

ESA/Webb (CC-BY)

IRAS 04302+2247, a planet-forming disc located about 525 light-years away in a dark cloud within the Taurus star-forming region.

Creationists and fundamentalist Bible literalists continue to insist that the Bible is the inerrant word of their god and a more reliable account of science and history than anything discovered through scientific investigation. Yet however emphatically that claim is repeated, repetition does not turn it into evidence.

The claim of divine authorship requires independent support. Quoting the Bible to establish the Bible’s authority merely takes us round in a circle. As Christopher Hitchens’s familiar principle reminds us, an assertion offered without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

When I and other critics argue that biblical cosmology bears little resemblance to the observable universe, however, we can point to evidence. We can compare what the texts describe with what astronomical observations reveal, and ask whether those descriptions display the knowledge we would expect of an omniscient creator.

Consider the ancient cosmology reflected in Genesis: an earthly realm beneath a firmament that separates the waters above from the waters below, with the sun, moon and stars set in that firmament. The familiar illustration of a flat earth beneath a solid dome reconstructs this ancient worldview; Genesis does not describe a planet orbiting a star in a galaxy. Its heavenly lights serve to illuminate the earth and mark days, seasons and years. Genesis 1:6–19

Elsewhere, the imagery becomes even more striking. Revelation describes stars falling to earth following the announcement of a great earthquake, while Daniel’s vision depicts a horn casting down and trampling some of the heavenly host and stars. These are apocalyptic visions, with symbolic meanings, so it would be misleading to present them as straightforward astronomical claims. Nevertheless, anyone who insists on reading such passages as literal descriptions of physical events has an obvious problem: real stars are not little lights that can fall onto the ground and be trodden underfoot. Revelation 6:12–14; Daniel 8:9–10.

Now compare that ancient picture with the James Webb Space Telescope’s image below. It shows the “Treasure Chest”, a cloud of gas and dust enclosing a young star cluster in the Carina Nebula, some 7,500 light-years away. The cluster contains an estimated 70 stars and is thought to be around 1.3 million years old. This is just one small region within our own galaxy. Webb’s infrared measurements, translated into visible colours, reveal the physical structures of a stellar nursery. ESA/Webb image and description

Creationism Refuted - The 'American Cheetah' Was Not A Cheetah - Convergent Evolution

An artistic rendering of two Miracinonyx, one in Beringia preying mainly on fish and one in the Lower 48 feeding on pronghorn antelope.

Credit: Julius Csotonyi (CC-BY SA)

The feline Miracinonyx trumani got its nickname, the “American cheetah,” from its slender, long-limbed body, reminiscent of an African cheetah. While the extinct Pleistocene predator did hunt down speedy prey, such as saiga antelope (illustrated), a new study shows some animals ate a diet of mostly fish, suggesting the species was more adaptable than previously thought.

Velizar Simeonovski

The extinct American ‘cheetah’ was not a cheetah after all | EurekAlert!

A cat can look rather like a cheetah without being a cheetah, and a predator with long legs need not spend its life chasing antelopes. That is the lesson from new research into the extinct “American cheetah”, Miracinonyx trumani, whose ancient DNA and dietary chemistry reveal a more complicated animal than its nickname suggests. It is also another example of why evolutionary relationships have to be investigated through evidence, rather than decided by resemblance and fitted into preconceived categories.

The study, led by Molly Cassatt-Johnstone of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and published in Current Biology, analysed ancient DNA from four specimens. It strengthens earlier evidence that Miracinonyx was more closely related to living pumas than to true cheetahs, with the puma and Miracinonyx lineages estimated to have separated approximately 2.6 million years ago. Its cheetah-like anatomy therefore reflects convergent evolution: the independent evolution of similar features in different lineages.

There is an immediate difficulty here for young-Earth creationism. The evolutionary separation of these cats occurred millions of years before the supposed “Creation Week”, while the three Yukon specimens themselves are approximately 31,000 years old. These were animals living, feeding and dying in an established ecosystem long before the entire universe supposedly existed according to a literal reading of Genesis. Their identification also extends the animal’s known distribution far into northern Canada. Science News.

Refuting Creationism - Bible Mythology Dead And Buried Beneath The Gondwana Supercontinent

Artists impression of the supercontinent Gondwana.

Source: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty (Royalty-free)

Reconstruction of Greater Gondwana at ca. 500 Ma or at 550 to 500 Ma compared with conventional paleogeographic interpretations (inset).

From: Tao Wang et al.(2026).

Gondwana really was a supercontinent. And it helped kick-start life on Earth

More than half a billion years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of biblical literalism, moving continents were reshaping the planet and helping to establish the environmental conditions in which early animals diversified. That is the inconvenient historical setting of new research into Gondwana: a vast continental assembly whose formation, geological activity and subsequent fragmentation belong to a timescale that bears no resemblance to the few thousand years allowed by young-Earth creationism.

A paper in Science Advances , by Tao Wang of the State Key Laboratory of Deep Earth and Mineral Exploration, Institute of Geology, Beijing, China, and colleagues, suggests that Gondwana was substantially larger than conventional reconstructions show. As co-author Bill Collins explains in his accompanying account in The Conversation, isotopic evidence in granites identifies ancient continental material now concealed beneath younger geological formations across much of Asia. Including these overlooked fragments increases Gondwana’s estimated share of Earth’s continental landmass to roughly 80 per cent, making it a supercontinent even under a restrictive definition of that term. This reconstruction concerns the world of approximately 550–500 million years ago.

Its significance extends beyond redrawing an ancient map. The researchers propose that the reorganisation of plate boundaries associated with Gondwana’s assembly established an enormous belt of volcanic activity. Sustained emissions of greenhouse gases could then have helped alter the climate, contributing to conditions favourable to the diversification of Cambrian life. This is a proposed connection between geological and biological change, rather than a demonstration that volcanism alone caused the Cambrian radiation.

One distinction matters here: despite the article’s headline, this concerns the diversification of life, not its original appearance. Life already had a long evolutionary history before the Cambrian, and animals existed before that period began. Nor was the Cambrian ‘explosion’ an instantaneous event resembling a magical creation. The term describes a geologically rapid evolutionary diversification, unfolding over millions of years.

For creationism, therefore, the problem is more substantial than another inconvenient date. Here is a testable account connecting the history of continents with the environmental context of biological evolution. Continents assemble, plate boundaries change, volcanoes influence the atmosphere, and organisms evolve in the resulting conditions. None of this requires foresight or a predetermined destination. It requires physical processes, evolving populations and the immense passage of time.

Refuting Creationism - The People of Sulawesi Were Chewing Betel Nuts Thousands Of Years Before Creationism's God 'Created The World'

Areca 'betel' nuts, Areca catechu

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

Areca 'betel' nut (Areca catechu)

By LBM1948 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Ice Age origins of one of humanity’s oldest drug habits - Griffith News

One of the recurring problems for Bible-literalist creationism is that people were living ordinary human lives long before its chronology permits them to have existed. They were finding food, acquiring knowledge of local plants and developing habits that left recognisable traces on their bodies. Two ancient individuals from Sulawesi, Indonesia, now provide a particularly revealing example: their teeth preserve evidence of betel-nut consumption thousands of years before the supposed biblical Flood—and, in the older individual’s case, long before “Creation Week” itself.

The research, published in Science Advances, concerns two hunter-gatherers, one dated to approximately 25,000–16,000 years ago and the other to 7,600–6,300 years ago. Even the youngest end of the older specimen’s age range places that person well before the entire universe supposedly appeared, according to young-Earth creationism. The younger individual also predates the legendary genocidal Flood in conventional biblical chronologies; indeed, both individuals predate creation itself under the familiar approximately 6,000-year scheme. These are awkward people to accommodate in a history constructed from Genesis.

As the Griffith University news report, researchers detected arecoline, a psychoactive compound found in betel nut, in the individuals’ dental tissues. Both also had unusual rounded grooves in their teeth, interpreted as evidence of habitually sucking whole nuts. Experiments showed that soaking intact nuts in artificial saliva released enough of the compound to produce effects in laboratory receptor tests. Together, the chemical evidence, tooth wear and experiments make a strong case for an ancient practice of consuming a neuroactive plant.

Refuting Creationism - The Evidence For Denisovans Just Keeps Getting Better

Map showing the geographic locations of Denisovan fossils determined by molecular evidence. The colours of the map reflect a combination of elevation and environmental context.

From: Rao, H., Xing, S., Ruan, Q. et al. (2026).

Denisovan Radius Discovered for First Time in Southwest China----Chinese Academy of Sciences

Fragments of Denisovan teeth, and bones recovered from Bianfu Cave in Southwest China

From: Rao, H., Xing, S., Ruan, Q. et al. (2026).

Long before the universe supposedly existed, according to Young-Earth creationism, human relatives were making tools and processing animal carcasses in what is now south-western China. Two complementary papers in Nature reveal another chapter of this inconvenient prehistory, combining ancient proteins, fossil anatomy and archaeology to investigate the Denisovans of Bianfu Cave in Yunnan Province.

In the first paper, Huiyun Rao and colleagues identify five Denisovan remains: two teeth, two skull fragments and part of a radius, one of the forearm bones. These come from layers dated to approximately 167,000–134,000 years ago. The radius provides the first securely identified example of this bone from a Denisovan, adding valuable evidence about a human lineage whose skeleton remains frustratingly poorly known.

The identification depended on proteins preserved within the fossils. Researchers screened more than 60,000 bone fragments before selecting promising specimens for molecular analysis. Surviving protein sequences contained diagnostic Denisovan variants, allowing small fragments to acquire an evolutionary identity that their appearance alone could not securely establish. The study also places another confirmed Denisovan locality within a previously conspicuous gap in their known Asian distribution.

A second paper in Nature, by Qijun Ruan and colleagues examines the wider archaeological record. Evidence of cave use extends from approximately 190,000 to 70,000 years ago — a span of around 120,000 years. Its inhabitants hunted medium-sized and large animals, produced stone tools and made extensive use of bones without elaborate modification. These practices suggest practical exploitation of available materials in a landscape of coniferous forest and forest-steppe.

An important distinction remains: the identified Denisovan fossils cover only part of that longer sequence. Attributing the wider archaeological record to Denisovans is the researchers’ most economical interpretation, rather than direct proof that Denisovans occupied the cave throughout. Nor does the sequence establish uninterrupted residence. That qualification illustrates how scientific conclusions are bounded by the evidence.

Refuting Creationism - Creationists Bitten By Snapping Tasmanian Tiger

AI-depiction of a thylacine in the Tasmanian bush

ChatGPT 6 Astra

The last known Tasmanian tiger in footage digitised by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

Photograph: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia.

3D scans of Tasmanian tiger’s skull reveal it had crocodile-style snapping jaws

The thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, has long been a textbook example of convergent evolution: a marsupial predator whose resemblance to a wolf evolved independently in a distant branch of the mammalian family tree. For creationists, such similarities offer an opportunity to invoke a designer reusing a successful design. But that explanation overlooks the more revealing question: how far does the resemblance go, and why do similarities in some features coexist with substantial differences in others?

New research led by Flinders University’s Professor Vera Weisbecker, published in Nature Communications, shows why describing the thylacine as a “marsupial wolf” can be misleading. Its skull combined features resembling those of different carnivores with an unusual specialisation of its own. As the university’s account explains, this animal was more closely related to kangaroos than to dogs, despite its superficially canine appearance.

Three-dimensional comparisons revealed a striking mixture. The back of the skull resembled that of larger canids, including wolves, while the long, slender snout looked more like that of smaller foxes and jackals. Yet the whole skull was disproportionately large for the animal carrying it. The researchers suggest that this combination supported rapid, forceful snapping bites at relatively small prey. Some features even invite comparison with crocodiles and other vertebrates that catch agile prey with elongated jaws. These are inferences from anatomy, rather than direct observations of hunting behaviour, but they undermine the familiar image of a predator equipped to overpower large animals in the manner of a wolf. The authors explain these findings in their article for The Conversation.

Refuting Creationism - Why Nature Creates Fossils Of Different Ages In The Same Deposit - Unlike The Mythical Genocidal Flood

AI depiction of how shells accumulate in sediment

ChatGPT 6 Astra

Collection of creatures that can disturb sediment and relocate shells.

Florida Museum.

Paleontologists spent 20 years carbon-dating thousands of marine fossils, then used them to decode a process fundamental to Earth’s history – Research News

A fossil bed is not necessarily a collection of animals that lived and died together. Two shells lying side by side can belong to creatures whose lives were separated by hundreds or thousands of years. For creationists who interpret fossil-bearing deposits as the products of a single, year-long biblical Flood, that raises an awkward question: how much history is actually represented within a supposedly catastrophic snapshot?

An international study, published in PNAS, brings substantial evidence to bear on that question. Drawing on two decades of research, the team assembled dates for more than 7,500 marine fossils, obtained using radiocarbon dating and other methods. They investigated “time averaging”: the mixing of remains from different generations within the same assemblage.

Their principal finding was that sediment accumulation rate is the strongest predictor of this mixing. Where sediment accumulates slowly, remains from successive generations can collect before permanent burial. Faster accumulation generally limits that opportunity. Comparisons between observations and computer simulations showed that sedimentation exerted a stronger influence than the other factors examined, including mixing by burrowing animals and the destruction of skeletal remains. These findings concern the relatively recent fossil record; their application to much deeper time still requires testing.

The creationist response cannot therefore consist merely of declaring that the fossils were all buried by Noah’s Flood. Burial and death are different events. A sudden event could gather older shells and redeposit them, but that would concede that the resulting assemblage contains a history predating the catastrophe. It would still be necessary to explain the age differences, the source of the older material and the surrounding sedimentary evidence.

Nor does a vague appeal to “errors in carbon dating” solve the problem. An identical age offset applied to every specimen would leave their age differences intact. Other proposed errors would need to be specified, quantified and shown to account for the observed pattern. Simply assuming that inconvenient measurements must be wrong is not an explanation; it is a refusal to accept evidence.

The significance of this research is that the history preserved within fossil assemblages can be investigated and measured. Scientists can ask how much time a collection represents, identify the processes responsible and test their explanations against thousands of specimens. For Flood geology, the challenge is to produce an equally convincing account of those observations. A biblical narrative, however confidently repeated, supplies neither the measurements nor the explanation.