A selection of dogs with a common ancestry. 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
The story of how wolves became domestic dogs is one to which I have returned several times, for both scientific and personal reasons. It is one of the most remarkable examples of two species forming a relationship that changed the evolutionary future of one and the cultural history of the other.
It also provided the inspiration for two of my novels, The Girl and the Wolf and its sequel, The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic. These are, of course, works of fiction, not proposed reconstructions of an event for which the details will probably never be known. In them, however, I tried to imagine a biologically plausible way in which the process might have begun: not with people deciding suddenly to “invent” the dog, but with individual wolves and humans discovering that tolerance, cooperation and mutual protection could benefit both.
A point made many times but worth repeating so long as there re sill people who insist the Bible is the inerrant word of an omniscient god - and then demand the right to special privileges including the right to mandate us to comply with their Bronze Age morality, is that a simple comparison of the Bible's description of reality with the actual reality it purports to describe.
This should quickly reveal that what the Bible describes is not reality but the satisfying guesses of ignorant people who lacked the science and technology to discover the truth.
And there are few better examples of that than the childishly ridiculous description of the universe as the Bible claims it was created with what science is discovering. The Bible very clearly and unambiguously describes the universe as a small flat planet at the centre, over which there is a solid dome to keep the surrounding water out. The celestial bodies are described as lamps and small lights fixed to the dome so that we can tell day from night. Outside this construction there is nothing but water, apparently extending to infinity in all directions, but above which there is another realm reached by travelling upwards from the surface of the planet – centred then on the Middle East.
Of course, this bears no more relationship to reality than the sort of description a five-year-old might produce when asked to describe his or her world, and yet there are grown adults who believe it is the best available description of the real universe! And these people demand to be taken seriously because they believe that on 'faith', not on an examination of reality.
I'll again remind readers of what the Bible says because so few people who claim to be Bible-literalists actually ever seem to read the Bible, but instead rely on what preachers and creationist sources tell them to believe.
The results of a study co-led by researchers at UCLA and the University at Buffalo, published in Nature Communications in May 2026, provide another straightforward counterexample to the creationist claim that natural processes cannot add genetic material to a genome without the intervention of their particular magic creator. They also show how relatively recent human evolution can be detected, reconstructed and quantified from the DNA of living populations.
What cannot be observed is the intelligently designed caricature of evolution that creationists are conditioned to mistake for the scientific theory: a single dramatic event in which one species suddenly transforms into an unrelated form. There is no plausible biological mechanism for such a transformation, which is why evolutionary biologists have never proposed one. Biological evolution is a change in the frequency of heritable variants within a population over successive generations; larger differences, including those associated with speciation, accumulate through many such changes.
Young-Earth creationists are nevertheless prepared to invoke evolution at an absurdly accelerated rate when their mythology requires it. To squeeze the present diversity of life into the few millennia supposedly available after their genocidal global flood, a small number of vaguely defined ancestral “kinds” would have needed to diversify into hundreds of thousands of beetle species and countless other forms almost overnight. Yet the same creationists baulk at evidence that human populations have undergone much more modest evolutionary changes over thousands of years.
The new research concerns AMY1, the salivary amylase gene. Salivary amylase begins the digestion of starch in the mouth, and people differ considerably in the number of AMY1 copies they carry. An early duplication of the gene occurred in the hominin lineage at least 800,000 years ago, after which repeated duplications, deletions and inversions generated numerous structural variants containing different numbers of copies. These are mutations that change the amount and arrangement of genetic material in the genome — precisely the sort of naturally arising variation that creationists insist cannot occur.
Crucially, cultivating potatoes did not cause the ancestors of Indigenous Andeans to acquire additional AMY1 copies because they needed them. High-copy variants were already present in the population. When potatoes and other starch-rich crops became dietary staples, people carrying more copies probably produced more salivary amylase and obtained a reproductive or survival advantage. Natural selection then increased the frequency of those pre-existing variants — evolution acting as a filter, not as a designer working towards a predetermined goal.
The researchers analysed AMY1 copy numbers in 3,723 people representing 85 populations. Indigenous Peruvian Andeans had among the highest numbers found, with the Quechua participants carrying a median of ten copies, compared with six among the closely related Maya comparison group and seven across the worldwide sample. The genetic evidence indicates that a high-copy haplotype increased in frequency among Andeans from about 2 per cent to approximately 45 per cent after around 10,000 years ago, coinciding with permanent settlement of the high Andes and the domestication of potatoes between about 10,000 and 6,000 years ago.
Engraved ostrich eggshell fragments from around 60,000 years ago found in the Diepkloof Rock Shelter. Archaeologists believe the fragments probably originate from eggs used as storage containers.
Archaeologists led by researchers from the Università di Bologna, Italy have shown that designs carved more than 60,000 years ago on Ostrich shells were deliberate, structured designs, not random or casually improvised marks. They published their findings in PLOS ONE in February 2026.
The problem for creationists is that none of this evidence should exist if their favourite Bible myths were true. There could have been neither humans making these engravings nor ostriches producing the eggshells 60,000 years ago, because, according to the young-Earth creationist chronology, Earth itself did not yet exist. Nor could delicate engraved fragments have remained embedded in recognisable, archaeologically ordered deposits if the entire region had subsequently been submerged and violently rearranged by a planet-covering flood only a few thousand years ago.
And yet the evidence is there. Creationists must therefore perform the customary mental gymnastics—rejecting the dating, misrepresenting the geology, bearing false witness against the scientists or even presenting their god as a cosmic trickster who deliberately formed evidence such as this to fool us when it created the world — anything, apparently, rather than allowing demonstrable facts to modify a cherished belief.
The researchers assembled a dataset of images showing 112 engraved ostrich-eggshell fragments from Diepkloof and Klipdrift in South Africa and Apollo 11 in Namibia. Three badly worn fragments were excluded from the statistical analysis because their markings could not be reconstructed reliably. Using geometric and statistical techniques not previously applied systematically to these artefacts, the team traced the lines and examined their angles, alignments, intersections and spatial relationships.
The analysis identified recurring cognitive operations involving rotation, translation, iteration and “embedding”—the nesting of elements within additional hierarchical levels of a design. Parallel lines, near-right angles, hatched bands, grids and diamond-shaped motifs were combined according to consistent spatial rules. More than 90 per cent of the statistically assessed fragments conformed closely to models of regular parallel alignment or angular organisation, while orthogonality and spatial regularity characterised more than 80 per cent of the dataset overall.
These were therefore not merely scratches or repeated movements. The engravers exercised deliberate control over the placement and orientation of the lines, constructing what the researchers describe as a “geometric grammar”. The patterns indicate visual-spatial planning and suggest that their makers had an overall conception of the design before or while engraving it. They provide an early material expression of abstract, rule-governed graphic thought.
These artefacts do not, by themselves, identify the first appearance of abstract thought, nor do they provide a complete history of the evolution of human intelligence. What they offer is a remarkably ancient snapshot of sophisticated cognition in Homo sapiens. Together with the wider archaeological record, they fit an evolutionary history in which human cognitive and symbolic abilities arose and developed within the hominin lineage—not one in which fully modern humans, complete with all their intellectual abilities, were produced suddenly by magic a few thousand years ago.
There is enough for a substantial side-panel. One useful point to emphasise is that the famous painted stones from Apollo 11 are much younger than its engraved eggshell fragments and should not be conflated with them.
Diepkloof, Klipdrift and Apollo 11.
The engraved ostrich-eggshell fragments examined in this research came from three rock shelters associated with the Howiesons Poort, a Middle Stone Age technological tradition found across southern Africa. Dating broadly to about 65,000–60,000 years ago, Howiesons Poort assemblages include carefully made stone blades and backed tools, composite implements, the controlled heating of stone and evidence of symbolic or decorative behaviour.
The name describes a widespread technocomplex—a recurring combination of technologies and artefact types—not a single tribe or homogeneous culture.
Diepkloof Rock Shelter, South Africa
Diepkloof is a large quartzitic-sandstone shelter overlooking the Verlorenvlei River in South Africa’s Western Cape, about 17 kilometres from the present Atlantic shoreline. Its deposits preserve one of southern Africa’s most extensive Middle Stone Age sequences, recording intermittent human occupation from before 130,000 to approximately 45,000 years ago.
The shelter contains layers of ash, charcoal, hearth debris and burnt bedding left by successive groups of occupants. Archaeologists have also recovered stone tools, animal bones, marine shells and exceptionally well-preserved plant remains, providing evidence of the environment, diet and activities of the people who used the shelter.
Hundreds of engraved ostrich-eggshell fragments have been recovered from its Howiesons Poort layers. Some pieces preserve perforated openings, supporting the interpretation that the eggshells had been converted into portable water flasks. The engravings include parallel lines, intersecting lines, cross-hatching and especially hatched bands. Their distribution through numerous successive layers indicates a graphic tradition maintained for several thousand years rather than a single episode of decoration.
The precise chronology of some Diepkloof layers remains debated. The authors of the 2026 study adopted a date range of approximately 65,000–60,000 years ago for comparison with the other sites.
In 2024, Diepkloof was included in the UNESCO World Heritage property The Emergence of Modern Human Behaviour: The Pleistocene Occupation Sites of South Africa.
Klipdrift Shelter, South Africa
Klipdrift Shelter forms part of a cave complex in the De Hoop Nature Reserve on South Africa’s southern Cape coast. It should not be confused with the adjacent Klipdrift Cave: the shelter contains the relevant Middle Stone Age deposits, whereas the cave has principally yielded much younger Later Stone Age material.
Optically stimulated luminescence dating places the Howiesons Poort occupation of Klipdrift Shelter between approximately 65,500 and 59,400 years ago. Its well-preserved layers contain hearths, stone tools, ochre, marine shells, animal and plant remains and a human molar. The inhabitants exploited both terrestrial animals and coastal resources.
The site has also provided evidence that silcrete was deliberately heated to improve its suitability for making stone tools. Small backed pieces could have been mounted on wooden shafts using compound adhesives, demonstrating considerable technological knowledge and forward planning.
More than 95 engraved ostrich-eggshell fragments have been reported from its Howiesons Poort layers. Their designs include parallel lines, cross-hatching and diamond-shaped arrangements. In the 2026 analysis, the diamond motif was confined to Klipdrift and appeared in the final phase of its Howiesons Poort sequence, suggesting that particular designs could have local or chronological significance.
Apollo 11 Rockshelter, Namibia
Apollo 11 Rockshelter lies in the Huns Mountains of southern Namibia. It contains the longest known late-Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological sequence in the country, with deposits representing several Middle Stone Age traditions—including the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort—as well as later occupations.
The shelter received its modern name from archaeologist Wolfgang Erich Wendt, who was excavating there in 1969 when he heard of the safe return of the Apollo 11 lunar crew.
Only two engraved ostrich-eggshell fragments from Apollo 11 were available for the 2026 geometric analysis. Both carry intersecting, approximately parallel lines associated with the Howiesons Poort occupation. Although the sample is small, it extends the geographical distribution of this engraving practice well beyond the South African Cape.
Apollo 11 is better known for seven painted quartzite slabs recovered from a much later archaeological level. Painted with charcoal, ochre and white pigment and depicting animals or possible composite creatures, these portable artworks date to about 30,000 years ago and are among the earliest securely dated examples of figurative art in Africa. They are important in their own right but are not contemporary with the approximately 60,000-year-old engraved eggshells.
Why the three sites matter
Taken together, the sites show that engraving ostrich-eggshell containers was not an isolated accident or the idiosyncratic activity of one individual. Related geometric practices occurred across widely separated parts of southern Africa and persisted through multiple occupation layers.
At the same time, differences between the sites—hatched bands at Diepkloof, diamonds at Klipdrift and intersecting parallel lines at Apollo 11—suggest local traditions and changes through time. The engravers shared the cognitive ability to organise lines according to geometric rules, but they did not simply reproduce one rigid, unchanging design.
The paper in PLOS ONE was accompanied by an article in Unibo Magazine, the University of Bologna’s online news magazine:
Humanity’s oldest geometries, engraved on ostrich eggsAn analysis of the markings found on hundreds of eggshell fragments dating back more than 60,000 years, unearthed between South Africa and Namibia, has revealed our ancestors’ remarkable ability to organise visual space according to abstract principles
At several archaeological sites in southern Africa, hundreds of highly unusual fragments of ostrich eggs have been found. Dating back more than 60,000 years, the shells were engraved by groups of Homo sapiens who lived in that region.
A new investigation, led by researchers from the University of Bologna, has now revealed for the first time that these engravings on ostrich eggshells were not random or improvised, but followed recurring and surprisingly organised geometric rules. The study - published in the journal PLOS One - shows the presence of a genuine cognitive organisation of forms, based on parallelism, orthogonality and the repetition of lines and regular patterns.
These signs reveal a surprisingly structured, geometric way of thinking. We are talking about people who did not simply draw lines, but organised them according to recurring principles - parallelisms, grids, rotations and systematic repetitions: a visual grammar in embryo.
Professor Silvia Ferrara, senior author
Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies
University of Bologna
Bologna, Italy.
The ostrich eggshells were most likely used as water containers. The researchers carried out a quantitative and systematic investigation of 112 fragments from two South African archaeological sites (Diepkloof and Klipdrift) and one site in Namibia (Apollo 11). By applying methods of geometric and statistical analysis never previously used on these artefacts, the study made it possible to reconstruct in detail the lines, angles and trajectories of the markings.
The results show that more than 80% of the configurations analysed display coherent spatial regularities, with repeated use of angles close to 90° and groups of parallel lines. The most complex compositions - such as hatched bands, grids and diamond-shaped motifs - reveal cognitive operations of rotation, translation, repetition and “embedding”, i.e. the ability to build hierarchical levels of signs within the same surface.
These engravings are organised and consistent, and show mastery of geometric relationships. There is not only a process of repeating signs: there is real visuo-spatial planning, as if the authors already had an overall image of the figure in mind before engraving it.
Professor Silvia Ferrara, senior author
Beyond the possible meanings of the markings, the authors stress that the implications of the study concern above all the cognitive foundations that made it possible to create these decorations. The ability to construct visual configurations structured according to specific rules can be seen as a key indicator of the emergence of abstract thought - a crucial step in the evolution of human thinking.
Our analysis shows that Homo sapiens 60,000 years ago already possessed a remarkable ability to organise visual space according to abstract principles. Transforming simple forms into complex systems by following defined rules is a deeply human trait that has characterised our history over millennia, from the creation of decorations to the development of symbolic systems and, ultimately, writing.
Valentina Decembrini, first author
Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies
University of Bologna
Bologna, Italy.
Abstract
This article presents the first quantitative geometric and spatial analysis of engraved ostrich eggshell (EOES) fragments from the Howiesons Poort (HP) technocomplex of the African late Middle Stone Age (MSA), to evaluate whether the EOES demonstrates genuine formal structuring and visuo-spatial organization. By considering their ‘non-accidental properties’—such as curvature, parallelism, and co-termination—which remain consistent across different viewpoints, as well as their metric properties, including angular inclinations, based on empirical thresholds, we show that the HP dataset systematically employs salient geometric features. These features are combined and embedded through complex cognitive operations, including the iteration and alignment of parallel lines, rotation of lines generating intersections with variable angular openings, and translation of specific elements nested within organized spatial layouts. These engravings therefore constitute an early material expression of complex graphic representation, attesting to a species-specific human capacity for organizing geometric thought. Overall, the patterns reflect a system of rules through which Homo sapiens in the HP organized visual forms, revealing the cognitive foundations of structured graphic behavior.
What these engraved fragments preserve is not merely a collection of decorations but evidence of established human cultural traditions. Across three widely separated sites, people living about 60,000 years ago converted ostrich eggs into useful containers and embellished them with carefully planned geometric patterns. Differences between sites and between successive archaeological layers show that these traditions varied geographically and changed over time—precisely what we should expect from cultures developing through ordinary human invention, learning and transmission.
For young-Earth creationism, the chronology alone is fatal. These people were organising visual space according to abstract rules more than 50,000 years before the supposed “Creation Week”. The dates do not depend upon one questionable object or an isolated measurement: the fragments occur within ordered sequences containing stone tools, hearths, food remains and environmental evidence, all of which together document repeated human occupation over immense periods of time.
Nor is there any trace of the global catastrophe that creationists place only a few thousand years ago. The shelters preserve fine layers of ash, charcoal, burnt bedding and fragile eggshell accumulated during successive occupations. They have not been churned together, swept away or buried beneath the chaotic debris that a mountain-covering global flood would necessarily have produced. Instead, their stratigraphy records continuity, local environmental change and human activity—not planetary destruction.
The researchers needed neither a magical creation nor a supernatural injection of intelligence to explain what they found. They saw members of our own evolved species displaying sophisticated planning, abstraction and cultural learning deep in the African Stone Age. Once again, science reveals a richly detailed human past where creationism insists there could have been no past at all—and once again, it is the evidence, not the mythology, that survives examination.
Advertisement
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
All titles available in paperback, hardcover, ebook for Kindle and audio format.
Prices correct at time of publication. for current prices.
A team led by scientists at Eurac Research, a private research centre based in Bolzano, South Tyrol, Italy, has reconstructed a remarkably detailed picture of the microbial community associated with Ötzi, the Copper Age man whose naturally mummified body emerged from melting ice high in the Ötztal Alps in 1991. Their findings, like so much relevant scientific evidence, are utterly incompatible with Bible-based creationist mythology.
According to young-Earth creationist dogma, the creator god committed an act of global genocide by drowning almost every terrestrial human and animal beneath a flood deep enough to cover the highest mountains. The precise date varies even among creationist organisations: Answers in Genesis places the Flood in 2348 BCE, while the Institute for Creation Research has calculated a date of about 2472 BCE. Both accept the claim derived from the Masoretic text of Genesis that the Flood occurred just 1,656 years after “Creation Week”, when everything was supposedly made from nothing by magic.
Several centuries before either of those proposed Flood dates, however, a man died at an altitude of about 3,200 metres in the Ötztal Alps. His body, clothing and equipment were preserved in a protected, icy hollow until melting ice exposed them in 1991, more than 5,000 years later. That man, now known as Ötzi or the Iceman, is still providing scientists with information about the life, health and microbial companions of a Copper Age European.
The Eurac-led team combined microbial cultivation with DNA sequencing and metagenomic analysis to distinguish between different components of the microbial community associated with the mummy. These included remnants of Ötzi’s original intestinal microbiome, microorganisms that colonised his body after death in the glacial environment, and modern contaminants introduced during more than three decades of museum conservation.
Oblique view of the lower part of the surface from the east, showing the general extent of the exposed palaeosurface. People for scale. Red arrow indicates the pit.
Artistic reconstruction of the Mullurina Mayu bowl-shaped depression during the Late Cretaceous, depicting the probable tracemakers responsible for the Calorckosauripus trackways and possibly the bowl-shaped depression.
Some 67 million years before creationists believe their god created Earth during its mythical six-day “Creation Week”, a group of enormous, long-necked dinosaurs walked across the soft mud beside a river or lake in what is now Bolivia. At least one large animal may also have stopped to scrape repeatedly at the ground, leaving a great bowl-shaped depression surrounded by grooves and possible claw marks. Whether it was preparing a nest, digging for water or mineral salts, or doing something else entirely is uncertain, but the marks it left behind provide a rare glimpse of dinosaur behaviour shortly before the end of the Cretaceous Period.
The evidence comes from the Mullurina Mayu locality in the Maragua region, about 23 kilometres west of Sucre, Bolivia. There, an exposed surface of Maastrichtian-age claystone in the Lower Member of the El Molino Formation preserves several trackways attributed to titanosaurian sauropods. The tracks have been assigned to the trace-fossil species Calorckosauripus lazari, believed to have been made by comparatively non-derived titanosaurs.
Now, in a paper published in the journal Fossil Record, Christian A. Meyer, Jose Hugo Heymann, Edwin Chuca Ibarra, Eddy Laura Flores and Lara Sciscio have described an unusual structure preserved among those trackways. It is an irregular, bowl-shaped hollow measuring approximately 4.2 by 3.2 metres and reaching about 60 centimetres in depth. Around its walls are bundles of parallel grooves, roughly one centimetre wide and up to about 30 centimetres long, together with broader marks on the floor that may have been made by claws.
A heap of ancient bones does not come with a label explaining how it was formed. When large accumulations of woolly mammoth remains are found at Upper Palaeolithic sites, archaeologists must determine whether the animals were killed by people, scavenged after natural deaths, or accumulated through entirely natural processes such as floods, landslides or animals becoming trapped in bogs.
Cut marks, deliberately broken bones and stone projectile points embedded in mammoth remains show that humans sometimes hunted and butchered these enormous animals. But such evidence is not present on every bone, leaving open the possibility that some of the great mammoth bonebeds of Eurasia resulted largely from natural mortality rather than sustained human exploitation.
Now an international team led by researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm has approached the problem from an ingenious new direction: instead of asking only what happened to the bones, they used ancient DNA to determine whether the mammoths were male or female.
As described in a newly published paper in Current Biology, the researchers analysed genome data from 521 woolly mammoths, Mammuthus primigenius, recovered across Eurasia and North America. These included 448 animals sequenced for the first time, making this one of the largest palaeogenomic studies yet undertaken on an extinct species.
The contrast was striking. Among 421 mammoths recovered as dispersed remains from natural depositional settings, 66 per cent were male and only 34 per cent female. That male bias is consistent with the behaviour of modern elephants: adult males commonly leave their natal herds and live alone, making them more likely to take risks or become caught in natural traps such as bogs, sinkholes and landslides.
However, among 100 mammoths from large bone accumulations associated with Upper Palaeolithic people, the ratio was almost exactly reversed: 70 per cent were female and only 30 per cent male. As the researchers explain, this substantial difference provides population-scale evidence that human activity, rather than natural mortality alone, was the principal force creating these bone accumulations.
That does not necessarily mean that hunters deliberately selected females simply because they were smaller than adult males. If mammoths lived like modern elephants, females and their young would have travelled in matriarchal herds capable of mounting a formidable collective defence. However, such herds may also have followed more predictable routes than solitary males, making them easier for hunter-gatherers to locate repeatedly. People may have hunted them, scavenged animals that died along those routes, or—most probably—used a combination of both strategies.
Either way, the result opens a remarkable window onto human behaviour between about 30,000 and 20,000 years ago. Mammoths supplied meat and fat for food, hides for clothing and shelter, bones for construction, and ivory for tools, ornaments and works of art. By combining genetics with archaeology and knowledge of elephant social behaviour, scientists can now reconstruct something of how Upper Palaeolithic people located and exploited this critically important resource.
And all this human ingenuity, accumulated ecological knowledge and repeated interaction with mammoth herds was taking place tens of thousands of years before creationists believe their god created Earth and everything upon it. Once again, the evidence reveals not a recently created world interrupted by a global flood, but a deep and richly documented human past—one preserved not merely in tools and bones, but in fragments of ancient DNA surviving within those bones.
It is not often that fossilised faeces take centre stage in an explanation of one of the most important episodes in evolutionary history. However, a review published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution suggests that the evolution of digestive systems—and the resulting production of faecal pellets—may have helped to transform the chemistry and ecology of the oceans during the Cambrian radiation.
In The Cambrian fecal revolution: Fueling the Cambrian Radiation, palaeontologists Julien Kimmig and Russell D.C. Bicknell bring together evidence from fossil digestive systems and coprolites—fossilised faeces—from more than 35 deposits around the world. They found that coprolites became progressively more abundant and varied during the Cambrian Period, ranging from microscopic pellets to centimetre-sized masses containing shells and fragments of other animals.
This change coincided with the evolution of increasingly sophisticated digestive systems. Early animals with blind guts had only one opening through which food entered and waste was expelled. The evolution of a through-gut, with a separate mouth and anus, permitted food to move continuously through the body. Animals could feed more frequently, process a greater variety of foods and adopt new ecological roles. Early arthropods, in particular, developed specialised foreguts and digestive glands capable of extracting nutrients from increasingly diverse prey.
According to the authors, the consequences extended far beyond the animals producing the waste. Faecal pellets packaged organic matter and nutrients—including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and iron—and transported them through the water column and into deeper environments. In modern oceans, this sinking material forms an important part of the biological pump that carries carbon and nutrients away from surface waters. Kimmig and Bicknell propose that the beginnings of a comparable process during the Cambrian helped to fertilise previously nutrient-poor environments and support more complex food webs.
Evolutionary history is often represented as a neatly branching tree: an ancestral population divides, its descendants diverge, and each resulting lineage continues along its own independent path. Real evolution, however, is frequently much less tidy.
As I explained in my previous post on the Hawaiian honeycreepers, lineages that have begun to diverge can subsequently meet again and exchange genes through hybridisation. The result is reticulated evolution: an evolutionary history that is partly tree-like but also contains connecting branches where genes have passed between related populations.
The same principle applies to our own ancestry.
Modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans were not separately created, genetically sealed “kinds”. They were closely related human lineages produced by population separation and divergence, but that separation was never absolute. When populations encountered one another again, they sometimes interbred, allowing genes from one evolutionary branch to enter another—a process known as introgression.
Much of the resulting Neanderthal-derived DNA carried by people today may have little or no detectable effect. Some introgressed variants, however, continue to influence human biology. An international team led by Philipp Kanis of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Hugo Zeberg of Karolinska Institutet has now investigated one particularly interesting example: the Neanderthal version of the growth-hormone receptor.
Their peer-reviewed paper in Current Biology examines two amino-acid substitutions in the receptor that were characteristic of Neanderthals. The growth-hormone receptor sits on the surface of cells and transmits the signal produced when growth hormone binds to it, helping to regulate the growth of bone, muscle and other tissues.
In laboratory-grown cells, the Neanderthal form of the receptor produced a stronger response to growth hormone than the common modern-human version. Under the experimental conditions used, cells carrying it grew by about 40 per cent more, with most of the increase attributable to one of the two Neanderthal-derived substitutions.
Only a few days after writing about Darwin’s famous Galápagos finches and how the Galápagos daisy had parallelled their evolutionary radiation, another group of island birds provides an even more spectacular example of adaptive radiation.
This time the setting is the Hawaiian archipelago, and the birds are the Hawaiian honeycreepers — an extraordinary collection of finches that evolved an assortment of beaks, diets and ways of life from a shared ancestral population.
More than 60 species of Hawaiian honeycreeper are known, ranging from thick-billed seed-eaters and nectar-feeders to birds with long, curved beaks for probing flowers or extracting insects from beneath bark. Some became so anatomically different that, before their evolutionary relationships were understood, naturalists found it difficult to believe that they could all be related.
But related they are. According to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Michael G. Campana and colleagues at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute and National Museum of Natural History, the honeycreepers form a single adaptive radiation whose history includes not only repeated branching into new species but also genetic exchange between some of those emerging lineages.
Impression of a Tyrannosaurus rex attacking an Edmontosaurus annectens
AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)
Tooth traces on ulna HRS10076.
A) Ulna with black boxes indicating areas with tooth traces. B-C) Magnification of corresponding boxes from Fig 7A. White arrows indicate pits and red arrows indicate parallel scores.
Last month produced the usual crop of research papers which, quite incidentally, refuted creationism simply by revealing evidence utterly incompatible with its basic dogmas. It also produced another answer to a favourite creationist conspiracy theory: that scientists are not permitted to publish anything that challenges the supposedly ‘materialist orthodoxy’ of the scientific establishment.
This allegation confuses philosophical materialism with methodological naturalism. Science confines itself to explanations that can be tested against evidence. That is a working method, not a compulsory metaphysical belief. Findings that challenge established interpretations are not prohibited; provided they are supported by evidence and survive critical scrutiny, they are an essential part of the way science advances.
Literalist creationism works in the opposite direction. It begins with the non-negotiable conclusion that scripture must be inerrant, so any contrary evidence must be denied, explained away or forced into conformity with that predetermined belief. Changing one’s mind in response to evidence is therefore treated not as intellectual honesty but as a failure of faith.
Creationists consequently try to have it both ways. When scientists agree, this is presented as evidence of a conspiracy suppressing dissent; when scientists challenge or refine an earlier interpretation, it supposedly proves that scientists are always changing their minds and that science is therefore unreliable. It is a convenient rhetorical trick in which both consistency and self-correction are declared to be evidence against science.
A modest but revealing example is a study published recently in PLOS ONE by researchers from Loma Linda University, Western University of Health Sciences, The Master’s University, Southern Adventist University and Southwestern Adventist University. Four of those five institutions are explicitly Christian: Loma Linda, Southern Adventist and Southwestern Adventist are Seventh-day Adventist universities, while The Master’s University declares a commitment to Christ and ‘biblical fidelity’. So much for the supposed exclusion of religious scientists from mainstream scientific publication.
The paper itself is not creationist research: it employs standard palaeontological methods and places the fossils within the conventional Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous. What it does show is that evidence-based research can be published and scrutinised irrespective of the religious affiliations of the institutions involved.
The researchers examined 3,013 dinosaur bones, most belonging to Edmontosaurus annectens, excavated between 1997 and 2017 from the Hanson Ranch Station bonebed in the Lance Formation of eastern Wyoming. Thirteen bones initially displayed perforations or other features that resembled tooth traces. Closer examination—including microscopy, comparison with other fossils and, in an ambiguous case, CT scanning—showed that one specimen contained normal openings in the bone, or foramina, rather than bite marks. The remaining 12 bones, just under 0.4 per cent of the total examined, preserved genuine tooth traces.
Four of those bones carried particularly diagnostic traces known as Knethichnus parallelum and Linichnus serratus. By comparing the spacing of the preserved striations and serrations with the denticles on carnivorous dinosaur teeth recovered from the same bonebed, the researchers identified Tyrannosaurus rex as the most likely culprit. Other, less diagnostic marks may have been produced by crocodilians living in the same ecosystem.
Most of the tooth traces showed no associated bone remodelling, suggesting that they were inflicted at or after the time of death. The evidence therefore points more strongly towards scavenging than successful predation, although the two cannot always be distinguished. Weathering, bioerosion and characteristic fractures in fresh bone also indicate that the carcasses remained exposed for some time before burial and were probably exploited by theropods, crocodilians or both.
