Turin 'Shroud' - DNA Study Does NOT Authenticate The Cloth's Origins

Enhanced close up of the face on the 'shroud'
(showing the 'Gap of the God' where the front and back of the head meet)

The 'shroud' as displayed in Turin Cathedral

New DNA research sheds light on the biological history of the Shroud of Turin

I can almost guarantee that fundamentalist Christians will misrepresent this scientific study of DNA found on the so-called 'Shroud of Turin', as proof of its authenticity, so this blog sets out the refutation of that claim based on the research paper itself and the Lancaster University news release. Creationist frauds normally rely on two characteristics of their target dupes: their eagerness to accept any evidence that confirms their bias and their reluctance to check the sources.

Finding human DNA on a cloth that people have handled for centuries is hardly a revelation. Identifying whose DNA it is, and how it came to be there, is a scientific question. Turning that discovery into proof that the cloth once covered Jesus of Nazareth would require evidence of an altogether different kind. That distinction matters when reading the study published in Scientific Reports.

The researchers investigated biological traces in samples collected in 1978. They found a mixture of human, microbial, plant and animal DNA. Particularly instructive is a predominant human mitochondrial lineage matching that of the sample collector, Pierluigi Baima Bollone. This is evidence of handling and contamination, not the identification of a first-century occupant of a tomb.

Nor does a genetic lineage found in present-day Middle Eastern populations establish that the cloth came from first-century Palestine. People travel; objects circulate; biological material can arrive long after an object was manufactured. The geographical distribution of a lineage cannot tell us when its DNA reached a piece of linen. Still less can it supply the name of the person who deposited it.

The authors explicitly conclude that their metagenomic analysis cannot determine the shroud's age or distinguish a medieval origin from a history extending back two millennia. Any claim that this study has authenticated the burial cloth of Jesus would therefore go beyond its findings. The scientific interest lies in what these methods reveal about an object's biological history, not in a demonstration of Christian doctrine.

Meanwhile, the central problems for authenticity remain: no securely documented provenance connecting this cloth to first-century Judaea, a reliable historical trail beginning in medieval France, and radiocarbon measurements placing the sampled linen in the Middle Ages. If apologists present this research as scientific confirmation of the resurrection, the appropriate response is simple: where, precisely, does the paper demonstrate that? Recovering DNA is an analytical achievement. Converting it into a certificate of authenticity is an act of faith.

Refuting Creationism - A Fruit-Eating Dinosaur - 66 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated depiction of Infernogallus jamesi

ChatGPT-6 Astra (based on a 2025 illustration by Danielle Dufault)

Life reconstruction of the Hell Chicken Infernogallus munching on early fruit, while a T. rex lurks in the background.

© Danielle Dufault, 2025

Rare fossil discovery reveals new dinosaur species that were specialized fruit-eaters | Royal Ontario Museum

A dinosaur nicknamed the “hell chicken” might sound like an especially unpleasant predator, but its remarkable skull suggests rather different eating habits. Infernogallus jamesi, a turkey-sized dinosaur from the approximately 66-million-year-old Hell Creek Formation of North America, appears to have specialised in processing soft plant foods, probably including fleshy fruit. Behind the entertaining name lies a useful illustration of evolution: a lineage descended from carnivorous ancestors acquiring a feeding apparatus suited to a very different diet.

The discovery is described in a paper in Nature Communications by Gregory Funston and colleague. Infernogallus belonged to the caenagnathids, a group of toothless, feathered oviraptorosaurs whose feeding habits have been difficult to establish. Its unusually complete skull has now provided evidence that isolated bones could not supply.

Using CT scans and anatomical reconstruction, the researchers investigated how its jaws would have worked. The arrangement of the palate and jaw muscles indicates that the lower jaw could move backwards and forwards, while opposing ridges and grooves helped process food inside the mouth. Rather than an apparatus for tearing flesh, this was suited to mashing softer material. Particularly revealing is the resemblance to feeding adaptations in living fruit-eating parrots: an example of convergent evolution, in which similar functional demands produce comparable adaptations in separate evolutionary lineages.

There is an important distinction here between reconstructing a feeding mechanism and finding the remains of an animal’s last meal. The evidence supports specialised herbivory and makes fleshy fruit a strong candidate, but it does not establish an exclusively fruit-based diet. Nor does it demonstrate that these dinosaurs dispersed seeds or drove the evolution of fruit. The authors identify a potentially significant relationship between dinosaur feeding specialisations and the diversification of flowering plants, while acknowledging that the ecological details remain uncertain.

For creationism, the difficulty extends beyond the familiar problem of a dinosaur living tens of millions of years before the supposed biblical Creation Week. This animal belongs within an evolutionary history of changing anatomy, changing diets and changing ecosystems. Its feeding apparatus was built from the inherited structures of a theropod skull, modified for a new way of obtaining food. Calling it a separately created “kind” supplies neither an explanation for those anatomical relationships nor a testable account of how its specialisations arose.

Refuting Creationism - People Were Making Goatskin Leather Thousands Of Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated depiction of Neolithic leather-working in 5th century BCE Andalucia

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A Bermeya goat from the Principality of Asturias, Spain, one of the modern breeds showing the closest genetic affinity to the Neolithic goat from Cueva de los Murciélagos.

MUTERMUR Project in collaboration with ACRIBER, CC-BY 4.0

A 7,000-year-old piece of leather reveals a deep history of Spanish goats | EurekAlert!

More than a thousand years before the traditional biblical date of creation, people in southern Spain were already using domestic goats to make leather. They belonged to an agricultural world with established skills in animal husbandry and the processing of animal products. A surviving piece of their handiwork now provides another awkward encounter between the physical evidence of human history and the compressed chronology of young-Earth creationism.

In a paper published in PLOS One, Jolijn A. M. Erven and colleagues report the recovery of ancient DNA from worked leather found in Cueva de los Murciélagos, near Albuñol in southern Spain. Radiocarbon dating places the specimen at approximately 5300–5060 BCE. Its manufacture therefore predates the familiar creation date of 4004 BCE by well over a millennium. This was already an artefact of human culture when, according to that chronology, there should have been neither humans nor goats — nor even an Earth on which they could live.

The genetic evidence identifies the hide as domestic goat rather than wild Iberian ibex, and links it with European goat populations, including the modern Bermeya breed of northern Spain. That does not mean that Bermeya goats existed as a distinct breed in the Neolithic. It indicates shared ancestry connecting ancient livestock with animals alive today. The leather thus preserves evidence both of prehistoric craftsmanship and of the population history of a domesticated species.

There are sensible limits to what can be inferred. One object cannot establish the history of goat husbandry throughout Iberia, and the surviving DNA is fragmented. Nevertheless, those limitations do not diminish the central finding: a manufactured object can retain genetic information that helps identify its animal source and place it within a much longer biological history.

The contrast with creationist reasoning is instructive. Here, researchers combine an archaeological object, radiocarbon measurements and genetic comparisons to reconstruct part of the past, while acknowledging what remains uncertain. There is no requirement that the evidence fit a predetermined sacred chronology. The resulting history is constrained by what survives and what can be tested — even when an unassuming piece of leather turns out to be older than the entire universe is supposed to be.

Creationism Refuted - Reconstructing Europe's Ancient Landscape - Long Before 'Creation Week'

Miocene European landscape

Painting: Márton Zsoldos

Pliocene European landscape.

Márton Zsoldos.

Dense, dark forests in Europe are a modern phenomenon

Europe’s landscapes have a history far older, richer and more dynamic than anything envisaged by the authors of Genesis. Long before humans cleared fields, planted crops or managed woodlands, changing communities of plants and animals were shaping the continent’s vegetation. The countryside was neither a finished creation nor a permanent backdrop against which life played out. It was itself the changing product of ecological interactions operating over millions of years.

A review published in Biological Conservation, by Szymon Czyżewski and colleagues, examines that history across approximately 23 million years. The researchers challenge the familiar picture of prehistoric Europe as an almost continuous expanse of dark, closed-canopy forest. Their synthesis instead supports a widespread mosaic of grassland, scrub, open woodland and denser forest patches, with large herbivores playing an important role in maintaining this variety.

This reconstruction rests on several complementary sources of evidence, including fossil pollen, plant remains, charcoal, animal teeth and ancient environmental DNA. Together, these records allow researchers to investigate landscapes that no human observer ever saw. The result is not a picture of one habitat remaining unchanged for 23 million years, but of recurring landscape patterns within a long history of ecological change.

The animals were active participants in that history. Feeding and disturbance by large herbivores helped maintain open vegetation; their disappearance could alter the balance between trees and open ground. Later, people introduced further changes through hunting, burning, farming and livestock grazing. What we now regard as “natural” therefore requires historical explanation: today’s landscape is not necessarily a reliable guide to the environments in which its species evolved.

For young-Earth creationism, the difficulty begins with the timescale. Here is an environmental history extending millions of years before the supposed creation of the entire Universe, reconstructed from physical evidence rather than ancient storytelling. The study does not investigate creationist claims, but its findings belong to the immense body of evidence those claims must somehow explain away. Compressing this history into a few thousand years does not explain it; it discards the chronology that makes the evidence intelligible.

Creationism Refuted - Homo Erectus Genes In Modern Humans Via Denisovans

AI-generated depiction of a Homo erectus group

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Ancient tooth proteins suggest ‘Homo erectus’ may have left a genetic legacy in people today

One of the difficulties creationists face when trying to squeeze human origins into the Genesis story is that the evidence keeps revealing a history far richer than their mythology allows. Instead of a single founding couple appearing a few thousand years ago, we find an extended human family, with populations diverging, migrating and sometimes exchanging genes. Now, ancient proteins preserved in fossil teeth suggest that even Homo erectus may have left a genetic legacy in some people alive today.

In a paper published in Nature, researchers report enamel proteins recovered from six Homo erectus teeth from three Chinese sites, dating to approximately 400,000 years ago. They identified two shared variants in the enamel protein ameloblastin. One distinguishes these specimens from other sampled human lineages; the other also occurs in Denisovans, with its corresponding genetic variant present in some modern humans.

The intriguing possibility is that this variant passed from a population related to these Homo erectus individuals into Denisovans, and subsequently into Homo sapiens. This is a proposed route of inheritance, not a recovered Homo erectus genome or proof of direct mating between Homo erectus and our own species. Further molecular evidence will be needed to clarify the relationship.

Refuting Creationism - Hundreds of Rock Art Figures In A Spanish Cave - From About 30,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated imaginative depiction of Palaeolithic people examining cave art.

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Location of Cova de la Font Major

Hundreds of Ice Age rock art engravings discovered hidden in plain sight | Antiquity Journal

Sometimes a gap in our knowledge of the past is sitting right in front of us, waiting to be recognised. In the Cova de la Font Major in Catalonia, Spain, visitors spent decades passing ancient engravings without recognising their Palaeolithic origin. Some even added their own names and dates over them. A cave that became a tourist attraction in 1993 has now emerged as an important repository of Ice Age artistic expression — another contribution to the long human history that young-Earth creationism attempts to squeeze into a few thousand years.

A study published in Antiquity by Josep Maria Vergès Bosch and Míriam Salas-Altès describes 280 graphic motifs, including 55 animal figures, first recognised as a Palaeolithic assemblage in 2019. Horses, deer, bovids, caprines and a bear feature alongside non-figurative markings. The discovery challenges the apparent scarcity of Palaeolithic cave art in north-eastern Iberia and adds to the evidence for a distinctive Mediterranean artistic tradition.

The chronology deserves precision. These are not 280 engravings each supplied with its own radiometric date. Their attribution rests on archaeological context and comparisons with established artistic conventions. Radiocarbon evidence places episodes of human activity in the deeper cave between approximately 40,000 and 26,000 years ago, while features of some animal figures support a pre-Magdalenian attribution. Those contextual dates should not be mistaken for direct measurements of when individual images were made. Dating calcite covering one animal figure is a prospect for future research.

Refuting Creationism - Traces Of Blood In A Dinosaur Fossil - Something Else For Creationist Frauds To Lie About

AI-generated depiction of Aratasaurus museunacionali

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A limb bone from the theropod dinosaur Aratasaurus preserved red blood cells containing haem and haem breakdown products.

Victor O. Leshyk

Traces of dinosaur blood found in world-first discovery

Discovering traces of dinosaur blood in a 115-million-year-old fossil is remarkable enough without pretending that someone has found fresh blood in a recently deceased dinosaur. Yet that distinction — between ancient biological material preserved through exceptional chemistry and ordinary tissue awaiting decay — is precisely what creationist propaganda has repeatedly obscured. A new discovery provides an opportunity both to explore the extraordinary information fossils can retain and to revisit the misrepresentations surrounding Mary Schweitzer’s earlier research.

The new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by an international team led by Curtin University’s Professor Kliti Grice, reports haem-derived molecules and microscopic structures interpreted as mineralised red blood cells in limb bones of Aratasaurus museunacionali, a theropod dinosaur from Brazil. Haem is the iron-containing component of haemoglobin involved in oxygen transport. Finding its chemical signatures associated with cell-like structures inside the bone’s vascular canals offers a potentially revealing glimpse of ancient biology. It does not establish that fresh blood, functioning blood cells or dinosaur DNA have survived.

There is a familiar creationist sleight of hand here. When Schweitzer and her colleagues reported exceptionally preserved soft tissues in Tyrannosaurus rex bones in 2005, young-Earth creationists seized upon the discovery as supposed evidence that dinosaurs had lived only a few thousand years ago. The argument depended on treating “soft tissue” as though it necessarily meant fresh, chemically unaltered tissue, then assuming that its survival invalidated the geological evidence for the fossil’s age. Neither conclusion followed from the research.

Refuting Creationism - Ecuadorian Human Genome Refutes The Biblical Creation Myth

AI depiction of coastal hunter-gatherers in Ecuador 9,000 years ago

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Ancient Ecuadorian genomes | EurekAlert!

Ancient DNA is giving the people of South America something biblical mythology never provided: a history reconstructed from evidence. That history involves regional ancestry, movement, cultural change and communities persisting through environmental upheaval. A new study of ancient genomes from coastal Ecuador adds another piece to this picture, while also revealing a much darker aspect of life there: tuberculosis affecting an infant long before European contact.

In a paper published in PNAS Nexus, John Lindo and colleagues report four ancient human genomes from Salango, spanning approximately 2,300 to 740 years ago. Their genetic similarities suggest substantial local continuity over more than 1,500 years, despite volcanic disruption and major cultural transformations. Changing customs and social organisation need not mean that one population replaced another: communities can change their ways of life while retaining much of their ancestry.

The chronological challenge to young-Earth creationism requires a distinction. These burials are younger than the supposed biblical Flood, so their ages alone do not demonstrate survival across it. However, the researchers’ demographic modelling places the divergence of the coastal Ecuadorian lineage from other Southern Native American lineages at approximately 9,800 years ago. That estimate is model-dependent, rather than a direct date for a skeleton, but it points to population history extending beyond the entire conventional young-Earth chronology.

Claiming that the descendants of Noah migrated to the America during the last few thousand years, forgot all about the god who had caused the flood and the name of the man who had saved humanity and invented a language unrelated to that of their ancestors, while a divine trickster manipulated their genomes to make it look like they diversified thousands of years earlier, raises uncomfortable questions of anthropology and theology for creationists. Four genomes cannot settle every demographic question; they nevertheless add evidence to a history that cannot reasonably be compressed into recent dispersal from Noah’s family.

Refuting Creationism - Baffin Bay Ice Sheet And Sea-Bed Sediment - From 20,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

An iceberg in Baffin Bay between Greenland and Canada.

credit: ShannonKlotsko/UNCW

Baffin Bay near Greenland and sea floor features indicative of a large ice shelf in the past.

Klotsko et al. (2026)

New Discovery Sheds Light on Ancient Baffin Bay Ice Shelf | UNCW

About 20,000 years ago, when a literal reading of biblical chronology would have us believe that Earth had yet to be created, an enormous floating ice shelf occupied Baffin Bay between Greenland and Canada. Its existence is recorded in physical evidence: the marks it left on the seabed and the sediments that help reconstruct its disappearance. Together, these preserve a history of an Ice Age landscape undergoing profound change, thousands of years before the supposed creation of the world.

The discovery, described in a paper in Nature Geoscience by Shannon A. Klotsko and colleagues, indicates that this ice shelf covered approximately 150,000 square kilometres and was around 1.4–2.1 kilometres thick. Comparable in area to major ice shelves in modern Antarctica, it helped buttress three neighbouring ice sheets: the Laurentide, Innuitian and Greenland ice sheets. This floating mass acted as a restraint on the movement of land-based ice towards the sea.

The researchers identified seafloor features that reveal the former ice shelf’s remarkable extent and thickness. Mapping showed evidence of ice contact deep along the continental slope. The team interpreted these features as the imprint of a vast, basin-spanning ice shelf, whose dimensions could be reconstructed with allowance for past relative sea level.

Sediment cores provide another part of the story. The researchers suggest that the shelf disappeared over approximately 500–1,000 years, although the precise timing remains uncertain. The researchers infer that losing this restraint helped trigger rapid retreat of the surrounding ice sheets. This is a reconstruction from geological evidence, with uncertainties explicitly recognised, rather than a claim that every stage of the process is known.

For young-Earth creationism, the difficulty is considerably greater than explaining away a few layers of mud. Floods can deposit layers, so layering by itself is not the decisive point. What requires explanation is the combination of an ancient glacial setting, ice-contact landforms, sedimentary evidence and a sequence of environmental changes. A single recent global inundation provides no adequate account of that history. Nor does invoking a catastrophe that supposedly remodelled Earth’s surface explain the preservation of evidence from a much older glacial world.

Unintelligent Design - Evolution Of Egg Mimicry In The Parasitic Cuckoo Finch Carries A Genetic Cost - No Intelligence Detected

Male cuckoo finch, Anomalospiza imberbis

By terathopius - https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/1507136, CC BY 4.0, Link

Maternal inheritance accelerates sex chromosome degeneration and mitonuclear coevolution in a brood parasitic bird | Nature Ecology & Evolution

Cuckoo finch mimicry of tawny-flanked prinia eggs.

This photograph shows eggs of the cuckoo finch (middle circle) and one of its common host species, the tawny-flanked prinia (outer circle), revealing the diversity of host egg colour and pattern “signatures” (an anti-parasite adaptation that aids host parents in recognizing their own eggs) that are mimicked by cuckoo finch egg “forgeries". However, cuckoo finches do not mimic the rich olive-green eggs (top left) laid by some tawny-flanked prinia females. The new study suggests that a genetic constraint in cuckoo finches may account for their apparent inability to mimic this host egg type.

Source: University of Cambridge (2022).

An intelligent designer worth its salt would presumably avoid improving one feature by compromising another, then introducing further modifications to compensate for the damage. Yet this is precisely the sort of outcome we should expect from evolution: adaptations that work well enough to spread, carrying disadvantages with them because natural selection cannot separate every useful change from its genetic baggage. The African cuckoo-finch, Anomalospiza imberbis, provides a particularly revealing example.

Cuckoo-finches are brood parasites: they lay their eggs in other birds’ nests and leave the hosts to rear their offspring. Their success depends partly on producing eggs that resemble those of their intended foster parents. Hosts, meanwhile, benefit from recognising and rejecting the impostors. The result is an evolutionary arms race between increasingly effective deception and increasingly effective detection — an odd arrangement to attribute to a single intelligent designer supposedly responsible for both sides.

Creationism Refuted - DNA Shows Hidden Human Connections Across Europe - 20,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated depiction of Gravettian life at the Isturitz Cave, southwest France

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Ancient human DNA reveals hidden connections across Ice Age Europe

Location of the sampled individuals and estimated dates. The map was obtained from https://mapswire.com under a CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

More than 30,000 years ago, people living in Ice Age Europe were leaving genetic evidence of connections between widely separated populations — tens of thousands of years before the world supposedly existed, according to the familiar young-Earth creationist interpretation of Genesis. Their descendants inherited traces of those encounters, and scientists can now recover those traces from ancient human remains. What emerges is a history of migration, interbreeding and survival through changing climates, on a timescale wholly incompatible with a recent creation followed by a global flood and the repopulation of Earth by Noah’s family.

The evidence comes from a study led by researchers at the University of Vienna, published in Science Advances. A woman who lived around 30,000 years ago, whose remains were found in Isturitz Cave in south-western France, carried predominantly western European ancestry, together with ancestry related to populations farther east. Assuming a single pulse of admixture, genetic modelling places that exchange approximately 32,500–31,500 years ago. This does not mean that the woman herself crossed Europe: her genome preserves evidence of connections between ancestral populations.

The researchers also recovered human nuclear DNA from an approximately 22,000-year-old sediment layer at El Mirón Cave in northern Spain, despite the absence of human bones or teeth. This supports the persistence of western European ancestry through the Last Glacial Maximum. Regional continuity and incoming ancestry could therefore coexist: populations could maintain deep local roots while also exchanging genes with other groups.

For biblical literalism, the difficulty extends beyond finding room for another inconveniently ancient date. Here are distinguishable populations, an inferred episode of interbreeding and evidence of ancestry persisting through a major climatic upheaval. These findings belong to a reconstructable human history stretching far beyond the few thousand years allowed by young-Earth chronology. Compressing that history into a post-Flood dispersal would require evidence for the compression, not simply a declaration that the biblical account must be correct.

Refuting Creationism - Violent Death But Also Care And Compassion in Neanderthal Society - No Religious Handbook Required

[caption]

[credit]

Neanderthal scapula with spear hole.

View of Shanidar Cave from approximately the south.

Photo: G. Barker.

Fatal Neanderthal wound may be earliest evidence of a wooden spear attack on a human ancestor | University of Cambridge

Some 75,000 years ago, a Neanderthal in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan survived a devastating facial injury, apparently with help from others, only to suffer a probably fatal penetrating wound later in life. The remains preserve a striking combination of vulnerability, probable compassion and possible interpersonal violence: recognisably human behaviour from a time tens of thousands of years before the biblical creation story places the beginning of human history.

The individual, designated Shanidar A, is described in a new paper in Scientific Reports. Researchers led by Dr Emma Pomeroy identified a roughly circular, 15-millimetre-wide perforation in the left shoulder blade, consistent with a sharpened wooden spear entering through the chest and passing through the body. The injury occurred around the time of death and was probably lethal. Its position and the force required suggest a deliberate attack, although a hunting accident remains a possibility. The evidence supports a violent death; it does not supply the identity or intentions of whoever held the spear.

Earlier in life, Shanidar A had suffered a severe blow to the mouth, splitting a lower incisor lengthways. Subsequent wear and the accumulation of dental calculus show that the individual survived the injury for a considerable period. Given the likely pain and difficulty eating, the researchers suggest that survival involved care from companions. This is not a fossilised moral code, nor proof that Neanderthals thought exactly as we do. It is, however, evidence consistent with practical compassion in an extinct human lineage closely related to our own. The capacity to help an injured companion evidently has a much deeper history than the religious traditions that now claim ownership of morality.

For young-Earth creationism, the chronology is already fatal: these events occurred around 69,000 years before the supposed creation of the Universe in the familiar six-thousand-year chronology. The archaeological context adds another difficulty. Fragile remains survived within a cave sequence that researchers can investigate in detail, including evidence that a local flash flood disturbed the bones after decomposition. That is evidence of a particular event in a particular landscape, not of a recent worldwide deluge. Any attempt to impose the biblical catastrophe on this record must explain the actual sequence of deposition, decay, disturbance and preservation, rather than treating every mention of flooding as confirmation of Genesis.

Creationism Refuted - Horizontal Gene Transfer From A Giant Virus Into Our Complex-Celled Ancestor

AI-generated representation of a giant DNA virus, its host and a potassium channel.

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Viruses as master builders of complex proteins – TU Darmstadt

Where do new genes and complex proteins come from? For intelligent design creationists, gaps in our knowledge are opportunities to invoke a supernatural designer. For scientists, they are opportunities to investigate. A discovery reported in PNAS illustrates the difference: researchers have identified a functional protein in a giant virus that offers clues to the evolutionary origins of a more elaborate family of cellular proteins.

The proteins concerned are tandem potassium channels, which allow potassium ions to cross cell membranes. In humans, members of this family help stabilise the electrical potential across membranes and regulate the excitability of nerve cells. Their distinctive architecture includes two linked pore-forming domains within each protein subunit. Although simpler precursors of other potassium-channel families are known from bacteria, the evolutionary origins of this tandem arrangement have remained uncertain.

The researchers found a gene encoding such a channel in Pyramimonas orientalis virus, which infects a single-celled marine alga. Its protein, named Kpov, contains just 178 amino acids, yet experiments in artificial membranes confirmed that it functions as an ion channel with a preference for potassium over sodium. Here, then, is a comparatively simple working version of a molecular structure associated with more elaborate cellular machinery.

The evolutionary analysis adds a particularly interesting twist. The results suggest that the virus did not simply acquire this gene recently from its host. Instead, the channel may have originated through the fusion of simpler viral pore-forming components. This supports the possibility that viruses have contributed both genetic material and molecular innovations to cellular evolution.

Creationism Refuted - Now It's Transitional Dinosaur Egg Shells - From 195 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An imaginative AI-generated reconstruction of a basal sauropodomorph beside a clutch of eggs in Early Jurassic woodland, approximately 195 million years ago.

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Fig. 1 | Localities of Sinemurian basal sauropodomorph eggs/eggshells, stratigraphic section of the Zhangjiawa Member (Lufeng Formation, Dawa Dinosaur Mountain), and the rock containing Mutabilisoolithus dawaensis and associated embryonic skeletons.

From: Di, Z., Wang, H., Wang, T. et al (2026).

A team led by Di Zhiyong from the School of Life Sciences at Hebei University, in collaboration with others, spent six years meticulously analyzing the world's oldest and most complete amniotic eggshell structure.

Creationism thrives on gaps because it is easy to fool scientifically illiterate people looking for confirmation for their pre-exiting bias with a god of gaps and a false dichotomy fallacy. But one massive gap they invariably ignore is the gap between the real start of the history of life on Earth some 3.8 billion years ago and the mythical 'Creation Week' 6,000-10,000 years ago, as the Bible narrative claims. This means it's easy to refute creationist beliefs simply by discovering evidence from the long pre-'Creation Week' history.

Other gaps creationists crave are the ones that transitional fossils fill, hence creationists insistence that such transitional fossils are missing, despite them regularly being found by palaeontologists, as reported in this blog and the scientific journals. This article then will have creationists performing all manner of intellectual gymnastics to try to minimise it or ignore it altogether.

Some 195 million years ago, in what is now Yunnan, China, an early dinosaur laid eggs with a revealing combination of features: a thick organic membrane and a thin mineralised layer that had not formed a rigid, interlocking shell. These eggs pre-date the supposed creation of the Universe in the conventional young-Earth biblical chronology by almost their entire existence. They also preserve something creationists repeatedly insist is missing from the fossil record: an intermediate condition illuminating an evolutionary transition.

The fossil eggshell, named Mutabilisoolithus dawaensis, is described by Zhiyong Di and colleagues in a paper published in Nature Communications. Associated with an early-diverging sauropodomorph dinosaur, it combines flexibility with a limited degree of biomineralisation — the biological deposition of minerals. Its thin calcareous layer consists of shell units that do not interlock, while its underlying membrane is exceptionally thick. This is a soft eggshell, but “soft” does not mean entirely devoid of mineral reinforcement.

Refuting Creationism - How Our Complex Cells Evolved

3D volume segmentations of Cryo-electron tomogram slice of Methanocalculus. Red, ferritin-like granules; yellow, actin filaments

From: Imachi, H., Nobu, M.K., Ishii, S. et al. (2026).

How could a comparatively simple cell give rise to the elaborate internal organisation found in the cells of animals, plants, fungi and other eukaryotes? For creationists, this is another opportunity to insert a supernatural designer into an unanswered question. For scientists, it is an invitation to investigate. A new study has now brought that investigation a significant step forward by cultivating two strains of microbes belonging to one of our closest known archaeal relatives.

The research, led by Hiroyuki Imachi and Masaru K. Nobu of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, with colleagues including Satoshi Nakagawa of Kyoto University, was published in Nature on 28 October 2026. The organisms belong to Heimdallarchaeia, within the group widely known as Asgard archaea, now formally classified as Promethearchaeota.

What makes these organisms especially informative is the combination of internal simplicity and elaborate external structures. They lack a nucleus and persistent internal membrane systems, yet produce long, branching membrane protrusions. They also depend on metabolic partnerships with other microorganisms. Their biology therefore provides a way to investigate how close associations between initially separate cells could have helped set the stage for a much more intimate evolutionary partnership.

Endosymbiosis involves one organism living inside another. In the case of eukaryotic origins, a bacterial partner eventually became the mitochondrion. The outstanding questions concern how that relationship began and how it became integrated with changes in the host cell. These new findings support scenarios in which the archaeal host was still internally simple, with much of eukaryotic cellular complexity developing during or after the establishment of that partnership.

How To Tell The Bible Is Wrong - Simply Compare it To Observable Reality

Stars brewing in a nebulous cauldron | ESA/Webb

Webb’s NIRCam is the observatory’s primary camera, and can simultaneously image the cosmos in two different infrared ranges. Taking advantage of Webb’s exquisite image quality and large primary mirror, the instrument has acquired some of the deepest (i.e. farthest away) near-infrared images ever obtained, detecting light from the first stars and galaxies.

Curiously, although creationists are notoriously reluctant to fact-check anything their cult tells them, most of them would have little difficulty understanding that the best way to check a claim made by another person is to look at the tangible evidence. For example, told that Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC is really only three feet tall, even a creationist could understand that simply by looking at it, it is easy to see that the claim is wrong.

However, asked to apply the same test to claims in the Bible, most creationists will flatly refuse, or will assert that the evidence must be wrong - the equivalent of asserting that the Lincoln Memorial might look taller than three feet, but that appearance is deceiving.

For example, the following comparison between the Bible's claim and the observable reality, should tell any rational person that the Bible is wrong. Not so a creationists who will simply assert that the evidence is wrong and refuse to look at it, or even claim that the creator of the evidence just made it look that way to test them, so the evidence itself become part of an imaginary conspiracy to make them change their minds.

Here's then is a quick reminder that the Bible was written by simple people who tried to fill the gaps in their knowledge and understanding with imaginative stories. The problem was, the stories they made up were based on ignorance and tradition, not on a scientific analysis of the evidence. Not surprisingly, their stories were little better than the stories you would get if you asked a five year old to describe the universe and explain why it's like it is. This much should be readily apparent to any person honest enough to base opinions on evidence, not on unevidenced claims, simply to conform to popular dogma.

This is illustrated most simply by comparing the description of the Universe in the Bible with the real universe being revealed in every greater detail by science. In the Bible, the universe is described as consisting of a small flat planet with a dome over it at the centre, and the moon and stars and all other celestial bodies from planets to galaxies described as lights stuck to the dome, all created by magic just a few thousand years earlier. The entire construction was imagined to be surrounded by water, which the dome, in addition to being something to stick the celestial bodies too, was there to keep out.

So, compare that description with a tiny fragment of the real, dynamic and expanding universe - a star-forming region named LHA 120-N 159, or simply N159, located 161,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the satellite galaxies orbiting the Milky Way galaxy.

This image spans about 230 light years across.

Refuting Creationism - Early Humans Lived In The Jordan Valley - 1.9 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A bifacial stone tool from ‘Ubeidiya

Credit: Omry Barzilai

A specialized imaging technique reveals mineral layers preserved within a fossilized Melanopsis shell (sample UB1).

Credit: Perach Nuriel

Study Finds 1.9 Million Year Out-of-Africa Migration wave leaves its mark in the Jordan Valley | EUROPEAN FRIENDS OF THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY

Long before anyone composed the biblical creation stories, early members of our genus were making stone tools and inhabiting the Jordan Valley. Research on the prehistoric site of ‘Ubeidiya, south of the Sea of Galilee, now suggests that this chapter of human history began earlier than previously thought — probably more than 1.9 million years ago. The landscape subsequently woven into biblical tradition preserves a much older history, written in sediments, fossils and archaeological remains.

The research, published in Quaternary Science Reviews brings together cosmogenic burial dating, ancient magnetic signatures and uranium–lead dating of fossil freshwater snail shells. Their combined interpretation favours an older chronology for the site, with implications for when tool-making hominins dispersed beyond Africa.

These inhabitants were not modern Homo sapiens. They were earlier members of our genus, probably associated with the Homo erectus/ergaster group, although the surviving fossils do not justify an unqualified species identification. Their presence, together with the site's Acheulean stone tools, contributes to an increasingly detailed picture of early human expansion into Eurasia.

Refuting Creationism - More On Denisovans Exposes Moronic Creationism

An artist's reconstruction of what a Denisovan might have looked like.

Image credit: Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology / Chinese Academy of Sciences

Chinese Scientists Solve Puzzle of Identifying Extinct Group of Hominins----Chinese Academy of Sciences

One of the strengths of science is its willingness to leave a question open until there is enough evidence to answer it. An incomplete picture is an invitation to investigate, and an explanation that changes when new evidence emerges is a demonstration that the method is working. The developing story of the Denisovans provides an excellent example: an extinct group of humans is acquiring a clearer identity through the patient accumulation and comparison of evidence.

As a Xinhua report reproduced by the Chinese Academy of Sciences explains, Denisovans were first identified in 2010 through DNA recovered from a tiny finger bone found in Siberia. Scientists could recognise a distinct evolutionary lineage before they had much idea of what its members looked like. That imbalance between molecular knowledge and anatomical knowledge presented a problem that further discoveries and improved analytical methods could address.

Bible Blunder - People Were Sailing Boats Around the Mediterranean Years Before The Genocidal Flood

AI-generated depiction of Noah's Ark, based on a literal reading of Genesis 6:14-16

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Noah's Ark, exactly as described in Genesis 6:14-16.

ChatGPT-6 Astra

World’s oldest shipwreck discovered off coast of Turkey

One awkward question about the biblical story of Noah’s Ark is what happened to everyone else who owned a boat. In a world where people built vessels, transported goods by sea and made their living on the water, why should rising water have left just one family afloat? Genesis asserts that everyone outside the Ark perished, but offers no account of the other sailors, fishermen and boatbuilders whose existence makes that exclusive survival rather less straightforward than the story suggests.

A shipwreck discovered off the coast of southern Turkey gives that question an archaeological context. Near Kekova, researchers have identified the remains of a cargo provisionally dated to around 2700–2400 BCE, potentially making this the oldest known shipwreck. The wooden vessel has disappeared, but its pottery survives, providing evidence of maritime commerce in the Early Bronze Age. On the familiar chronology of Archbishop James Ussher, which places the supposed global flood in 2348 BCE, this trading vessel was already on the seabed before Noah’s legendary voyage began.

This was evidently a vessel operating within a world of established maritime connections. As archaeologist Karin Sowada explains in the article reproduced below, Egyptian texts and archaeological finds already document overseas trade during this period. Ships carried commodities between coastal communities, supported by the practical knowledge of people who knew how to build boats, handle cargoes and undertake sea voyages. Noah, on the creationists’ preferred timetable, would hardly have inhabited a world in which keeping people and provisions afloat was an unprecedented idea.

There is an important distinction here. The existence of other boats does not establish that their occupants could have survived the entire catastrophe described in Genesis. A vessel suitable for coastal commerce was not necessarily equipped to remain at sea for months without access to fresh supplies or somewhere to land. Nor does Genesis explicitly claim that Noah owned the only boat. What the evidence does expose is an unanswered question: why did every other vessel and every other experienced seafarer fail, while Noah’s household alone survived? Simply repeating the story’s assertion that everyone else died does not provide an independent explanation.

Unintelligent Design - A Marine Amphibian With an Evolutionary Past - 237 MIllion Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-assisted rendering of Gerrothorax maritumus, informed by newly discovered fossil evidence of the creature, which is the first fully marine amphibian on record. AI was used to adjust lighting, brightness, fish skin and amphibian skin.

Chen Geng/Guizhou University

New fossil evidence reveals the first fully marine amphibian, Gerrothorax maritimus, which dates to the Late Triassic period nearly 237 million years ago. The animal had a flattened body that was covered in bony armor, a potential defense mechanism against predators like ichthyosaurs.

Credit: Ryosuke Motani, UC Davis.

Researchers Unearth Fossil Evidence of First Fully Marine Amphibian | UC Davis

Why would an omniscient designer give an animal the inherited anatomy of a four-limbed vertebrate, then adapt that anatomy for life on the seabed? Evolution has a straightforward explanation: descendants inherit structures from their ancestors, and natural selection modifies what is already available. An unrestricted designer, supposedly capable of anticipating every requirement, has no comparable constraint. Yet nature repeatedly presents us with organisms whose bodies make sense as products of history.

A newly described amphibian adds another intriguing example. According to research, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Gerrothorax maritimus, an armoured amphibian that lived approximately 237 million years ago, presents evidence for a fully marine existence in a group whose living representatives have no equivalent ocean-going species.

The evidence includes two remarkably complete skeletons from Guizhou Province, China, marine sediments deposited far from major land masses, and strontium isotope proportions consistent with Triassic seawater. Together, these observations support an animal that inhabited the sea, rather than a freshwater carcass that happened to wash into it.

Creationism Refuted - Eland Collagen in Ocre In A South African Cave - From 50,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

The Kilpdrift Complex located within the coastal cliffs in the De Hoop Nature Reserve, South Africa, where the samples for the study were collected.

Credit: Ole F. Unhammer
Universitetet i Bergen

Common eland, Taurotragus oryx

Credit: David Clode / Unsplash.

Antelope collagen found in 60,000-year-old ochre offers clues to early human practices

Some 60,000 years ago, humans occupying a shelter in southern Africa left behind traces of activities that modern science is only now learning to recover. An ochre-rich surface at Kilpdrift Shelter preserves proteins identified as belonging to the common eland, Taurotragus oryx, a large African antelope.

For those who insist that the entire Universe was created only a few thousand years ago, the difficulty begins before we even consider what these people were doing: they were already there, handling animal materials and ochre, tens of thousands of years before the supposed creation of their ancestors.

The discovery is described in a paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B by researchers from Kyushu University, the University of Bergen and the University of Copenhagen.

What that contribution represents remains an open question. Animal-derived material may have been deliberately mixed with ochre, or the surface may preserve traces of eland hides treated with it. The finding establishes an association between ochre and animal material; it does not, by itself, establish a particular recipe, a hide-processing technique or a symbolic purpose. Nevertheless, it opens a valuable window onto the technical, and possibly symbolic, behaviour of early Homo sapiens, particularly in environments where ancient DNA is poorly preserved.

Here, then, is another example of archaeology producing inconvenient evidence for biblical literalism simply by investigating the human past. The researchers are asking what people did, which materials they used and how surviving molecules can help reconstruct their activities. There is room for uncertainty about the precise activity recorded on this ancient surface. That uncertainty is not permission to compress 60,000 years of human history into a creationist chronology of six to ten thousand years.

Creationism in Crisis - Yet Another Of Those 'Non-Existent' Transitional Fossils - From 165 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Sinojapyx giganteus.

Jie Sun.

Palaeoecological reconstruction of Sinojapyx giganteus.

Jie Sun.

Jurassic Giant Dipluran Reveals the evolution of Hexapods---- Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology Chinese Academy of Sciences

Another of those transitional forms that creationists insist are missing, has turned up in the fossil record — this time in the shape of a Jurassic relative of insects with an informative combination of ancestral mouthparts and developing tail pincers. Named Sinojapyx giganteus, it lived approximately 165 million years ago, presenting young-Earth creationism with two familiar problems: evidence of evolutionary transition and a chronology irreconcilable with a literal reading of Genesis.

The discovery, described in a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B is a fossil from the Middle Jurassic Daohugou deposits of Inner Mongolia, China. More than five centimetres long, it is the oldest confirmed dipluran and the largest fossil representative yet described. Diplurans, sometimes called two-pronged bristletails, are six-legged relatives of insects, rather than insects themselves.

Its evolutionary significance lies in the details. Living diplurans have mouthparts enclosed within the head, but those of Sinojapyx were exposed. Its paired rear appendages, known as cerci, were already pincer-like, yet remained symmetrical and lacked the small teeth characteristic of the more specialised pincers of modern japygoids. The researchers place it on the stem lineage of this living group and interpret its cerci as an intermediate condition in the evolution of sensory appendages into specialised grasping weapons.

This is what a transitional fossil actually looks like: a functioning animal with a mixture of ancestral and derived characteristics. It does not need to be an implausible hybrid of two modern species, nor must palaeontologists demonstrate that this particular species was the direct ancestor of a living one. Its significance is that it preserves an anatomical combination which helps reconstruct how later specialisations evolved. Dismissing it as “still a dipluran” would miss the point entirely: evolution within a lineage does not require its descendants to cease belonging to that lineage.

Creationism Refuted - Fish And Newts Share A Common Gene for Fin and LImb Growth - Common Origin

AI-generated depiction of common genetic origin of zebra fish and Iberian ribbed newts.

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The findings support a stepwise model for how the genetic program that builds vertebrate paired fins and limbs may have evolved. An ancestral Hox9–10 program may first have helped establish posterior appendages, later expanded into a broader Hox patterning system, and eventually been redeployed in anterior paired appendages.

Image after H. Nakazawa et al., (2026) CC BY-NC-ND.

Ancient Hox code reveals the developmental roots of vertebrate hind fins and limbs | EurekAlert!

Creationists who insist that fish and terrestrial vertebrates are separately created “kinds” have another piece of evidence to explain away. Beneath the obvious differences between a fish’s pelvic fins and an amphibian’s hindlimbs lies a shared developmental inheritance: related genes performing an essential early role in establishing the cells from which those structures develop. Evolutionary relationships are recorded not only in fossils and adult anatomy, but also in the processes that build living bodies.

This is illustrated by research led by scientists at Saitama University, Japan, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The researchers investigated Hox genes, regulatory genes involved in organising the developing body. Their experiments reveal a shared requirement for members of the Hox9–10 groups at the beginning of pelvic-fin and hindlimb development.

In zebrafish, disrupting five of these genes together eliminated the detectable populations of pelvic-fin progenitor cells—the cells that would normally give rise to the developing fins—and the pelvic fins failed to form. In Iberian ribbed newts, disrupting seven related genes likewise impaired the establishment of hindlimb progenitors. These results support the inference that this developmental function was already present in the common ancestor of ray-finned and lobe-finned vertebrates, before the evolutionary separation of the lineages represented by zebrafish and newts.

The significance extends beyond the discovery that different animals use related genes. The findings help connect the genetic programme that organises the rear of the body with the programme that initiates its paired hind appendages. They are consistent with an evolutionary model in which an ancestral programme was recruited, expanded and redeployed as the developmental machinery of paired fins and limbs evolved. The experiments do not directly reconstruct that entire historical sequence, but they provide functional evidence with which to assess it.

For intelligent design creationism, the familiar difficulty is that evolutionary innovation need not involve inventing every component afresh. Existing genes and developmental relationships can acquire additional roles as evolution modifies inherited systems. Calling those systems “designed” supplies no comparable account of when, where or how the changes occurred, nor does it improve the experimental explanation.

Refuting Creationism - A Continuous Record Of Climate History In A Peruvian Cave - From 440,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Professor Elizabeth Olson collecting drip waters inside Haugapo cave in the Peruvian Andes

Past and future Milankovitch cycles via VSOP model Graphic shows variations in five orbital elements:

Axial tilt or obliquity (ε).

Eccentricity (e).

Longitude of perihelion (sin(ϖ)).

Precession index (e sin(ϖ)) Precession index and obliquity control insolation at each latitude:

Daily-average insolation at top of atmosphere on summer solstice () at 65° N Ocean sediment and Antarctic ice strata record ancient sea levels and temperatures: Benthic forams (57 widespread locations) Vostok ice core (Antarctica) Vertical gray line shows present (2000 CE)

By Incredio - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link

News and Events | Geosciences | Union College

Another awkward chapter in Earth's history has emerged from the darkness of Peruvian caves — and it stretches back some 450,000 years. For young-Earth creationists, that is an inconvenient amount of climate history to squeeze into a universe supposedly created only a few thousand years ago. For scientists, it is an opportunity to investigate how the rainfall systems on which ecosystems and human societies depend respond to a changing planet.

The research, published in Nature was led by Elizabeth Olson, a former postdoctoral researcher at Union who is now at Wesleyan University. The team examined stalagmites from caves in the Peruvian Andes, using their chemical composition to reconstruct the history of the South American summer monsoon. The resulting record has an average resolution of about 50 years, providing an unusually detailed view of changes across several glacial–interglacial cycles.

Stalagmites grow upwards as dripping water deposits minerals on cave floors. As they accumulate, their layers can preserve changes in oxygen-isotope composition that reflect the climatic history of the water reaching the cave. Uranium–thorium dating provides the chronology, while the oxygen isotopes provide evidence of past monsoon behaviour. These are complementary measurements: the researchers are reading a dated chemical archive, not simply assuming that every stalagmite grows at a constant rate.

Location of caves where speleothems were recovered.

Credit:Olson, E.J., et al (2026)

Comparison with Asian cave records reveals that the two monsoon systems generally varied in opposite directions, against a background of Milankovitch forcing — the changes in the distribution of incoming sunlight associated with Earth's orbital and axial cycles. But the relationship was not fixed. The researchers identified ten episodes of unusually synchronous behaviour, including during transitions out of ice ages. Changes in greenhouse gases, ocean temperatures and temperature differences between the hemispheres probably contributed to these departures from the usual pattern.