Refuting Creationism - Fossils of Complex Cells In Australian Mudstone - From 1.7 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

Layers of 1.7 billion-year-old sedimentary rocks, Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory

Maxwell Lechte

Fossils of single-celled eukaryotic organisms with complex surface features such as extensions and plates.

Leigh Anne Riedman

Tiny fossils found in 1.7 billion-year-old mud yield clues to the evolution of complex life

For young-Earth creationists, some of the most troublesome evidence comes in the smallest packages. Microscopic fossils preserved in ancient Australian mudstones record organisms living approximately 1.75–1.4 billion years ago — an antiquity impossible to reconcile with the few thousand years allowed by a literal reading of the biblical genealogies. These organisms were already part of aLayers of 1.7 billion-year-old sedimentary rocks, Kakadu National Park, Northern Territoryn evolving biosphere more than a billion years before the supposed “Creation Week”. Their existence presents a chronological problem that no amount of argument about the meaning of “kind” can resolve.

These fossils are the subject of a paper in Nature, by Maxwell A. Lechte and colleagues, investigating the environments inhabited by some of the earliest known eukaryotes. Eukaryotes are organisms with structurally complex cells, typically containing a nucleus and specialised internal compartments; they include animals, plants, fungi and numerous microscopic organisms. Here, “complex life” refers to cellular organisation, not to miniature animals swimming through those ancient seas. Understanding these early cells helps explain the evolutionary foundations upon which much later forms of life depended.

Glossary.

Aerobes

Organisms that use oxygen in their metabolism. Obligate aerobes require it; facultative anaerobes can grow with or without it; microaerophiles require oxygen at concentrations below those in ordinary air.

Benthic

Living on, in or close to the bottom of a sea or lake. A “benthic habit” means a bottom-dwelling way of life.

Planktonic

Living suspended in the water and drifting largely with currents, rather than inhabiting the seabed.

Bottom waters

The water immediately above the seabed. It can lack oxygen even when the surface waters contain it.

Morphological complexity

Complexity of physical form or structure. Elaborate fossil walls, ornamentation and extensions can help researchers recognise probable eukaryotes.

Palaeontological, sedimentological and geochemical analyses

Studies of fossils, sediments and their formation, and the chemical composition of geological materials, respectively. Combining them helps reconstruct both ancient organisms and their environments.

Body fossils and molecular biomarkers

Body fossils preserve remains or impressions of organisms. Molecular biomarkers are chemical traces of biological molecules that can provide evidence of ancient life even without recognisable bodies.

Proterozoic eon

The interval from approximately 2.5 billion to 539 million years ago, encompassing much of the early history of eukaryotic life.

Neoproterozoic era

The final part of the Proterozoic, approximately 1 billion to 539 million years ago. The researchers propose that eukaryotes expanded substantially into planktonic habitats during this interval.

The research also illustrates something creationist caricatures of science routinely overlook: scientists continually test their explanations against evidence. Discoveries of living eukaryotes capable of surviving without oxygen, together with evidence that ancient seas were widely oxygen-poor, had raised questions about whether the earliest eukaryotes needed oxygen at all. To investigate, the researchers turned to rock cores drilled decades ago during mineral exploration and subsequently stored in Darwin. They examined more than 12,000 microfossils and analysed the sediments and their chemistry to reconstruct the organisms’ habitats. Old collections, approached with new questions, can still yield major discoveries.

The resulting pattern was revealing. Eukaryotic fossils occurred almost exclusively in sediments deposited beneath oxygenated waters, whereas sediments from oxygen-free settings still preserved other microbial fossils. Their distribution suggests that these early eukaryotes used oxygen and probably lived on the seabed. The researchers also propose that a much later expansion into planktonic habitats helped shape subsequent diversification. This connects evolutionary history with the availability of suitable environments: the opportunities for complex organisms to flourish depended on the physical and chemical conditions around them.

This does not establish every step in the origin of the eukaryotic cell, nor demonstrate that one particular rise in oxygen directly caused its appearance. It does strengthen the evidence that oxygen availability constrained early eukaryotic habitats. The broader picture is one of evolution unfolding within a changing planet, with environmental conditions opening opportunities and imposing limits. There is no requirement here for foresight or a predetermined destination.

Creationists may welcome any suggestion that scientists are reassessing an earlier interpretation, but the revision offers them no chronological refuge. Whether these organisms inhabited the seabed or drifted in the water, and precisely how they used oxygen, are questions within an ancient evolutionary history. Reconsidering those details does not compress that history into a biblical timetable. Science advances because its explanations remain answerable to evidence; a chronology fixed in advance can survive only by refusing the evidence that contradicts it.

In the following article from The Conversation, reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, researchers Maxwell Lechte and Leigh Anne Riedman explain what these tiny fossils reveal about the early evolution of complex life.

Published: May 21, 2026 12.08am BST

Tiny fossils found in 1.7 billion‑year‑old mud yield clues to the evolution of complex life

Drill cores of sedimentary rock which contains microscopic fossils.

Maxwell Lechte

Maxwell Lechte, University of Sydney and Leigh Anne Riedman, University of California, Santa Barbara

Stored in an open-air warehouse in tropical Darwin, Australia, are dozens of trays containing cylindrical cores of rock. They are from drill holes bored hundreds of metres below the surface by mineral exploration companies decades ago.

Some of these cores at the Northern Territory Geological Survey are mudstone – a type of sedimentary rock formed from hardened seafloor mud. The companies that drilled these cores were largely unaware that within these mudstones were fossils of microscopic organisms buried on the seafloor of an ancient inland sea that covered much of northern Australia over 1.5 billion years ago.

As our new study, published today in Nature, shows, these fossils are crucial for addressing a longstanding puzzle about the major evolutionary leap that led to all complex life on Earth: the origin of eukaryotes.

Layers of 1.7 billion-year-old sedimentary rocks, Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory.

Maxwell Lechte

Small but complex

All life on Earth can be placed into one of two types which are fundamentally different at the cellular level.

Prokaryotes (bacteria and archaea) have simple cellular organisation and are mostly single celled. Eukaryotes – including all animals, plants, algae and fungi – are very different. They have much more complicated cells featuring a nucleus and other specialised structures such as organelles which perform specific jobs.

The eukaryotic revolution transformed the planet. It led to the rise of animals and, eventually, to us. Based on observations from the genes of living organisms, it is now widely agreed that the last common ancestor of all living eukaryotes resulted from the symbiotic union of (at least) two prokaryotic microbes: an archaeon and a bacterium.

The first evidence for eukaryotic life comes in the form of these fossils of single-celled organisms. They show a level of cellular complexity not seen among prokaryotes, but common in eukaryotes.

Eukaryote fossils can be found around the world in rocks dating back at least 1.5 billion years. The fossils of the Northern Territory, the oldest of which date back to 1.75 billion years ago, are the oldest currently known eukaryote fossils globally.

But the ancient world in which early eukaryotes evolved remains shrouded in mystery. And so many fundamental aspects regarding their nature are unknown.

Oxygen – friend or foe?

Many types of bacteria can live and grow in places without oxygen. But nearly all eukaryotes alive today use oxygen for their survival. That’s because aerobic respiration – breaking down food using oxygen – provides the vast amounts of energy that complex life demands.

But the idea that oxygen has always been beneficial for all eukaryotes has come under fire in recent years. This follows the surprising discoveries of enigmatic eukaryotes that can thrive in conditions without oxygen.

There is also mounting evidence from the geological record that when eukaryotes were first evolving, oxygen was likely much scarcer. This means oxygen-free marine habitats would have been the norm. Collectively, these observations have called into question the assumption eukaryotes have depended on oxygen since their inception.

Genetic studies of living microbes belonging to groups considered closest to the ancestors of the first eukaryote can offer key insights into eukaryote ancestry. But only the fossil record can tell us about long-extinct lineages. And only geology can offer a window into the kind of world these organisms lived in.

Fossils of single-celled eukaryotic organisms with complex surface features such as extensions and plates.

Leigh Anne Riedman

More than 12,000 fossils

For our new study, we crushed up samples of the mudstone cores stored in Darwin, then dissolved them. We identified more than 12,000 fossils by analysing the organic residue left behind by this dissolution under a microscope.

We also studied the mudstones the fossils were preserved in to better understand what the environment was like when the sediments were deposited. This offered insight about the habitats in which these eukaryotes lived. And by analysing the chemistry of these mudstones, we could determine whether oxygen was present in the ancient seawater.

Our results show that eukaryote fossils were found in environments ranging from coastal mudflats to the open sea. But they were present only in samples deposited in oxygenated settings. Samples from oxygen-free environments contained only simple, prokaryotic forms.

This suggests that even the oldest known eukaryotes that lived on Earth 1.7 to 1.4 billion years ago were dependent on oxygen. These data lend support to a long-held hypothesis that oxygen played a key role in driving the evolution of early eukaryotes.

Resolving the drivers and context of the major evolutionary leap represented by early eukaryotes is one of the major outstanding questions in the life sciences. Ongoing studies of these enigmatic, ancient microfossils will no doubt tell us more about our own origins – and our place in the cosmos.
Maxwell Lechte, Research Associate in Geobiology, University of Sydney and Leigh Anne Riedman, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Earth Science, University of California, Santa Barbara

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

Abstract
The evolution of the eukaryotic cell paved the way for the emergence of all complex life on Earth. Despite its significance, the environmental context of early eukaryote evolution is largely unknown^1,2. Here we use the geological record to reconstruct the habitats of the oldest known fossil eukaryotes, approximately 1.75–1.4 billion years old. Our integrated palaeontological, sedimentological and geochemical analyses show that although fossil eukaryotes are found in samples deposited in a range of environments from coastal to offshore, they are almost entirely restricted to those from settings with oxygenated bottom waters. This distribution suggests these organisms were aerobes (obligate, facultative and/or microaerophilic) and, given their size and morphological complexity, probably possessed mitochondria. Furthermore, their near absence from otherwise fossiliferous anoxic samples suggests a benthic habit, as planktonic eukaryotes would be expected to be present in both oxic and anoxic samples. We propose that eukaryotes were largely restricted to oxic benthic habitats for much of the Proterozoic eon, only expanding into planktonic habitats during the Neoproterozoic era (1–0.54 billion years ago). This late ecological expansion could account for the mismatch between the appearance of eukaryotic body fossils and molecular biomarkers³ and explain the stepwise increase in eukaryote diversity during the Neoproterozoic era⁴.

Lechte, M.A., Riedman, L.A., Porter, S.M. et al.
Early fossil eukaryotes were benthic aerobes.
Nature 655, 670–675 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10533-4

©2026 Springer Nature Ltd.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

For young-Earth creationism, the fundamental problem remains the chronology. These microscopic organisms inhabited Earth more than a billion years before the supposed biblical creation. Debates about their metabolism or preferred habitat cannot make that immense span of time disappear. There is no evidence-based reconciliation between this geological history and a world only a few thousand years old; preserving the latter requires rejecting the former.

The study also illustrates how science progresses. Researchers revisit specimens, question assumptions and combine different kinds of evidence to distinguish between competing explanations. Whether early eukaryotes depended on oxygen is a question to investigate, not a doctrine to defend. Revising an interpretation in response to evidence strengthens our understanding; it does not render every alternative explanation equally credible.

What emerges is a history in which the evolution and distribution of complex life were constrained by environmental conditions. Oxygen availability helped determine where these early eukaryotes could flourish, while subsequent ecological expansion offered further opportunities for diversification. This does not mean that oxygen alone explains the origin of complex cells, but it places their history firmly within the workings of a changing natural world.

There is no need to imagine those ancient seas being prepared with humans in mind. Evolution has no foresight: organisms survive and reproduce under the conditions they encounter, and their descendants inherit the consequences. These tiny fossils preserve evidence of that long, contingent history — a history we can reconstruct by examining the rocks, rather than insisting that the rocks conform to an ancient creation story.

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Spot The Differences

This article is best read on a laptop, desktop computer

Readers will have noticed that I have been using ChatGPT to generate illustrations for my articles. Generally, the results are very good, but earlier versions had a habit of introducing anachronisms: Neanderthals accompanied by dogs and other livestock, for example, or Stone Age hunters carrying what appeared to be metal-tipped spears. Correcting these could become an amusing — and sometimes frustrating — exercise. Removing one error would introduce another, and the next attempt might restore the original mistake.

This time, however, something rather encouraging happened. For my previous article, about a Neolithic village in Serbia that archaeologists have re-examined, I asked ChatGPT to produce an impression of everyday life in the settlement. It generated an image, then identified an anachronism in its own output and produced a corrected version without my having to point out the problem. That does not mean historical inaccuracies are now a thing of the past, but it was a welcome example of checking and correction.

Naturally, this also presented an opportunity for a little fun. Below are the two images, side by side. Can you spot what does not belong in the image on the left? If you would like a helping hand — or simply want to cheat — click the button to reveal a nifty tool for comparing them.

AI-generated impression of life in a Neolithic Serbian village.

Creationism In Crisis - People Were Living In A Serbian Village From Before 'Creation Week' - The Archeology Shows No Signs of A Genocidal Flood

AI-generated impression of life in Neolithic Opovo

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A minimally invasive look into the late Neolithic

One recurring difficulty for young-Earth creationism is that people were apparently building communities before the Earth on which they built them had been created. At Opovo Ugar-Bajbuk, in present-day Serbia, archaeologists place the principal occupation of a substantial Neolithic settlement around 4850–4725 BCE. That is more than seven centuries before Archbishop Ussher’s famous creation date of 4004 BCE, and long before the supposed global Flood of conventional young-Earth chronologies. These people were inconveniently getting on with their lives before that particular biblical timetable allowed them to exist.

The settlement covered more than nine hectares, with up to 220 identified house structures across its development and an estimated peak population exceeding 700. This was a substantial community whose inhabitants could organise the labour needed to construct extensive enclosing ditches. The findings are reported by Fynn Wilkes and an international team in Archaeologia Austriaca.

There is another lesson here that creationist polemics routinely misrepresent: scientists revise their conclusions. Earlier investigations, based on a much more limited excavated area, had produced a picture of a smaller settlement, estimated at about five hectares. The new researchers returned with geomagnetic surveying, coring, systematic surface collection and targeted excavation, combining their findings with radiocarbon evidence. The resulting reconstruction changes our understanding of the settlement’s scale and development. Indeed, Ruth Tringham, who led the research project in the 1980s, is herself a co-author of the reassessment.

That is how scientific knowledge improves. Earlier interpretations remain open to testing, and better evidence produced by improved techniques and better technology, can require them to change. A revision does not make every alternative explanation equally credible, nor does it give an ancient religious narrative a free pass. In this case, the revised chronology still places the community centuries before Ussher’s proposed Creation Week. Changing the reconstructed size and history of a Neolithic settlement does nothing to rescue a timetable that places the creation of the entire planet after its inhabitants had already lived there.

The researchers also distinguish evidence from interpretation. House sizes suggest relatively limited differences in material wealth, while the enclosing ditches indicate an ability to coordinate substantial communal work. Those observations are consistent with a comparatively egalitarian community, but they cannot establish that everyone enjoyed equal status or that coercion was absent. Such qualifications express the limits of the evidence — precisely the limits that responsible scholarship should acknowledge.

Opovo therefore presents two related difficulties for biblical literalism: a human history that refuses to fit its preferred chronology, and a demonstration of how knowledge advances when conclusions remain accountable to evidence. Archaeologists can reconsider what they thought they knew about the settlement because their task is to discover what happened. The evidence is allowed to change the story. Creationism by contrast refuses to change the story and attempts to change the inconvenient evidence.

Creationism Refuted - Bats Evolved In Europe - 65 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

New study reveals bats originated in Europe and rewrites the bat family tree | University of St Andrews news

Corynorhinus townsendii.

Credit: Elizabeth Clare.

Bats present creationists with a multitude of problems: firstly, there is the fact that they have a vastly more effective immune system than humans, so creationists need to explain why an omnibenevolent creator god would not give his favourite special creation, humans, the best available immune system. Secondly, there is the famous Bible blunder where, in most English language translations, bats appear to have been classified as birds (Leviticus 11:13-19) by the ignorant people who wrote it.

Now the facts have become even more difficult in the form of an awkward combination: remarkable adaptations that invite declarations of “design”, and an evolutionary history that researchers can investigate using evidence. Calling a bat a specially created “kind” explains neither its relationships with other bats nor when and where those relationships arose. Those are questions that require fossils, genomes and testable hypotheses.

Now, a major international study, published in Nature, has brought these questions into sharper focus. Researchers working within the Bat1K consortium assembled genomic data from 103 species, representing all 21 recognised living bat families, and combined this resource with anatomical evidence from 44 fossil bats. The university summarises their findings as pointing to a European origin for bats and mammalian powered flight around 65 million years ago — tens of millions of years before the supposed “Creation Week” of young-Earth creationism.

The research reconstructs a branching history of ancestry, migration and diversification. Its geographical model favours Europe as the ancestral region, followed by dispersal into Africa and subsequent expansion into other continents. These are historical inferences that can be tested and revised as further evidence becomes available.

The study also sheds light on echolocation: the ability to use returning echoes to detect surroundings and prey. The inferred position of the extinct bat Vielasia supports the conclusion that laryngeal echolocation — using calls generated in the voice box — arose before the diversification of the group containing all living bats. This places another celebrated bat adaptation deep within their evolutionary history.

Creationism Refuted - How Life Could Have Started On Earth 4.33 Billion Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated impression of the Hadean Bombardment

ChatGPT-6 Astra

New Study Pinpoints When Early Earth May Have Become Ready for Life’s Chemistry - Planetary Science Institute

For creationists who depend on gaps in scientific knowledge, research into the origin of life presents a recurring difficulty: scientists keep finding ways to investigate those gaps. One question is when the early Earth became sufficiently stable for the chemistry preceding life to persist. Producing potentially useful molecules would have achieved little if repeated impacts then destroyed them. Before life could gain a foothold, its chemical ingredients needed somewhere they could survive.

A new study by Oleg Abramov and colleagues, published in Nature Communications investigates that problem using a three-dimensional model of impact heating. The researchers identify approximately 4.33 billion years ago as a particularly favourable time for persistent prebiotic chemistry. That places the proposed opportunity billions of years before the entire universe supposedly appeared in the chronology of Young-Earth creationism.

The emerging picture scarcely resembles a world prepared as a comfortable home for living things. Early Earth endured bombardment by asteroids, comets and leftover planetary building blocks. As that bombardment declined, regions of the shallow crust could remain cool enough for fragile molecules to persist. Around 4.4 billion years ago, the simulations begin to show environments that escaped subsequent reheating above the study’s specified threshold.

There is an interesting complication: impacts could also help create opportunities for life’s chemistry. Water circulating through heated, fractured rock can produce hydrothermal environments with sources of chemical energy. The researchers therefore sought an overlap between enduring cooler regions and continuing hydrothermal activity. Their proposed favourable window represents a changing balance between destructive heating and potentially useful geological activity, with no foresight required.

The distinction between opportunity and occurrence matters. This study does not demonstrate that life began 4.33 billion years ago, nor establish that an “RNA world” actually existed then. It constrains the thermal conditions under which such a proposed stage could have persisted. The date also depends on assumptions about bombardment: a lower estimate of the incoming mass moves the favourable window earlier, towards 4.4 billion years ago.

For creationism, the difficulty extends beyond the enormous timescale. An unanswered question about life’s beginnings is being broken down into physical conditions that researchers can calculate, compare and challenge. Uncertainty remains, but uncertainty supplies questions for further investigation; it supplies no evidence for a supernatural designer. Here, another part of the origin-of-life problem becomes a tractable question about the history of a changing planet.

Creationism Refuted - 'Jumping Genes' Create New Functional Genetic Information - No Magic needed.

Eciton vagans, with lava from a raided wasp nest.

By Geoff Gallice from Gainesville, FL, USA Spoils of the raid, CC BY 2.0, Link

Ants look back on an evolutionary story of success. The photo shows workers of the Asian weaver ant.

© Lukas Schrader

“Jumping genes” helped ants in their evolutionary triumph after the extinction of the dinosaurs

One of creationism’s favourite assertions is that evolution cannot produce “new genetic information” without an intelligent designer. What usually goes missing is a clear definition of information, an explanation of why known genetic mechanisms cannot generate novelty, or any evidence of the supposed designer doing anything. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists continue to investigate the natural processes by which genomes change and organisms acquire new capabilities. A new study of ants provides another example of how productive that scientific approach can be.

As reported in Science Advances, an international team led by Dr Lukas Schrader has investigated the contribution of transposable elements, commonly called “jumping genes”, to ant evolution. These mobile DNA sequences can move or copy themselves within genomes. Their activity can be disruptive, but it can also supply material for evolutionary innovation. The research links their activity to the expansion of gene families, including those encoding the odour receptors so important to ants’ chemical communication.

The researchers compared genomes from 163 ant species, representing twelve of the sixteen living subfamilies. They identified independent bursts of transposable-element activity in the ancestors of major ant groups, preceding their rapid diversification following the Cretaceous–Palaeogene, or K–Pg, mass extinction approximately 66 million years ago. The findings support a connection between changes within genomes and the evolutionary opportunities created by a profoundly altered world.

The evolutionary significance is straightforward. A mass extinction changes the conditions under which survivors live: ecological relationships are disrupted, resources become available in different ways, and opportunities arise as ecosystems recover. A genetic variant that previously offered little advantage may become useful under these new conditions. Natural selection can then favour organisms carrying it. Neither the mutation nor the environmental upheaval needs to anticipate the outcome.

Nor does genetic novelty require a complete, finished gene to appear from nowhere. Duplication supplies additional copies of existing sequences, which can subsequently diverge; changes to the regulation and arrangement of DNA can also alter what an organism does. Calling the starting material “existing information” does nothing to prevent its descendants from acquiring new functions. The relevant questions concern what changed, how it changed, and what consequences followed—not whether creationists are willing to call the result “information”.

Here, the specific finding is an association between mobile DNA, expanding gene families and subsequent diversification. It should not be inflated into a claim that every extra receptor acquired a demonstrated new function, or that the asteroid impact directly produced particular beneficial mutations. Nevertheless, the study supplies evidence for a natural route connecting genomic change with evolutionary diversification, precisely where the creationist argument substitutes an assertion of impossibility.

For young-Earth creationists, there is the additional inconvenience of the timescale. This diversification followed an extinction event some 66 million years ago—thousands of times further into the past than their entire supposed history of the Universe allows. Ant evolution was already unfolding in a world unimaginably ancient by biblical standards. What emerges is a history of genetic change, environmental catastrophe and opportunities exploited by surviving lineages, without foresight or a predetermined destination.

Fine-Tuned Fallacy Exposed - Earth Fine-Tuned For Regular Mass Extinctions - Malevolence, Incompetence Or Nature?

AI-generated impression of the End-Permian extinction

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AI-generated impression of the End-Permian mass extinction.

UNM researcher helps uncover recurring climate regimes linked to elevated extinction risk | UNM UCAM Newsroom

One of the more ridiculous of creationist claims is that Earth was perfectly ‘fine-tuned’ for life by an omniscient, omnibenevolent designer. Ridiculous because a mere glance at the reality should tell them that natural disasters such as earthquakes, seismic activity and flash-floods regularly devastate huge areas and kill vast numbers of people. The rose-tinted view requires a remarkably selective reading of the planet’s history: admire the organisms alive today, but overlook the environmental upheavals that wiped out so many of their predecessors. A world capable of supporting life is not necessarily a world designed to protect it, and the geological record provides abundant evidence of that distinction.

New research, paper, published in Nature Communications, adds another dimension to this problem. An international team, including UNM palaeobiologist Corinne “Cori” Myers, examined approximately 539 million years of Earth’s history and identified five major, persistent ‘mega-climate’ regimes. Transitions between these regimes were associated with heightened vulnerability in the biosphere and elevated extinction risk. The history emerging from this analysis is one of prolonged climatic states punctuated by potentially dangerous reorganisations.

The study brings together carbon and oxygen isotope records, statistical analyses and a conceptual model of the interacting climate and carbon cycle. The researchers compared the environmental patterns with a measure of biological vulnerability incorporating fossil diversity and the rates at which groups appeared and disappeared. Their findings suggest that the consequences of an environmental disturbance depend partly on the state of the planetary system it affects: a perturbation can help push that system into a different regime, with serious consequences for its inhabitants.

This does not establish that every mass extinction had the same cause, or that each climate transition inevitably produced one. Volcanism, asteroid impacts and their associated environmental effects remain essential parts of the explanation. The study instead offers a broader framework for understanding why some episodes of disruption coincided with particularly severe biological crises. Its central finding concerns an association between changing climate–carbon regimes and increased vulnerability, rather than a single universal extinction mechanism.

For the creationist argument, however, the difficulty is plain. If Earth’s suitability for living organisms is to count as evidence of benevolent design, what are we to make of its capacity to become catastrophically unsuitable for organisms already living here? Invoking a designer’s concern for life while dismissing the destruction of entire evolutionary lineages is an exercise in choosing the evidence to fit the conclusion. Survival receives the credit; extinction disappears into the small print.

Creationism Refuted - The History Of Viticulture - Uninterrupted By A Global Genocide

AI-Generated image of wine-making in Iberia, 3000 Years ago

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Grape seeds from Huelva, Vitis vinifera L.

Image: Guillem Pérez Jordà.

Ancient DNA reveals that the first grapevines cultivated in the Iberian Peninsula arrived from the eastern Mediterranean 3,000 years ago

If fruit-bearing plants were created for human use by an omnipotent, omniscient god, why have humans spent thousands of years modifying them to suit our needs? Genesis 1:29 presents seed-bearing plants and fruit trees as divine provisions for humanity, yet agriculture tells a rather different story: people taking what nature supplied and, through cultivation and selection, producing crops better suited to their purposes. Grapevines provide another example of this gap between the claim of providential design and the biological history of our food.

Research published in Current Biology, traces part of that history through ancient DNA. An international team analysed 28 archaeological grape seeds from Iberia and Sardinia. Their findings indicate that cultivated vines of eastern Mediterranean ancestry reached Iberia approximately 3,000 years ago, associated with Phoenician settlement and trade. These were already domesticated plants, arriving in a landscape where wild grapevines also grew.

The imported vines subsequently crossed with local wild populations. This mixing contributed to the ancestry of traditional Iberian varieties, with characteristic lineages already identifiable in seeds from the fourth century BCE. Ancient DNA also revealed connections between medieval seeds and varieties preserved today. The record therefore contains both change and continuity: new combinations of ancestry alongside lineages maintained across centuries.

More worryingly for Bible-literalist creationist, the genetic evidence shows that viticulture (the cultivation and growing of grapes) has a continuous history from before 'Creation Week' through the mythical global flood and biological reset of Earth, right up to the present, with no evidence of interruption of either the culturally-inherited methods or of the grape varieties used.

This is a useful illustration of how evolution works. Populations do not have to acquire all their useful variation through new mutations arising on the spot. Reproduction can reshuffle existing variation, while interbreeding brings together genetic variants from previously separated populations. Cultivation then provides opportunities for people to retain and propagate plants with desirable characteristics. Human preferences influence which vines reproduce or are multiplied, but the inheritance and variation on which that selection acts are ordinary biological processes.

Refuting Creationism - Earth Fine Tuned For Catastrophe And Mass Extinction

AI-generated impression of a Yellowstone supereruption

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Yellowstone hot spring.

End of humanity? Blow-by-blow account of what would happen if the Yellowstone supervolcano erupted now

One of the more curious creationist claims is that Earth was perfectly designed for human life by an all-powerful, all-knowing and omnibenevolent creator. This comforting picture tends to concentrate on pleasant scenery, sunshine and things we can eat, while overlooking the planet’s considerable capacity to kill us. Yellowstone provides a particularly impressive example of what must be left out of the picture. It tends to be made by those fortunate individuals born to the relative comfort and security of a technologically-advanced society and it of course attributed to the locally-popular god.
Beneath the spectacular landscape of Yellowstone National Park lies a volcanic system whose history includes enormous explosive eruptions. Its most recent caldera-forming eruption occurred approximately 631,000 years ago — long before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of young-Earth creationism. A comparable event today could devastate surrounding regions, spread ash across large areas of North America and disrupt the global climate, with serious consequences for agriculture. That is an extraordinary feature to include in a world supposedly engineered for our benefit.

None of this means Yellowstone is ‘overdue’ for a supereruption, or that such an event would wipe out humanity. As the US Geological Survey explains, volcanoes do not follow a timetable, and another catastrophic eruption at Yellowstone is by no means inevitable. Scientific accuracy matters here: the argument against benevolent design needs no assistance from exaggerated claims of impending doom. The existence and geological record of these hazards are quite sufficient.

The underlying problem for creationism is the difference between a planet on which humans can live and one perfectly arranged for human welfare. Our existence establishes the former; it does not demonstrate the latter. Evolution provides a straightforward reason why organisms possess adaptations to the environments in which their ancestors survived. It gives us no reason to expect those environments to remain safe, or the physical processes shaping them to take account of our needs.

An omnipotent designer, however, cannot be excused as an engineer forced to work within constraints beyond its control. If the planet’s life-supporting features are to be credited to deliberate benevolence, its destructive features also require an explanation. Pointing to the beauty of Yellowstone while overlooking the processes capable of devastating its surroundings is selective accounting. Invoking a mysterious divine purpose merely assumes the benevolence that the design argument was supposed to establish.

The creationist difficulty remains even without the worst-case details: a habitable Earth is not a promise of a hospitable Earth. Our protection from its hazards depends on understanding natural processes and acting on the evidence — a rather more useful response than assuming that everything was arranged with our welfare in mind.

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

AI-generated impression of Columbian mammoths around the sinkhole trap

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

Mahan SA, et al (2026)

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

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

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

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

What was dated originally?

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

What does luminescence measure?

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

Does that date the mammoths?

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

Why trust a revised date?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Cullen Townsend

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

Image: Cullen Townsend

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

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

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

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

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