Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - How We Know The Bible Was Made Up By Ignorant People

Refuting Creationism

How We Know The Bible Was Made Up By Ignorant People

Reconstruction of life in 'Green Arabia'

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The lush past of the world’s largest desert - Medias - UNIGE

The brown traces represent the beds of ancient streams, organized in dendritic drainage networks that are now abandoned.

While the biblical authors drew heavily from earlier Mesopotamian myths — most notably adapting the flood narrative from the Epic of Gilgamesh — they appear to have had little understanding of the broader historical and environmental context of the region. Recent research highlights a striking omission: the rich prehistoric past of the Arabian Peninsula, just to the south of Mesopotamia.

Far from being an eternal wasteland, the Arabian Peninsula was once a verdant, fertile region. Between approximately 11,000 and 5,500 years ago, it featured extensive river systems, lush vegetation, and a large freshwater lake. This environment supported human settlement and migration, acting as a corridor out of Africa rather than the barrier it is today.

The biblical narrative, especially in Genesis, reflects a parochial worldview, lacking any apparent awareness of the dramatic environmental transformations that shaped the region. The latest findings, published by an international team including researchers from the University of Geneva, show that around 8,000 years ago, a gradual shift in Earth’s orbit triggered a weakening of the monsoon systems. This climatic change led to severe aridification, culminating in the desertification of the region and the disappearance of the once 42-metre-deep lake.

What was once a cradle of biodiversity and human migration is now the Rub’ al-Khali or "Empty Quarter"—one of the most inhospitable deserts on the planet. The contrast between this rich prehistoric reality and the narrow scope of the biblical texts speaks volumes about the limited horizons and historical understanding of their authors.

What is known of the climate changes in Arabia during the Quaternary?

Quaternary Climate Change in Arabia: A Shifting Landscape

The climate of the Arabian Peninsula has undergone dramatic fluctuations throughout the Quaternary period (the last 2.6 million years), alternating between arid desert conditions and wetter, more hospitable phases known as “Green Arabia” episodes.

These humid periods were driven by changes in Earth’s orbit—specifically the precession cycle, which alters the timing and intensity of monsoon systems. During peak humid phases, occurring roughly every 20,000 years, the Indian Ocean monsoon shifted northward, bringing increased rainfall to the peninsula.

Key humid periods occurred around:

MIS 5 (130,000–80,000 years ago)
MIS 7 (around 240,000 years ago)
MIS 9 (around 320,000 years ago) - And most recently, between 11,000 and 5,500 years ago, during the early Holocene

During these green phases:

Rivers flowed across what are now dry wadis.
Lakes and wetlands formed, some over 10 metres deep.
Grasslands supported diverse fauna and human populations.
The peninsula served as a migration corridor between Africa and Eurasia.

These wet periods were punctuated by long dry spells, including the current hyper-arid phase that began around 5,500 years ago. This shift led to the formation of the Rub' al-Khali (“Empty Quarter”), one of the largest and driest sand deserts in the world.

Modern research, including remote sensing, sediment cores, and archaeological data, continues to reveal how these ancient climate cycles shaped both the environment and human history in the region.

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The research detailing this discovery of a once green Arabia is the subject of an open access paper in Communications Earth & Environment and a University of Geneve press release:

The lush past of the world’s largest desert
An international team, including researchers from UNIGE, has revealed that the Arabian Peninsula’s desert was once home to a vast lake and rivers that shaped its landscape.

The Empty Quarter (Rub’ al-Khali), the vast desert of the Arabian Peninsula, was not always an arid landscape. A recent study by the University of Geneva (UNIGE), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, Griffith University in Australia, California Institute of Technology, University of Texas and University of the Fraser Valley in Canada reveals that this region was once home to a vast lake and river system. These favorable conditions fostered grasslands and savannahs, enabling human migration — until drought returned, forcing populations to move. Published in Communications Earth & Environment, this research highlights the impact of climate cycles on landscapes and human societies.
The Empty Quarter, or Rub’ al-Khali in Arabic, is one of the world’s largest deserts. Spanning nearly 650,000 square kilometers—mainly in Saudi Arabia—it dominates the Arabian Peninsula, with dunes towering up to 250 meters. Yet, this vast arid expanse was not always so inhospitable. A recent study by an international team led by UNIGE reveals a very different past.

Our work highlights the presence of an ancient lake, which reached its peak around 8,000 years ago, as well as rivers and a large valley shaped by water.

Dr Abdallah Zaki, first author
Department of Earth Sciences
University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.

A 42 metre deep lake

These water sites emerged during the ‘Green Arabia’ period, a time of heavy rainfall that lasted from approximately 11,000 to 5,500 years ago, at the end of the Quaternary era.

The lake is estimated to have been vast, covering an area of 1,100 m² - almost twice the surface area of Lake Geneva - and reaching a depth of 42 meters. As rainfall increased, the lake eventually overflowed, causing a major flood that carved a 150 km-long valley into the desert floor.

Professor Sébastien Castelltort, co-author
Department of Earth Sciences
University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.

Based on sediments and landform traced over 1000 km, scientists believe that the heavy rains feeding these ancient waterholes came from the northward expansion of the African and Indian monsoons. These wet phases, linked to orbital cycles, varied in duration depending on the region: lasting several millennia in the south compared to only a few centuries in the north. They favored the formation of grasslands and savannahs, which in turn facilitated human expansion across the Arabian Peninsula.

Human Impact

The formation of lake and river landscapes, along with grasslands and savannahs, would have facilitated the expansion of hunting, gathering, and pastoral groups into what is now a dry, barren desert. This is confirmed by abundant archaeological evidence found in the Empty Quarter and along its ancient lake and river systems.

Professor Michael Petraglia, co-author
Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution
Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

6,000 years ago, the region experienced a sharp decline in rainfall, creating dry, arid conditions that forced these nomadic populations to migrate to more hospitable environments.

These findings underscore the crucial role played by the African monsoon in the rapid transformation of the Arabian Peninsula’s desert landscape, as well as in shaping population movements. This narrative of climate perturbations and human migrations, written in rocks and landscapes, is fundamental to understanding and predicting the possible consequences of current climate change.

Abstract
Abundant geomorphological, biological, and isotopic records show that Arabia repeatedly underwent significant climate-driven environmental changes during late Quaternary humid periods. Precisely mapping how the enhancement and expansion of the African Monsoon during these humid periods have affected landscape evolution and human occupation dynamics in Arabia remains a scientific challenge. Here we reconstruct an ancient water-sculpted landscape consisting of lake and river deposits, coupled with a large outlet valley in the Rub’ al Khali Desert of Saudi Arabia. During the peak of the Holocene Humid Period or before, intense rainfall reactivated alluvial floodplains and filled a ~1100 km² topographic depression, which eventually breached, carving a deep ~150 km-long valley. Coupling geologic reconstructions with transient Earth system model simulations shows that this hydrological activity was linked to higher seasonal precipitation punctuated by repeated heavy events. Analysis of lacustrine and fluvial sedimentary deposits implies sediment routing across distances of up to 1000 km from the Asir Mountains. Our results indicate that such intense flooding challenges the conventional view of simple, weak, and linear landscape stabilization following increased rainfall in Arabia. Our findings highlight the crucial role of an enhanced African Monsoon in driving rapid landscape transformations in the Arabian Desert.

Main
The Arabian Peninsula is mostly a vast arid to hyperarid desert region. However, abundant geological archives show evidence for an intermittently more humid past^1,2,3,4 (Fig. 1). During the early Holocene to middle Holocene ( ~11 to ~5.5 ka BP), perennial lakes and extensive drainage networks characterised Arabian landscapes^5,6,7,8. Increased rainfall during the early Holocene, driven by the northward expansion of African and Indian Ocean monsoon rain belts^9,10,11, is the most recent of the multiple wetter periods that have occurred synchronously with insolation changes associated with orbital precessional cycles throughout Late Pleistocene to Holocene. Although this wetter period spanned the early to middle Holocene, its duration varied locally, extending over multiple millennia in the southern part of the peninsula^{1,2,3,4,5,6,7} to just a few centuries in northern Arabia⁸ due to the contribution of monsoonal systems. These wetter climatic conditions would have created grasslands and savannah-like environments, paving the way for significant human expansions across Arabia^11,12,13 (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Distribution of palaeohydrological and geomorphic records, archaeological sites, modeled streams, major monsoon systems, and the study site in Arabia.

A Hillshade map of Arabia highlighting the locations of the HHP palaeohydrological records (Supplementary data 1 and 2) and major archaeological sites¹¹. The map displays the modeled streams, namely Wadi ad Dawasir, Wadi al Batin, and Wadi Sahba^5,12, as well as the dominant moisture-bringing atmospheric systems (monsoons, Westerlies). B A sketch map depicts the distribution of both the fluvial and the lacustrine deposits used in this study. The data are derived from a 30-m-resolution Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) digital elevation model.

Multiple water isotope fingerprinting studies have found that the HHP intensification resulted from a reinforcement/strengthening of the Indian Monsoon, African Monsoons, and possibly Mediterranean Westerlies, given its situation at the confluence of multiple atmospheric circulations^3,10,14. Some isotopic and model studies have suggested that the HHP in northern and western Arabia was associated with an eastward expansion of the African Humid Period^6,15,16, though there is questioning of the degree to which it resulted in increased precipitation6. There is still a fundamental debate about the extent and magnitude of the expansion of the African Monsoons into Arabia, which needs to be addressed to understand the relationships between climatic and environmental changes and the dynamics of human occupation patterns throughout the Holocene. Furthermore, understanding the influence of African monsoons on Arabian Desert landscapes is crucial for establishing benchmarks needed to accurately simulate the extent and magnitude of the Saharo-Arabian belt’s greening^16,17,18,19.

The Rub’ al Khali Desert is a large sedimentary basin, located downstream of the Asir Mountains (Fig. 1), characterized by aeolian dunes, drainage systems, and paleo lacustrine and palustrine deposits^5,12. The Asir Mountains are hypothesized to have been primarily fed by the African Monsoons⁵. Consequently, the drainage systems that originated and eroded upstream and deposited sediments downstream could serve as a proxy to constrain the magnitude and extent of the African Monsoon’s influence on the Arabian Desert landscapes.

Here, we reconstruct an ancient water-sculpted landscape consisting of lacustrine, palustrine and fluvial deposits, coupled with a large outlet valley in the Rub’ al Khali Desert of Saudi Arabia (Fig. 1). We used a multi-proxy approach incorporating quantitative remote sensing, field sedimentology, radiocarbon dating, isotopic provenance tracers, palaeohydraulic reconstructions, and lithospheric flexural and climate models. Our results illustrate the functioning of a large-scale source-to-sink fluvial system impacted by intense monsoons during the HHP, filling and breaching of a downstream topographic depression by water, and incision of a large outlet canyon. Furthermore, our results are useful for testing and improving Earth system models of the greening of the vast Arabian desert belt, which may help shed light on the environmental drivers of human population dynamics in the region.

Zaki, A.S., Delaunay, A., Baby, G. et al.
Monsoonal imprint on late Quaternary landscapes of the Rub’ al Khali Desert. Commun Earth Environ 6, 255 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02224-1

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

A Myth Rooted in Ignorance, Not History

This discovery is yet another blow to the notion that the authors of Genesis were recording an accurate account of the ancient world. Far from depicting a historically informed landscape, the biblical narrative is silent on one of the most dramatic environmental transformations in the region’s recent past.

At the very time when Genesis situates its early stories—the Garden of Eden, the flood, the Tower of Babel—Arabia was not the vast, inhospitable desert it is today. It was a thriving, green corridor of lakes, rivers, and grasslands, supporting human migration, settlement, and a wide range of fauna. This verdant phase was known to no biblical author, despite the region’s proximity to the Fertile Crescent and the obvious relevance of such a transformation to any account of human origins.

Had the Genesis authors possessed even basic knowledge of their regional environment and its history, such a profound change in climate and geography would surely have left some trace in the text. Instead, what we find is a narrow, mythologised vision—rooted not in evidence or memory, but in folklore adapted from older Mesopotamian traditions and shaped by the limited worldview of a relatively isolated community.

Rather than providing a reliable historical account, the Genesis narrative increasingly appears to be a literary product of its time: culturally derivative, scientifically uninformed, and oblivious to the dynamic environmental history that modern science is only now revealing in full.

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