Refuting Creationism - Evidence of Humans In America 13,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Human footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, reported in 2021, show that human activity occurred in the Americas as long as 23,000 years ago – about 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. A new U of A study supports the 2021 findings.

Courtesy of David Bustos/
White Sands National Park

Earliest evidence of humans in the Americas confirmed in new U of A study | University of Arizona News

Fig. 3. Alkali Flat east escarpment.
(A) WHSA Locality 2 (view east) (Fig. 2B) with exposure of alluvial beds and palustrine beds along the escarpment. Stratum 1 is exposed in the foreground (comprising the eastern margin of Alkali Flat), but in this photo, it is dried out and covered with a thin sheet of eolian gypsum sand. The finely bedded sands and muds of Stratum 2A comprise the low escarpment in the middle ground, expressed by the thin, horizontal ledges formed by differential weathering of the stream beds. The trench exposing human tracks in Stratum 2A is at the left.

Vance T. Holliday et al.(2025)

Fig. 1. Field area setting.
The northern Tularosa Basin showing the area of the White Sands (“Gypsum Sand Dunes”), the Alkali Fat deflation basin, modern Lake Lucero, and present-day Lost River, which drains southwest across the distal piedmont until it is buried by the gypsum dunes (see also fig. S4). The 1204-m contour line approximates the proposed extent of paleolake Otero (15). It was likely more extensive given the >4 m of lake beds at “G.” The two field areas (red dots) are as follows: “G” is the area of Gypsum Overlook, the Central study area, and WHSA Locality 2; “Loc 1” is a stratigraphic section along the west margin of Alkali Flat. The brown pattern at G is the area of exposures of deposits linked to paleolake Otero and overlain by truncated Holocene dunes (31). The inset shows the location of the White Sands and the Tularosa Basin within New Mexico [based on figure 1 in (31)].

Image credit: X. Gong and A. Cowart, University of Wisconsin Cartography Lab.
Vance T. Holliday et al.(2025)

The Bronze Age Middle Eastern authors of the Bible clearly knew little of the world beyond a few days' walk from their homes in the Canaanite Hills. The world they described — and the stories they invented to fill the vast gaps in their knowledge — contained nothing unfamiliar to them. They had no way of knowing the true age of the Earth or the Universe, which they imagined to be fixed and immobile. They knew nothing of the history of living or extinct species, nor of the compelling evidence for common ancestry stretching back hundreds of thousands, even tens of millions, of years. And they were entirely unaware of the existence of other peoples living in distant lands, across vast oceans on other continents.

It should come as no surprise, then, that they got so much wrong, and that their writings omitted nearly everything science has since revealed about human origins. We now know that Homo sapiens diversified from archaic ancestors in Africa and gradually spread across the globe—migrating over land bridges now submerged by rising sea levels and eventually reaching the Americas.

Almost all of this is well-established in modern science, with the only significant uncertainty remaining around the precise timing of the first human colonisation of the Americas from Siberia. Bible literalists attempt to sidestep this discrepancy between the scientific evidence and the biblical narrative by postulating, without any supporting evidence, that the Bible was authored by an omniscient creator god. They argue that any contradiction with scientific findings must be due to mistaken interpretation, not error in the Bible. In essence, their reasoning runs: “The Bible was written by an all-knowing god because the Bible says so—therefore, any conflicting evidence must be wrong.” Instead of critically examining the claims of Bronze Age hill farmers, they demand that science must bend to fit ancient, unsubstantiated assertions.

One striking example of the scientific evidence at odds with biblical literalism is the recent confirmation that human footprints discovered at White Sands National Park, New Mexico, are 23,000 years old—some 13,000 years older than biblical literalists believe the Earth itself to be.

These footprints were discovered in 2021 and initially dated to 23,000 years ago — 10,000 years earlier than the previously accepted earliest human presence in the Americas. While this early date was controversial, a team led by Professor Vance Holliday of the University of Arizona’s School of Anthropology and Department of Geosciences has now re-evaluated the evidence and confirmed the original finding.

The team has just published their findings, open access, in Science, with an explanation in an official University of Arizona news release.

Refuting Creationism - The 'Abiogenesis Gap' Just Got a Little Bit Smaller

Image generated with Adobe Stock by Josef Kuster / ETH Zürich)

How urea forms spontaneously | ETH Zürich

Graphical representation of urea formation in a droplet.

Figure: Luis Quintero / ETH Zürich.

Creationism's ever-shrinking, gap-shaped creator god has just lost a little more ground. New research suggests that the formation of basic organic molecules may have been far easier under early Earth conditions than previously thought. Remarkably, scientists have found that urea—a key organic compound—can form spontaneously from ammonia and carbon dioxide on the surface of water droplets. This process requires no catalysts, no high pressure or heat, and consumes minimal energy.

Although vitalism was refuted as early as 1828 — decades before Darwin — creationists still claim that life cannot arise from non-living matter. Yet they quickly retreat when asked how dead food becomes living tissue, or what exactly they mean by ‘life’: a substance, a process, or some kind of magical force. In reality, life is a set of chemical processes, and at its core, it’s about managing entropy—using energy to maintain order against the natural drift toward disorder.

The discovery was made by researchers at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich in collaboration with colleagues from Auburn University in Alabama, USA. Their findings have just been published in Science.