Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - Party Time In Iran 1,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Sunday, 20 July 2025

Refuting Creationism - Party Time In Iran 1,000 Years Before 'Creation Week' - And The Flood Missed The Evidence

Regional ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr ratios were estimated using data from the Georoc database³⁷ and measurements of modern plants from Ali Kosh²⁹ and interpolated to the wider region using the underlying lithology (following Barakat et al.⁸⁷).

Vaiglova, P., Kierdorf, H., Witzel, C. et al. (2025)

‘Ultimate dinner party guests’: Dispersed communities attending feast in ancient Iran gifted boars sourced from distant lands | Australian National University

A thousand years before Earth was supposedly created—according to the Bronze Age myths that creationists regard as literal history—people were already feasting in the Zagros Mountains, at a site now known as Asiab in modern-day Iran. Then, in what must have been a strangely selective miracle, around 4,300 years ago—when, according to the same myths, a global flood wiped out all life on Earth—the remains of these ancient feasts remained completely untouched. Like countless other archaeological sites, Asiab shows no trace of the thick silt layer that such a cataclysmic flood would inevitably have left behind.

Long before the advent of agriculture, when humans still lived in scattered bands of hunter-gatherers, people gathered at Asiab for a communal feast. The exact reason—whether religious ceremony, marriage, funeral, or some form of tribal leadership event—can only be guessed at. But what is clear is that guests travelled long distances over mountainous terrain, bringing with them the carcasses of wild boar. These animals, dangerous to hunt and not commonly pursued by hunter-gatherers in the region, appear to have held special significance. Their presence suggests that hunting and transporting them was a display of prowess or status, perhaps reserved for prestigious guests.

This conclusion comes from a team of palaeontologists who examined the microscopic wear and isotopic signatures on the teeth of wild boar recovered from the site. (For more on how this technique works, see the AI information side panel.)

The international team, led by Dr Petra Vaiglova of the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU), has just published their findings open access in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

How can scientists tell where and when an animal lived by examining the enamel on its teeth? Scientists can determine where and when an animal lived by analysing the enamel on its teeth through a combination of isotopic analysis and microwear studies. Here's how it works:

Isotopic Analysis

Tooth enamel contains chemical signatures that reflect an animal’s diet and environment during the time the enamel was forming. Two key types of isotopic data are often used:

a. Strontium Isotope Ratios (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr)

Strontium isotopes in teeth reflect the local geology of the region where an animal lived and fed.
Different regions have distinct strontium isotope signatures, based on the age and type of bedrock.
When animals eat plants or drink water, strontium from the soil and rocks enters their body and gets incorporated into teeth.
By comparing enamel isotope ratios with known local baselines, scientists can trace an animal’s geographic origin or movements.

b. Oxygen Isotope Ratios (δ¹⁸O)

Oxygen isotopes in tooth enamel come from drinking water, which varies with climate, altitude, and latitude.
These ratios help reconstruct climatic conditions or determine if the animal moved between regions with different water sources.

Microwear and Dental Morphology

Tooth enamel also preserves microscopic scratches and pits from chewing:

These microwear patterns reflect the types of food an animal consumed (e.g., soft fruits vs. tough grasses).
They can distinguish between different ecological zones or seasonal dietary changes.

Why Teeth?

Enamel is the hardest tissue in the body and does not remodel like bone.
Once formed, enamel retains its isotopic and microwear record unchanged for millennia, making it ideal for studying ancient life.

Summary

By combining isotopic data with dental wear analysis, scientists can:

Date the animal (based on the archaeological context or radiocarbon dating).
Identify where it lived or travelled.
Understand aspects of its diet and environment.

This approach is widely used in archaeology, palaeontology, and ecology to study both humans and animals, offering powerful insights into prehistoric life.

The research is also summarised in an ANU news release.

‘Ultimate dinner party guests’: Dispersed communities attending feast in ancient Iran gifted boars sourced from distant lands
Magnets and shot glasses serve as fun holiday souvenirs, but certain foods synonymous with a country’s identity can make for extra meaningful gifts for friends and loved ones; think French cheese, Dutch Stroopwafels and Canadian maple syrup.

According to new research, communities that lived in western Iran about 11,000 years ago during the Early Neolithic period took a similar approach when it came to gift-giving.
They invested significant effort to bring wild boars hunted in dispersed parts of the landscape as gifts to be eaten at a communal feast that took place at what is now the archaeological site of Asiab in the Zagros Mountains.

The findings, conducted by an international team of researchers including scientists from The Australian National University (ANU), suggest the modern-day practice of offering gifts that have geographical symbolism can be traced back to prehistory.

Food and long-standing culinary traditions form an integral component of cultures all over the globe. It is for this reason holidays, festivals, and other socially meaningful events commonly involve food. For example, we cannot imagine Christmas without the Christmas meal, Eid without the food gifts, or Passover without matzo ball soup.

Dr Petra Vaiglova, lead author
School of Archaeology and Anthropology
Australian National University
Acton, ACT, Australia.

The scientists unearthed the skulls of 19 wild boars that were neatly packed and sealed inside a pit within a round building at the Asiab site. Butchery marks on the animals’ skulls suggest they were used for feasting, but until now scientists were unsure where these boars came from.

Dr Vaiglova and the international research team examined the tooth enamel of five of these wild boars. The researchers analysed microscopic growth patterns and chemical signatures inside the enamel that offered “tell-tale” signs indicating that at least some of the boars used for the feast were not from the area where the gathering took place.

The researchers said it is surprising that these hunters went through such effort to kill and transport boars from their local region over difficult mountainous terrain during a journey that likely would have taken several days, especially considering boars were not the most hunted animal during the Early Neolithic period.

Just like trees and their annual growth rings, teeth deposit visible layers of enamel and dentine during growth that we can count under the microscope. This is the first time these growth layers have been used to guide geochemical analysis of animal teeth to answer questions about human-animal interactions. Rainfall and bedrock have distinct geochemical values in different geographical locations. These isotopic values get incorporated into animal tissues through drinking water and food. Measuring the geochemistry of tooth enamel allowed us to assess whether all the animals came from the same place that the feast took place or if they originated from more dispersed locations. Because the values we measured across the five teeth showed a high amount of variability, it is unlikely that all the animals originated from the same location. It is possible that some of them originated roughly 70 kilometres away from the site where the feast took place.

Dr Petra Vaiglova.

Dr Vaiglova said communities living in the Zagros Mountains at this time had a “very diverse hunting strategy” and were hunting lots of different animal species.

Boars are especially aggressive and so displaying them as hunting trophies or presenting them at a feast carries with it a certain element of significance beyond their culinary value. Bringing these animals from distant locations would have undoubtedly helped celebrate the importance of the social event that took place at Asiab. What is special about the feast at Asiab is not only its early date and that it brought together people from multiple geographically dispersed settlements, but also the fact that people who participated in this feast invested substantial amounts of effort to ensure that their contributions involved an element of geographic symbolism. This feast also took place at a time that pre-dates agriculture and farming practices. This was clearly a very meaningful event and the fact that people put in so much effort to transport the boars over such challenging terrain provides us with a glimpse of how old the tradition of bringing geographically meaningful gifts to social events really is. These people were clearly the ultimate dinner party guests.

Dr Petra Vaiglova.

The research is published in Nature Communications Earth and Environment and involved scientists from Australia, Germany, Denmark and Iran.

Abstract
Feasting played an important role in cementing social bonds between prehistoric communities. At Early Neolithic Asiab, western Iran, ceremonial feasting is evidenced by the butchered skulls of nineteen wild boars (Sus scrofa), an animal that was not commonly hunted in the region at the time. Here we use microscopic dental growth patterns to guide geochemical analyses of five wild boar teeth from Asiab and examine the geographical scope from which the animals derived. Our dataset includes 165 stable oxygen isotope values, 107 strontium isotope ratios, and Barium concentration maps. The findings indicate that despite Asiab’s location in an environment favourable to wild boars, the animals used for ceremonial feasting originated from a wide geographical catchment, with at least some necessitating transport over substantial distance across mountainous terrain. This deepens our understanding of the effort invested by the participating pre-agricultural communities for celebrating social connectivity across the wider landscape.

Introduction
Hunting, one of the oldest forms of human–animal interactions, has for a long time held important value to human societies not only as a resource acquisition strategy, but also as a vehicle for provisioning symbolic feasts and rituals¹. Prior to the domestication of livestock in southwestern Asia around 10,000 years ago, wild animals were used in activities aimed at creating or maintaining social cohesion, which eventually laid the foundation for reciprocal social networks that were critical for the survival of agricultural communities^2,3,4,5,6,7. At Early Neolithic (~9660–9340 cal Before Common Era, BCE) Asiab, Iran, the remains of 19 butchered wild boars (Sus scrofa, representing both males and females of varying ages) were packed neatly together and sealed in a pit inside a circular semi-subterranean building (~20 m in diameter). This building was likely used as a communal structure similar to public buildings commonly found at Early Neolithic sites in the region⁸. Although wild boars appear in animal iconography at both nearby and more distant Early Neolithic sites (e.g., Sarab, Iran⁹; Göbekli Tepe, Türkiye¹⁰), they were not the most commonly hunted animal in the region at this time11 and the exact wild boar hunting strategies that were developed in the lead up to local pig domestication remains unknown.

The faunal material in the ‘boar pit’ at Asiab (which also included a skull and a mandible of a brown bear and fragments of red deer antler) represents evidence of feasting, most likely a single event rather than multiple events spread over a longer period of time¹¹. Based on an estimate of the dressed weight of the 19 wild boars (~700 kg) and the fact that participants in the feast likely consumed more than an average daily meat intake (around 0.4–1.0 kg/person), the wild boars from the feasting pit may have provided food for 350–1200 adults¹¹. It is possible that some of the meat was preserved for later consumption. This would have required relevant expertise as airdrying meat necessitates a suitable location or facility to balance airflow, temperature, and humidity so that the meat does not dry too fast (causing the surface to harden, trap moisture, and spoil) or too slow (causing the meat to get infected by maggots). Because the faunal material appears to have been deposited rapidly in one concentrated event, it is most likely that the killing, butchering, and consumption of the animals happened as part of the same event¹¹.

Given the quantity of meat that the wild boar remains represent, the event either 1) involved a group of people that was larger than the current estimates of the number of people that inhabited Epipaleolithic or Early Neolithic settlements; or 2) a large amount of meat was used for purposes other than consumption, possibly sacrifice¹¹. Both scenarios would have necessitated a large hunting operation to realise. Although Asiab is located on the bank of a river that has long provided a natural habitat for wild boars^12,13,14, the nature and geographical scale of the hunting activities that enabled feasting and/or sacrificial activities at Asiab are unknown. The faunal assemblages from Asiab and other contemporary sites in the Zagros Mountains (including Ganj Dareh and Sheikh-e Abad) indicate that Early Neolithic inhabitants in the region employed diverse hunting strategies by focusing on species with distinct habitat requirements, such as wild goat (Capra aegagrus), aurochs (Bos primigenius), and chukar partridge (Alectoris chukar)^12,13,14. Here we focus on how these diverse hunting strategies were used to realise large-scale ceremonial feasting.

In this study, we examine the geographical scope of wild boar hunting that underpinned feasting at Early Neolithic Asiab (34°18’1.6”N; 47° 8’6.90”E). Our samples include two second molars (M2) and three third molars (M3) recovered from the Asiab ‘boar pit’. The sample size (n = 5) was limited by the number of teeth that were sufficiently preserved. For each tooth, we map microscopic enamel growth patterns visible on longitudinal sections of the sample and use this information to target high-resolution isotopic and trace element analyses. For a summary of the workflow used in this study, see Fig. 1. After sectioning (stage 1), we used established histological methods¹⁵ to reconstruct the timing of development of the wild boars’ teeth (stage 2). In stage 3, we applied the estimated duration of enamel extension (in days) and rate of enamel apposition (in µm/day) to target in-situ analysis of phosphate δ¹⁸O values in enamel secreted at ~weekly intervals and later attenuated through enamel maturation. We combined these results with analyses of in-situ ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr ratios, an assessment of the regional distribution of bedrock ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr ratios, and trace element (barium, Ba) maps of the teeth ground sections (stage 4), to assess the likelihood that all boars were hunted in close proximity to the site.

Fig. 1: Summary of the analyses carried out in this study.

For details on each stage, see ‘Methods’.

Our multi-proxy suite of analyses provides a unique opportunity to scrutinise the social role of hunting and assess the degree to which the hunting strategies may have been shaped by worldviews around landscape connections that were at the heart of the ceremonial activities at Asiab. Long-distance animal transport has been identified in later ritual contexts (e.g., at Neolithic henge monuments in Britain¹⁶), but this is the first time, to the best of our knowledge, that it has been found in pre-agricultural contexts. The approach of using tooth-specific developmental landmarks to guide high-resolution geochemical analyses provides an improvement over the more commonly used method of hand-drilling tooth enamel powder in ~1 mm intervals^17,18,19, which provides averaged and attenuated values of dietary inputs. A central aim of this research is to make the methodology reproducible, and we provide extensive documentation in the ‘Methods’ section, in Supplementary files, and in materials deposited to an online repository to enable others to reproduce every step of the process.
Fig. 3: Contour map estimating the distribution of ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr ratios in southwestern Asia.

a Regional ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr ratios were estimated using data from the Georoc database³⁷ and measurements of modern plants from Ali Kosh²⁹ and interpolated to the wider region using the underlying lithology (following Barakat et al.⁸⁷). b Prediction error on the interpolations. In both panels, the location of Asiab is shown with a star and the locations of the 87Sr/86Sr observations underpinning the interpolation are shown in points. Rock measurements from the Georoc database are shown as circles; plant measurements from around Ali Kosh are shown as squares.

Vaiglova, Petra; Kierdorf, Horst; Witzel, Carsten; Falster, Georgina; Joannes-Boyau, Renaud; Wang, Yue; Wu, Jiade; Williams, Ian; Knowles, Brett; Wu, Yang; Bangsgaard, Pernille; Yeomans, Lisa; Richter, Tobias; Darabi, Hojjat
Transport of animals underpinned ritual feasting at the onset of the Neolithic in southwestern Asia
Communications Earth & Environment 6(1) DOI: 10.1038/s43247-025-02501-z

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)

Findings like this present a deep and recurring challenge to creationist narratives, particularly those that rely on a literal interpretation of the biblical timeline. According to young Earth creationists, the world is around 6,000 years old and experienced a global flood approximately 4,300 years ago—one so catastrophic it allegedly wiped out all terrestrial life and reshaped the Earth’s surface. Yet the archaeological record stubbornly refuses to cooperate with this tale.

The remains at Asiab, including the preserved teeth of wild boar and other materials, date back more than 10,000 years—well before the supposed creation date of the planet. This alone flatly contradicts the young Earth timeline. But the real problem for the flood narrative is the complete absence of any evidence of a massive, all-encompassing deluge. If such a flood had occurred, it would have left a uniform, distinctive layer of silt, mud, and debris across every archaeological site on Earth—especially in places like Asiab, where delicate evidence has remained undisturbed for millennia. No such flood layer exists here or at thousands of other ancient sites.

This is not an isolated case. Archaeologists and palaeoenvironmental scientists routinely uncover sites with continuous layers of occupation and undisturbed soil stratigraphy stretching back tens of thousands of years, with no sign of a global catastrophe. From the painted caves of France to the tool scatters of Africa to the feasting remains of ancient Iran, the story told by the Earth itself is one of continuity, change, and deep time—not sudden obliteration and divine reset.

What makes the Asiab discovery particularly powerful is that it doesn’t just contradict creationist timelines—it highlights a rich and complex human story that spans thousands of years and connects people through culture, ritual, and mobility. The idea that such a history could have occurred within a tiny window of time arbitrarily defined by ancient mythology doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. Instead, science offers a coherent, testable, and compelling account of our past—one that gets stronger with every new find.

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