Rosa Rubicondior: Refuting Creationism - Evidence From Ancient China Buries the Bible Creation and Genocidal Flood Myths

Weisskopf, A., et al; (2015) (CC BY 4.0)

Ancient DNA reveals the population interactions and a Neolithic patrilineal community in Northern Yangtze Region | Nature Communications

The bad news for creationists continues unabated - because science continues unabated to reveal the truth.

Creationists like to insist that the Bible’s tales of creation and Noah’s flood are real history, not myth. But once again, science has delivered a devastating blow to that fantasy. A new open access paper in Nature Communications reports the DNA of 58 individuals from the Baligang archaeological site in central China, spanning from the Middle Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age (6,500 BP - 2,500 BP). Far from supporting the idea of a world repopulated just a few thousand years ago by Noah’s family, the evidence shows continuous human settlement, migration, and cultural development stretching back thousands of years before, during and after the supposed date of the Biblical flood - about 4,000 years BP.

The genetics reveal a population that was anything but “reset.” Northern and southern East Asian groups repeatedly mixed at Baligang, leaving detectable signatures of long-term population movement and exchange. Around 4,200 years ago, southern ancestry became especially prominent, signalling migration into the region. Burial evidence adds further depth: the males were closely related along the paternal line, while the females carried diverse maternal lineages—clear evidence of patrilineal clans drawing in women from outside communities. This is a picture of a complex, interconnected society developing steadily over time.

The Baligang Archaeological Site.

Weisskopf, A., et al; (2015) (CC BY 4.0)

Location: Baligang is situated near Dengzhou City, in Henan Province, central China, on the northern edge of the Middle Yangtze River basin. This area lies at the transition between northern and southern cultural zones of Neolithic China, making it a crucial site for studying population interaction.
Excavation history: The site was first discovered in the 1970s and has been systematically excavated since the 1990s by Chinese archaeologists. It contains a long sequence of human occupation layers stretching from the Early Neolithic (~7000 years ago) through to the Bronze Age (~2500 years ago).
Cultural significance: Baligang sits at a crossroads between the northern millet-farming cultures (such as Yangshao and Longshan) and the southern rice-farming traditions of the Yangtze. Archaeologists regard it as a key site for understanding how agricultural systems, technologies, and populations spread and blended across China.
Material culture: Excavations have revealed evidence of both millet and rice cultivation, suggesting Baligang was one of the earliest centres of mixed farming in East Asia. Pottery, tools, burials, and settlement remains indicate a relatively complex community life over successive cultural phases.
Burial grounds: The site includes cemeteries with well-preserved human remains, which is why it is so valuable for ancient DNA research. The arrangement of burials provides insights into kinship and social organisation (e.g., patrilineal lineages and exogamous marriage practices as highlighted in the new study).
Research importance: Baligang provides one of the most continuous archaeological sequences in central China, documenting cultural transitions over thousands of years. This makes it a natural laboratory for archaeogenetics, since it offers both long-term continuity and evidence of contact with multiple cultural and genetic groups.

Now compare that with the Bible’s narrative. According to creationists, the Flood wiped out all humans except Noah’s family, who then repopulated the world. Within just a few centuries, this handful of survivors would supposedly have generated all the peoples, languages, and civilisations we know today. Yet the DNA at Baligang tells us otherwise. It shows multiple ancestries persisting and blending across millennia, not springing from a single bottleneck. It shows stable kinship systems and social complexity that simply could not have arisen in the tiny time window biblical literalism allows.

This is not an isolated finding—it’s one more thread in the vast and consistent tapestry of evidence from archaeology, genetics, geology, and anthropology that utterly refutes the idea of a recent global flood or a young Earth. Creationists can only cling to their beliefs by ignoring or distorting this mountain of data. The truth is written in our DNA, and it tells a story of deep time, gradual change, and human history far richer—and far older—than anything imagined by Bronze Age scribes.

Ancient DNA reveals the population interactions and a Neolithic patrilineal community in Northern Yangtze Region
Tingyu Yang, Jianing He, Chunmei Li, Chao Ning, Tianming Zhang, Jincheng Wang, Hai Zhang, Guanbo Wang, Xiaowen Jia, Chi Zhang, Shi Yan, Xiannian Zhang, Fan Wu, Chaodong Wu, Xiaohong Wu, Yuhong Pang & Yanyi Huang

Abstract
The scarcity of ancient genomes of early rice cultivators has hindered our understanding of their genetic profiles and dynamic interactions with millet cultivators. In this study, we analyzed 58 ancient genomes from Baligang, a long-term settlement situated on the northern rim of the Middle Yangtze River Basin, spanning from the Middle Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age. This chronostratified genetic dataset offers comprehensive genomic insights into populations engaged in early rice cultivation, enhancing our understanding of East Asian demographic history. Our study revealed that Baligang experienced successive waves of admixture over time, with ~4,200 BP as a critical transition point, marked by a significant genomic influx of southern East Asian populations. We also identify the detailed kinship relations within multi-generational secondary burial and the existence of patrilineal communities dating back five millennia, offering fresh perspectives on early social structure in prehistoric China.

Introduction
In East Asia, the Yangtze River Basin in the south and Yellow River Basin in the north served as two primary loci of population expansion in the Holocene^1,2,3. Their distinct geographic, climatic, and land conditions led to divergent agricultural practices, cultural development, and demographic transition throughout prehistoric and historical periods^4,5.

In the north, the Neolithic Yangshao (YS, ~7000–5000 years before present (BP)) and Longshan (LS, ~4500–3800 BP) cultures, based on millet agriculture, maintained a long-standing and influential presence in the middle Yellow River Basin^6,7,8,9,10 (Fig. 1a). In contrast, in the south, societal complexity developed alongside rice cultivation, following the crop’s domestication in the middle and lower Yangtze River Basin and its subsequent establishment as a staple^3,11. Two main cultures emerged in this region —Qujialing (QJL, ~4900–4500 BP), and Shijiahe (SJH, ~4500–4200 BP), which also left a profound influence on the genesis of social structure, evidenced by large-scale religious ceremonies and meticulously organized cities, from the Qujialing cultural period onward^12,13 (Fig. 1a). Previous research has indicated a pattern of ongoing interaction and overlapping territories in the region bridging the Yellow River and Yangtze River, where cultural transformations were closely entwined with agricultural development^10,14. However, the details of population interplay remain largely uncharted since no ancient human genome has been obtained from the Yangtze River region so far.

Fig. 1: Geographic placement and chronology of Baligang subjects.

a The locations of the Baligang (BLG) site and previously published individuals. The map also highlights the primary regions where Yangshao (YS), Longshan (LS), and Shijiahe (SJH)/Qujialing (QJL) cultures predominated. The base map was obtained from the Word Terrain Base domain map dataset (https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=c61ad8ab017d49e1a82f580ee1298931) and created with ArcGIS pro v3.0. Sources: Esri, USGS, NOAA. b Geographical setting of Baligang and its surrounding areas, including the regions flanking the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, as well as the significant rivers that connected Baligang to the Yangtze River. The basemap was plotted using the open-source data “SRTMDEM 90-meter resolution original elevation data”, The data set is provided by Geospatial Data Cloud site, Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences. (http://www.gscloud.cn). c The current satellite image of the Baligang area, situated on the southern bank of the Tuan River, a tributary of the Han River. The map is provided by National platform for common geospatial information services (https://www.tianditu.gov.cn). d The principal architectural features of excavated Baligang ancient dwellings, portrayed on a map that includes four sedimentary layers: one from the Middle Neolithic (MN), two from the Late Neolithic (LN) period, and one from the Late Bronze Age (LBA). The map also marks the sample names and locations of each thoroughly sequenced individual, with explicitly identified biological sex information. The radiocarbon dating of Baligang individuals sampled in this study is displayed in chronological order, supplemented by representative cultural artifacts, significant climate indicators (oxygen levels, temperature, precipitation)³⁹, and the distribution and size of agricultural types (the pie chart size corresponds to the number of unearthed crop remains)¹⁷.

In this paper, we focus on Baligang (Fig. 1a–c), a Neolithic-Bronze Age archaeological site spanning approximately 8500 to 2500 BP, located on the northern edge of the middle Yangtze River Basin. This region marks an intermediate zone between the Yellow River and Yangtze River Basin^5,15,16,17. Stratified archaeological evidence suggests that Baligang underwent alternating transitions influenced by both northern and southern cultures^5,17. Baligang provides an ideal context for broadening our understanding of Neolithic East Asia for several reasons. Firstly, Baligang provides a unique opportunity for extracting genomic components associated with ancient rice cultivators of the Yangtze River Basin. Secondly, as a continuous human settlement since the Middle Neolithic, Baligang allows us to explore the dynamic interplay between population movements, cultural transitions, and agricultural dispersal over time. Furthermore, the site features several large-scale secondary burials dated to the late Yangshao cultural period (~5000 BP), where the remains of all individuals were exhumed from their primary graves and reburied collectively. The motives and social organization underlying this widespread burial practice of the period remain to be explored through archaeogenomic approaches. Moreover, given the relative sparsity of studies on ancient kinship structure in East Asia¹⁸, genetic kinship analysis of the secondary burials containing multiple generations of individuals at the Baligang site^15,19,20,21, may provide valuable insights into the Neolithic social organization in the region.

In our study, we elucidate population dynamics through the genomic analysis of 58 ancient individuals from the Baligang population, spanning from the Middle Neolithic to Late Bronze Age. The analyzed individuals display multiple cultural affiliations associated with both Yellow River societies in northern East Asia and Yangtze River societies in southern East Asia. Our findings demonstrate how the Early Neolithic East Asian populations contributed to the Baligang gene pool, revealing sustained bidirectional gene flow between northern and southern ancestral components throughout this extended temporal framework. These genetic interactions likely facilitated the concurrent transmission of agricultural practices and material cultures across regions. Furthermore, we provide kinship information for large-scale secondary burial practices and the existence of a patrilineal social structure in East Asia dating back to approximately five thousand years ago.

Yang, T., He, J., Li, C. et al.
Ancient DNA reveals the population interactions and a Neolithic patrilineal community in Northern Yangtze Region.
Nat Commun 16, 8728 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-63743-1

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)

The Baligang study is just one more piece in the vast mosaic of archaeogenetics, but it is a particularly striking one. From a single site in central China, we now have a continuous record of human occupation, ancestry shifts, and social organisation stretching over four thousand years. The picture it paints is one of deep time, continuity, and gradual change—precisely the opposite of the sudden, catastrophic “reset” that biblical literalists claim happened a few thousand years ago.

Creationists are left with an uncomfortable choice. They can either ignore this evidence altogether, pretending it doesn’t exist, or attempt to contort it into their narrative by dismissing the science, attacking the researchers, or invoking miracles. But what they cannot do is provide a coherent, evidence-based explanation for why a supposed global flood left no genetic bottleneck, no archaeological break, and no sign of universal cultural collapse in sites like Baligang. Instead, we see stability, migration, and cultural flourishing, uninterrupted by the fantasy of a worldwide deluge.

In this way, the Baligang DNA fits seamlessly with all the other lines of evidence from geology, palaeontology, archaeology, linguistics, and genetics: the Earth is old, humanity has a long and tangled history, and the Bible’s flood tale is myth, not history. The more we uncover, the clearer it becomes that creationism is not a rival explanation but a denial of reality. For those willing to face the facts, the message is unmistakable: our past is written not in scripture but in the soil, the stones, and the DNA of our ancestors.

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