Rosa Rubicondior: How We Know The Bible Was Wrong - Creationists Dogged by DNA And Fossil Evidence

Dogs 10,000 years ago roamed with bands of humans and came in all shapes and sizes

This is the first of two articles published in The Conversation concerning the origins of domestic dogs and the myriad different breeds that have been developed under human agency since wolves were first domesticated. Neither of them is good news for creationists for several reason.

Firstly, the DNA evidence points to a history much older that the simple tale origin tale in the Bible allows for - a history stretching back some 11,000 years or more to before creationists believe anything existed.

Secondly, and this is something that I have found creationists will always run away from - if God supposedly created all animals for the benefit of humans, why have we had to modify them to such an extent that in many cases they are scarcely recognisable from their wild ancestors? Did God not know what we would use them for or what designs would be best suited for different purposes?

The answer of course, is that the Bible stories are just that - stories. They were never intended to be written down and bound together in a book later declared, by people with a personal stake who needed a spurious 'God-given' authority to take control of society, to be the inerrant word of a creator god and therefore definitive history and science textbooks. Their complete misalignment with observable reality should be more than a clue that the latter is wrong.

This article by two of the authors involved in the first study - Carly Ameen, a lecturer in Bioarchaeology, University of Exeter and Allowen Evin, CNRS Research Director, Bioarchaeology, Université de Montpellier. Together with a large group of colleagues they have just published their study in Science. Their article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Published: November 13, 2025 6.56pm GMT

It’s a myth that the Victorians created modern dog breeds – we’ve uncovered their prehistoric roots

cynoclub/Shutterstock

Carly Ameen, University of Exeter and Allowen Evin, Université de Montpellier Domestic dogs are among the most diverse mammals on the planet. From the tiny chihuahua to the towering great dane, the flat-faced pug to the long-muzzled borzoi, the sheer range of canine shapes and sizes is staggering.

We often attribute this diversity to a relatively recent phenomenon: the Victorian kennel clubs that first emerged around 200 years ago. These clubs are usually credited with formalising the selective breeding that created the hundreds of modern breeds we recognise today.

But our new research, published in Science, shows that this is only the latest chapter in a much older story. Dogs were already remarkably diverse in their skull size and shape more than 10,000 years ago, long before kennel clubs and pedigrees.

This discovery challenges the idea that directed breeding alone created the physical variety we see in dogs today. Instead, our research found that early dogs had already evolved an extraordinary range of forms soon after domestication – a diversity that has been continually shaped by thousands of years of shared history with humans.

Looking for the first dogs

For decades, archaeologists and geneticists have been trying to answer a deceptively simple question: when did wolves become dogs?

The history of human interaction with wolves is a long one, stretching into the last ice age, perhaps even as far back as 30,000 years ago. But the exact timing of dog domestication is uncertain. What makes dogs particularly special is that they were the first species humans domesticated – well before any plant or livestock. Yet despite decades of research, the first dogs continue to elude us.

Part of the challenge is the similarity between wolves and dogs. Even today, some modern dog breeds closely resemble wolves. This makes tracking their domestication in the archaeological record particularly difficult. By using a technique called geometric morphometrics – a way to map and measure shape variation in three dimensions – we could track subtle changes in shape over time from 3D models of the archaeological skulls.

We analysed 643 skulls of ancient and modern dogs and wolves, spanning 50,000 years from sites mainly across the northern hemisphere to track the emergence and diversification of domestic dogs across time and space.

What we found was striking: the earliest skulls with clearly domestic skull shapes in our dataset date to around 11,000 years ago, from the Mesolithic site of Veretye in Russia.

By this point, dogs had not only diverged in terms of skull shape from wolves but had begun to diversify among themselves. These early dogs were not all alike, but instead exhibited skulls of different sizes and shapes, probably reflecting the influence of local environments, population histories and human preferences.

In fact, some early dogs exhibit skull forms not found in any modern breeds, hinting at lineages and morphologies that may have since vanished. While we don’t see some of the most extreme forms of skull shape that we see today (such as pugs or bull terriers), the variation we see by the Mesolithic is already half the total amount of variation we see in modern breeds.

Photograph of an archaeological canid skull (top) and a modern dog skull (bottom).

C. Ameen, CC BY-SA

This echoes genetic studies that reveal deep splits among early dog populations. By the Neolithic (around 8,000–5,000 years ago), dogs had already formed regionally distinct lineages across Europe, the Near East and Asia. Some of these lineages survive in modern breeds, while others appear to have gone extinct, possibly replaced or diluted through interbreeding and human movements.

Uneven domestication

Our findings complement a growing body of genetic and archaeological evidence suggesting that the domestication of dogs was a protracted and regionally varied process. Ancient DNA research has shown that major dog lineages were already distinct by 11,000 years ago, implying that the domestication process began much earlier.

The exact timing is still debated, with some research pointing to close human-canid relationship from over 30,000 years ago. However, our study found no domesticated dogs among the 17 Late Pleistocene (126,000 to 11,700 years ago) skulls we examined, suggesting it may not reach that far back. Of course, the earliest dogs had to closely resemble wolves, and it’s possible that early dogs retained wolf-like skulls for generations, but for how long remains unknown.

There is still much we don’t know. To deepen our understanding, we need more specimens from the critical window between 25,000 and 11,000 years ago, particularly in underrepresented regions like central and south-west Asia. What this work has revealed, or perhaps reinforced, is the much older story of evolution between humans and dogs that began soon after domestication itself.

Ultimately, dogs are a mirror of human history. Their story is intertwined with ours, shaped by shared migrations, changing environments and evolving societies. As the first domesticated species – and still our most enduring companion – dogs offer a unique window into how humans have shaped the natural world and how the natural world has shaped us in return.

Carly Ameen, Lecturer in Bioarchaeology, University of Exeter and Allowen Evin, CNRS Research Director, Bioarchaeology, Université de Montpellier

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
Dogs exhibit an exceptional range of morphological diversity as a result of their long-term association with humans. Attempts to identify when dog morphological variation began to expand have been constrained by the limited number of Pleistocene specimens, the fragmentary nature of remains, and difficulties in distinguishing early dogs from wolves on the basis of skeletal morphology. In this study, we used three-dimensional geometric morphometrics to analyze the size and shape of 643 canid crania spanning the past 50,000 years. Our analyses show that a distinctive dog morphology first appeared at about 11,000 calibrated years before present, and substantial phenotypic diversity already existed in early Holocene dogs. Thus, this variation emerged many millennia before the intense human-mediated selection shaping modern dog breeds beginning in the 19th century.

Allowen Evin et al.
The emergence and diversification of dog morphology. Science 390,741-744 (2025). DOI:10.1126/science.adt0995

The findings discussed in this article demolish the familiar creationist narrative that animals were created fully formed “for mankind” and have remained essentially unchanged since. Far from being recent inventions of Victorian breeders, the deep genetic and morphological variety seen in dogs today stretches back tens of thousands of years, long before agriculture, the Bible, or any notion of “created kinds”. This ancient diversity shows that domestic dogs were shaped gradually through prolonged interaction with humans, not delivered as a ready-made toolkit by a divine designer.

This extended timescale alone is fatal to the biblical chronology, which allows only a few thousand years for the origin of all modern species—and only a few millennia since the supposed bottleneck of the Flood. Compressing the emergence of wolves, coyotes, jackals, dingoes and hundreds of dog breeds into this narrow window is biologically impossible. The sheer number of generations, mutations and selective steps required leaves no room for a literal Genesis timeline. Victorian breed formation worked only because it built on thousands of years of prior evolution—something the biblical story simply cannot accommodate.

Worse for creationism, the fact that humans have had to reshape animals so extensively highlights another flaw in the notion of a perfect creator. If dogs and other domestic animals were made expressly for human use, their initial forms ought to have been fit for purpose; instead, we see creatures that needed millennia of selective breeding to become useful in the ways we value today. Rather than a world populated with final, flawless designs, the evidence points to an ongoing, incremental process of adaptation—often driven not by divine intention but by human culture and necessity. This evolutionary history stands sharply at odds with the static, compressed and human-centred account offered in the Bible.

By comparing the claims about the natural world made in the Bible with the realities of the natural world, we can see how hopelessly wrong the Bible is about almost everything. It is not metaphorical or allegorical; it is wrong. Nothing that far out of line with reality could possibly be regarded as the work of an inerrant creator god unless that god wanted to mislead us. It is, of course, the work of ignorant parochial people making up stories to try to understand the world around them, stories based on cultural preconceptions and superstitions, not on the meticulous observations on which science depends.

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