Figure 3. View facing west over the surface of the deposits in the main chamber at the start of the current fieldwork, showing the paint markings made by Mr Redshaw.
Photo by Martin Stables.
A good thousand years before creationism’s god allegedly created the first two humans, the body of a young girl was being buried in a cave in Cumbria, northern England.
This unwelcome news for creationists comes from an international team led by archaeologists at the University of Lancashire, who have just published their findings in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society.
The girl’s remains were discovered about three years ago in Heaning Wood Bone Cave by local archaeologist Martin Stables, from the nearby village of Great Urswick. The University of Lancashire team have now succeeded in extracting enough DNA to determine that she was between about 2.5 and 3.5 years old when she died.
Jewellery in the form of a deer tooth pendant and pierced beads has been radiocarbon dated to around 11,000 years ago, strongly suggesting this was a deliberate burial. This raises the question of why the cave held such significance as a burial site. Modern hunter-gatherer groups often regard caves as gateways to a spirit world, so it is possible that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in northern Europe held similar beliefs.
The team also showed that at least eight other individuals were buried in the cave over a period spanning roughly 4,000–11,000 years ago, from the Early Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age — ironically, the latter being the period when the creation myths of the Bible were being invented. The authors of those Bronze Age stories, of course, would have known nothing whatever of hunter-gatherer societies in northern Europe, their cultural history, or their spiritual traditions.
No doubt we will see the traditional creationist misrepresentation of this evidence, with unfounded assertions that radiocarbon dating “doesn’t work” and that scientists simply make things up to conform to some notional Darwinian narrative. Making things up to fit a pre-existing story is something creationists themselves routinely do. It seems to be characteristic of those who set out to deceive that they accuse others of doing exactly what they themselves practise.
Radiocarbon Dating — Why Creationists Can’t Wish It Away. One of the most predictable creationist responses to discoveries like the Heaning Wood burial is to claim that radiocarbon dating “doesn’t work”, or that archaeologists simply invent dates to fit a preconceived evolutionary story. This objection fails for several reasons.The discovery and background to the paper are described in a University of Lancashire news release.
Radiocarbon dating is not guesswork, nor is it based on circular reasoning. It is a direct measurement of a physical process: the radioactive decay of carbon-14 (14C), an unstable isotope continuously produced in Earth’s upper atmosphere by cosmic rays. Living organisms absorb carbon from their environment, including a small proportion of 14C. Once an organism dies, it stops taking in carbon, and the 14C already present begins to decay at a known and measurable rate.
The decay follows an exponential curve with a half-life of about 5,730 years, meaning that after this time, half of the original 14C has disappeared. By measuring how much remains in organic material such as bone collagen, charcoal, wood, or plant fibres, scientists can calculate how long ago the organism died.
Radiocarbon dating is not used in isolation. Archaeological dates are routinely cross-checked against multiple independent lines of evidence, including:In fact, radiocarbon dates are corrected using internationally agreed calibration curves based on tree rings, corals, lake sediments, and ice cores — not on anyone’s preferred narrative.
- Stratigraphy (the geological layering of deposits)
- Artefact typology (styles of tools and ornaments known from other sites)
- Other radiometric methods (such as uranium-series dating)
- Dendrochronology (tree-ring chronologies), which provides exact calibration for the last ~14,000 years
Because of the relatively short half-life, radiocarbon dating is very accurate over a few thousand years but the degree of uncertainty in the result increases with age. For this reason, it ceases to be useful beyond about 50,000 years. It is never used for dating fossils in which any organic carbon will have been replaced by minerals.
Creationists often claim that carbon dating gives “wrong” results because of contamination or assumptions. In reality, contamination is well understood and laboratories apply rigorous chemical pretreatment and quality controls. Radiocarbon dating is one of the most thoroughly tested and independently verified techniques in science.
Most importantly, radiocarbon dating does not stand alone: it fits consistently into the broader framework of archaeology, geology, genetics, and palaeoclimate evidence. The burial of a child in northern England 11,000 years ago is not an isolated anomaly — it is part of an immense, globally consistent record of deep human history that simply does not fit within a Bronze Age creation myth.
DNA analysis reveals Northern Britain’s oldest human remains are of a young female child
University of Lancashire archaeologists discover more about identity of 11,000 year-old ‘oldest northerner’
The oldest human remains ever found in Northern Britain have been identified as a young female three years after being discovered in a Cumbrian cave.
Excavated at Heaning Wood Bone Cave in Cumbria’s Great Urswick by local archaeologist Martin Stables, the 11,000-year-old bones provided clear evidence of Mesolithic burials in the North.
Now, an international team led by archaeologists at the University of Lancashire were able to extract enough DNA from the bones to identify the remains as a female child aged between 2.5 and 3.5-years-old.
It is the first time we have been able to be so specific about the age of a child whose remains are so old and be certain that they are from a female.
Dr Rick Peterson, co-author
University of Lancashire, Preston, Lancashire, UK.
The team has also determined that these remains are the third oldest Mesolithic burial in North West Europe and present some of the earliest dates for human activity in Britain after the end of the last Ice Age. Jewellery discovered at the same site more recently includes a perforated deer tooth and more beads that have been carbon dated to 11,000 years-old.
Dating the jewellery to the same time frame as the remains provides more evidence that this was a deliberate burial and opens up conversations about the significance of cave burials during this period. Modern hunter-gatherer groups often see caves as a gateway into the spirit world, and this may be why we see so many caves used for burial by Early Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in northern Europe.
Dr Rick Peterson.
Local archaeologist Martin Stables carried out the excavations at the site and being from Great Urswick himself, he was keen the Mesolithic girls remains were named to bind her and her resting place together forever. Hence naming her the ‘Ossick Lass’, which in the local vernacular simply means Urswick girl.
Martin is entirely self-taught as an archaeologist, driven by his desire to know more about the prehistoric past of the village.
It’s nearly 10 years since I started the excavations in July 2016 and I couldn’t have envisaged the journey I have undertaken. It’s as if I’ve went back in time to 9,000 BC. In doing so I travelled through the Bronze and Neolithic Ages, discovering some of those that lived then and what they left behind. Ultimately, reaching the Mesolithic Period has obviously become the highlight of the excavation and something that’s particularly poignant to myself. Effectively, I was the first to bear witness to the obviously caring burial of someone’s child that occurred over 11,000 years ago.
The publication of this research paper is an important stage, that in due course, allows us to reveal further information about this unique site of national importance. My journey continues, but in the present as this is just the beginning and there is much more we plan to tell.
Martin stables, co-author
Local archaeologist.
Earlier human remains are known from southern England and from Wales, but the destructive effect of past glaciations means that such finds are rare in northern Britain. Before this discovery, the ‘earliest northerner’ was a 10,000-years-old burial from the nearby Kent’s Bank Cavern discovered in 2013.
Alongside the 11,000 year-old remains, the University team proved that at least eight different people were buried in the cave with evidence showing they were all deliberate burials. All are from three different dates in the prehistoric past; around 4,000-years-ago in the Early Bronze Age; approximately 5,500-years-ago in the Early Neolithic; and around 11,000-years-ago during the very early part of the Mesolithic period.
Publication:
Discoveries like this are quietly devastating for creationism, not because they are sensational, but because they are so ordinary within the real human past. An 11,000-year-old child burial in northern England is not an anomaly requiring special pleading — it is exactly what we expect to find once we accept that human history stretches back through deep time, far beyond the narrow horizons of Bronze Age myth-making.
What emerges from sites like Heaning Wood Bone Cave is a picture of people who were already fully human: grieving, commemorating, and investing meaning in death. These were not characters in a theological fable, but real communities living at the end of the last Ice Age, leaving behind traces that can be measured, dated, and placed into a coherent archaeological and genetic framework. The past does not rearrange itself to suit modern religious apologetics.
Creationists will continue to dismiss radiocarbon dating, archaeology, genetics, and geology as parts of some imagined conspiracy, but the problem for them is that all these independent strands of evidence converge on the same conclusion. The world is not a few thousand years old, humanity did not begin in a Mesopotamian garden, and the deep cultural history of Europe was unfolding long before the biblical authors began inventing origin myths to explain the universe as they understood it.
The bones in a Cumbrian cave are not “Darwinism”. They are not ideology. They are not bias. They are simply reality — and reality, as always, remains stubbornly indifferent to creationist requirements
Creationism demands a recent past — but the past, inconveniently, refuses to cooperate.
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