Stages of Burning on Bones – white (#5 on right) is the most burnt while yellow-beige (on left #1) is unburnt
Credit: Wonderwerk Cave Project.
A recent paper in PLOS ONE, by an international team including Dr Liora Kolska Horwitz of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reminded me of a quote by Francis Collins, former director of the Human Genome Project and founder and president of The BioLogos Foundation, which aims to reconcile Christian theology with science. It also reminded me how Young Earth Creationists traditionally cope with information that refutes their beliefs. The paper reports evidence for the use of fire in a South African cave by early hominins between 1.07 million and 1.79 million years ago — a fact entirely inconsistent with Young Earth Creationism (YEC).
This image of God as a cosmic trickster seems to be the ultimate admission of defeat for the Creationist perspective. Would God as the great deceiver be an entity one would want to worship? Is this consistent with everything else we know about God from the Bible, from the Moral Law, and from every other source—namely, that He is loving, logical, and consistent?
Thus, by any reasonable standard, Young Earth Creationism has reached a point of intellectual bankruptcy, both in its science and in its theology. Its persistence is thus one of the great puzzles and great tragedies of our time.
Francis Collins - The Language of God
In this quote from The Language of God, Francis Collins is referring to those Young Earth Creationists who dismiss the palaeontological, archaeological and cosmological evidence for life evolving on an old Earth in an even older Universe, as evidence deliberately created by God to test the faith of believers. Creationists also routinely dismiss this sort of evidence either by accusing scientists of faking it, or by attributing it to the work of Satan.
All of these are, of course, variations on conspiracy thinking — more understandable in a teleologically thinking toddler than in an adult. When it persists into adulthood, it is consistent with the findings of a psychology research paper which found that creationism and conspiracism share a common teleological bias: the tendency to explain events and natural phenomena as though they exist for a purpose, or are directed towards some hidden end. It is therefore no surprise that creationism so often depends on conspiracism. The surprise is that there are still so many people, especially in parts of the USA, who try to understand the world around them using a cognitive habit most children eventually learn to leave behind.
Teleological thinking. Explaining something in terms of its supposed purpose, goal, or intended end-point, rather than in terms of the processes that caused it.
In biology, for example, it is teleological to say, “birds evolved wings in order to fly.” A more accurate evolutionary phrasing would be: “wings evolved because variations that improved gliding or flight gave some individuals a reproductive advantage.”
In short, teleological thinking treats outcomes as though they were planned — which can lead to the false assumption that there must be a sentient agent with a plan.
So, this paper is one more piece of evidence for creationists to wave aside with their favourite conspiracy theory: these facts are not what I would like them to be, so someone must have forged them, misinterpreted them, or lied about them to try to make me change my mind.
The paper presents new evidence based on a tool developed for determining whether bone had been burned, using its light-emitting properties. When illuminated with specific wavelengths of light, bones that have been exposed to intense heat emit a distinctive glow. By combining this non-destructive luminescence technique with established chemical analyses, researchers were able to identify burned animal bones with a high degree of confidence.
The team applied the method to tiny fossil bones from owl pellets that had accumulated naturally on the cave floor. These provided an independent, non-anthropogenic source of microfaunal remains against which evidence of burning could be assessed.
The burned bones were found about 30 metres inside Wonderwerk Cave, which rules out natural bush fires reaching them from outside. The team also noted that the relevant layer lacked guano, making spontaneous combustion unlikely. However, the evidence does not show that these hominins could make fire at will. Rather, it suggests that they probably brought naturally occurring fire into the cave from the surrounding savannah and maintained it there.
The paper in PLOS ONE was accompanied by a press release from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, published through European Friends of the Hebrew University:
Ancient Fire Record Rewritten: Researchers Push Earliest Evidence of Human Fire Use Back to over a Million Years
A new study has uncovered evidence that early human ancestors were using fire in South Africa's Wonderwerk Cave between 1.07 and 1.79 million years ago, extending the chronology of one of the earliest known records of fire use associated with hominins. By applying a new method that detects traces of burning in fossil bones, researchers found signs of repeated fire use deep inside the cave, far beyond the reach of natural wildfires. The findings suggest that early humans were bringing naturally occurring fire into the cave and maintaining it there, providing new insights into how our ancestors first began to harness one of the most important tools in human history.
A new study has uncovered evidence that early human ancestors were using fire far earlier than previously confirmed, with traces of fire use dating to between 1.07 and 1.79 million years ago in South Africa's Wonderwerk Cave.
The study was part of an ongoing collaboration between Dr. Liora Kolska Horwitz of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's National Natural History Collections (co-director of the Wonderwerk Cave project with Prof Michael Chazan, University of Toronto) and an international team of researchers from Spain, Argentina, Canada, USA, South Africa, Portugal and Israel. Their research combines methods from archaeology, paleontology, geology and a range of scientific techniques to investigate one of the key developments in human evolution: the use of fire.
The current paper builds on the previous discovery of early fire at Wonderwerk Cave, located in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa, that was dated to ~1 million years ago (published by members of the team in 2012 in PNAS), that provided the oldest evidence for intentional use of fire worldwide.
Continuing research at Wonderwerk Cave has now pushed the date for early fire back further, with new evidence for traces of fire use in archaeological deposits dating between 1.07 and 1.79 million years ago, extending the chronology of one of the earliest known records of fire use associated with hominins. The findings, published in PLOS One, provide new insight into how our ancestors may have interacted with fire long before they learned to create it themselves.
Fire provided warmth, protection from predators, and light after sunset, and eventually enabled cooking. Yet determining exactly when humans first began using fire has remained one of archaeology's most challenging questions.
Evidence of fire from such ancient sites is often subtle and difficult to detect. Our study provides new tools for identifying traces of ancient burning and reveals that fire was repeatedly present deep inside Wonderwerk Cave.
Dr. Loira Kolska Horwitz, co-author.
National Natural History Collections
The Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel.
The study also introduces a new method based on the light-emitting properties of burned bone.
When illuminated with specific wavelengths of light, bones that have been exposed to intense heat emit a distinctive glow. By combining this non-destructive luminescence technique with established chemical analyses, researchers were able to identify burned animal bones with a high degree of confidence.
The method is non-invasive, portable, and can be applied to large collections of fossils without damaging them.
The new research applied this method to examine traces of burning on hundreds of tiny fossil bones left behind by owls that once roosted in the cave. Because these remains accumulated naturally on the cave floor, they provide an independent, non-anthropogenic record of ancient events.
The scientists now found clear signs of burning in an archaeological layer associated with artefacts from the initial Acheulean, likely associated with Homo erectus. Importantly, these burned remains were discovered approximately 30 meters inside the cave—far beyond the reach of natural wildfires, and in a layer lacking remains of guano which rules out spontaneous combustion.
The findings do not indicate that these early humans could create fire at will. Instead, the evidence points to the use of naturally occurring fires, such as those sparked by lightning or wildfires on the African savanna. The early humans introduced this fire into the cave on multiple occasions and maintained it there before it eventually died out. The team suggested that they may have used the owl pellets as fuel, resulting in burning of the tiny bones of rodents that were in the pellets.
Nevertheless, bringing fire into a cave and maintaining it represents a significant behavioral achievement.
These discoveries show that early humans were not simply passive observers of natural fires; they were actively engaging with fire and incorporating it into their lives.
Dr. Loira Kolska Horwitz.
Beyond extending the record of fire use, the study provides archaeologists with a new tool for investigating how and when humans first began using fire.
As researchers continue to apply this technique at archaeological sites around the world, it may help clarify the origins and development of one of the most consequential technologies in human history.
Publication:
Once again, the evidence does not merely fail to support Young Earth Creationism; it positively contradicts it. Here we have burned bones, deep inside a South African cave, associated with early hominins living more than a million years ago — hundreds of times older than the entire Universe is allowed to be in the creationist fantasy. No amount of semantic gymnastics, quote-mining, or ritualised denial can compress that evidence into a 6,000–10,000-year chronology without first abandoning any serious concern for truth.
That leaves creationists with their familiar choice: accept the evidence and revise their beliefs accordingly, as rational adults do, or invent another conspiracy theory in which scientists, Satan, or their own god has arranged the world to look exactly as though creationism is false. The first option is intellectually honest; the second is the retreat into toddler teleology, where inconvenient facts are not explained but assigned a malign purpose.
And that, as Francis Collins recognised, is the theological dead end of Young Earth Creationism. It requires believers either to deny the evidence of the real world or to imagine a god who filled that world with false trails — fossils, genomes, rocks, stars, cave deposits and now burned bones — all designed to deceive. That is not science, and it is hardly respectable theology. It is simply denial with a pious vocabulary.
Meanwhile, science carries on doing what science does: refining methods, testing evidence, correcting mistakes and building an increasingly coherent picture of our deep past. The result is not a world made for human vanity in a single magical week, but an ancient, changing planet on which human beings emerged late, gradually and naturally, from earlier forms of life. For creationism, that is not merely inconvenient; it is fatal.
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