Carving stone at Shimao city.
Image by IVPP.
The landscape of Shimao city.
Image by IVPP.
In my last blog post, I pointed out that ancient Egypt’s archaeological and written record extends continuously from long before the date young-Earth creationists assign to Noah’s Flood, through that supposed catastrophe and into biblical times. Nowhere is there any sign that Egypt was destroyed by a global flood and subsequently repopulated by migrants from Mesopotamia. I also showed that the biblical writers who set stories in Egypt possessed only a tenuous understanding of its real history and culture.
Ancient China presents creationists with much the same problem. Its archaeological record contains long regional sequences extending across the supposed date of the Flood, with local populations, cultures and economies continuing to develop. If every human outside Noah’s immediate family had been exterminated, the existing peoples of East Asia should disappear from the record and be replaced by a rapidly expanding population of recent Mesopotamian origin. That is not what archaeology shows—and ancient DNA now provides an especially clear test of the claim.
The evidence comes from a paper published in Nature in November 2025 by an international team led by Professor Qiaomei Fu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with researchers from several other Chinese institutions.
The team analysed genome-wide data from 169 ancient individuals recovered from Shimao and surrounding settlements in northern China. Population analyses were conducted using 144 unrelated individuals, while the remaining close relatives enabled the researchers to reconstruct pedigrees extending across as many as four generations.
Shimao, in northern Shaanxi Province, was one of the largest fortified settlements in Late Neolithic China. Occupied from approximately 2300 to 1800 BCE, it covered about four square kilometres and contained massive stone walls, separate inner and outer enclosures, specialised craft production, elite cemeteries and unmistakable evidence of a highly stratified society. Its occupation therefore began at about the very time when, according to the conventional young-Earth creationist chronology, the world should have been struggling to recover from a global extermination and repopulation by Noah’s immediate descendants.
Instead, the genomes showed that the people associated with Shimao were predominantly descended from populations already living in northern Shaanxi at least 1,000 years earlier. Those earlier inhabitants were associated with the Yangshao cultural tradition of the Yellow River’s Loess Plateau. The researchers found regional genetic continuity from the Middle to the Late Neolithic—continuity extending from before the supposed Flood into the centuries following it.
This was not a completely isolated or genetically static population. The researchers detected continuing contact with Yumin-related people from Inner Mongolia, close connections with the contemporary Taosi population farther south, and some ancestry from southern East Asian populations, possibly associated with the northward spread of rice cultivation. These were the ordinary movements, exchanges and intermarriages expected among neighbouring prehistoric farming and pastoral communities. They did not interrupt the dominant local ancestry, and there was no sign of wholesale population replacement by descendants of a family recently arrived from Mesopotamia.
The genetic evidence also revealed much about the organisation of Shimao society. Pedigrees reconstructed from elite burials indicated a predominantly patrilineal system in which status and wealth commonly passed from high-ranking men to their sons. Male members of these lineages showed relatively little diversity in their Y-chromosome ancestry, whereas the women displayed much greater mitochondrial diversity. This is consistent with women frequently marrying into communities dominated by established male lineages, although the evidence for strictly patrilocal residence remains suggestive rather than conclusive.
The study also uncovered a possible sex-related pattern in Shimao’s practice of human sacrifice. Nine of the ten sampled victims buried beneath the East Gate were male, contradicting earlier identifications based on skeletal anatomy. In contrast, most sampled sacrificial victims accompanying elite burials were female: six of seven at Hanjiagedan and fourteen of nineteen at Huangchengtai. This suggests that male and female victims may have been selected for different rituals conducted in different places, although the researchers caution that the number of genetically sexed victims remains too small to establish the pattern conclusively.
The archaeological evidence that Noah’s Flood never happened.The research and its implications are summarised in a news item from the Chinese Academy of Sciences:
According to the chronology traditionally associated with young-Earth creationism, Noah’s Flood occurred in about 2348 BCE. If a year-long global flood had then exterminated every human except eight members of one Mesopotamian family, archaeology should reveal a correspondingly global and simultaneous discontinuity.
We should find settlements throughout the world abandoned or destroyed at approximately the same time; mass graves and widespread human and animal mortality; catastrophic erosion or water-laid deposits; the disappearance of established populations and cultures; and their replacement by small founding populations carrying traditions derived from Mesopotamia.
Nothing resembling that appears in the archaeological record. Instead, different populations continued living in different parts of the world, developing their own cultures through the supposed catastrophe:
- Mesopotamia: The region in which the biblical story originated contains abundant evidence of ordinary river flooding—but not of a global flood. Excavators found substantial water-laid deposits at Ur, Kish and Shuruppak, but they do not all date to the same event. The deposit at Ur dates to at least 3500 BCE, while deposits at Kish and Shuruppak are generally associated with flooding around 3000 BCE. Meanwhile, other Mesopotamian cities continued to be occupied, build temples, conduct trade and produce administrative texts throughout the third millennium BCE. These local disasters may have helped inspire Mesopotamian flood legends, but they cannot establish a simultaneous worldwide event.
- The Indus civilisation: The Mature Harappan civilisation flourished from approximately 2600 to 1900 BCE, spanning the supposed date of the Flood. Its cities retained their characteristic street plans, drainage systems, standardised bricks, weights, pottery, seals, crafts and trading networks. Dholavira was occupied for about 1,500 years, from approximately 3000 to 1500 BCE, and its excavated sequence records the settlement’s growth, urban development and eventual decline—not destruction and repopulation by migrants from Mesopotamia.
- The Iranian Plateau: Sites such as Tepe Hissar preserve occupation and ceramic traditions extending from the Chalcolithic into the Bronze Age, across the supposed Flood date. Ancient DNA likewise shows that ancestry derived from earlier Iranian populations remained a major component of later inhabitants. There was migration and admixture, as there normally is, but no universal population extinction followed by descent from Noah’s family.
- The Central Andes: Caral-Supe in present-day Peru developed between approximately 3000 and 1800 BCE. Its platform mounds, sunken courts and urban organisation were constructed and remodelled over centuries, including the period in which the rest of humanity was supposedly being exterminated. There is neither a destruction horizon at about 2350 BCE nor any sign that the region was subsequently colonised by people arriving from the Middle East.
- Japan: The long Jōmon archaeological sequence extends across many millennia, including the supposed Flood. Its regional pottery traditions, settlements and subsistence practices continued to develop without a sudden break in the third millennium BCE. Archaeological and genetic evidence identifies the Jōmon as a deeply rooted East Asian population, not the recently arrived descendants of a Mesopotamian family.
Where is the worldwide layer of flood sediment?
A global flood would not necessarily deposit an identical layer of fine silt at every location. Fast-moving water erodes sediment in some places and deposits clay, sand, gravel, boulders and biological remains in others. Nevertheless, a catastrophe covering every continent should leave an unmistakable, approximately simultaneous horizon of erosion, deposition, destruction and ecological disruption at archaeological sites throughout the world.
No such horizon exists. Archaeologists certainly find flood deposits, especially in river valleys, but they are local, vary greatly in composition and date, and are interspersed with uninterrupted occupation elsewhere. A flood layer beside the Euphrates is evidence that the Euphrates flooded, just as a flood deposit beside the Yellow River shows that the Yellow River flooded. Neither is evidence that the entire planet was submerged.
Archaeology does record abandoned cities, migrations, wars, droughts, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and devastating regional floods. The important point is that these events occurred in different places at different times. At no point around 2350 BCE did the world’s settlements, populations and cultures disappear together. The archaeological record contains exactly what we should expect from ordinary human history—and nothing we should expect from Noah’s Flood.
New DNA Study Unlocks Origins, Social Structure of Neolithic Shimao Civilization
A new study published in Nature on November 26 has shed light on the origins, population structures, and kinship systems of the people of Shimao—one of China's most significant late Neolithic settlements. Analyses of ancient DNA from individuals who inhabited the site reveal genetic links to southern settlements, while also providing evidence of male mass burials associated with human sacrifice.
Led by Prof. FU Qiaomei from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the research was conducted in collaboration with the Shaanxi Provincial Academy of Archaeology and other institutions. The team spent 13 years carrying out large-scale, high-resolution nuclear genome analysis on 169 ancient human samples (144 unrelated individuals) collected from Shimao and surrounding sites, as well as the southern Shanxi region.
Dating to approximately 4200–3700 years before the present, the Shimao site is a massive, clearly socially stratified late Neolithic settlement located in northern Shaanxi Province, China. Encompassing roughly four square kilometers, the stone-walled settlement features distinct functional zones, alongside archaeological evidence of social organization and human sacrifice.
The landscape of Shimao city.Image by IVPP.
By comparing newly generated genomic data with previously published ancient DNA data from other Chinese populations, the researchers found that the Shimao people were predominantly descended from local groups that inhabited the region roughly 1,000 years earlier. Further analysis revealed cultural and genetic connections to Yangshao Culture—an iconic Neolithic civilization centered on the Yellow River's Loess Plateau—offering key insights into the possible origins of the Shimao population.
Additionally, around 80 human skulls were found at the East Gate location. In contrast, no other archaeological site in China produced such a large number of human skulls before the late Shang. The study's genetic analysis reconstructed family pedigrees spanning up to four generations within Shimao society, uncovering a social hierarchy organized around patrilineal descent and patrilocal residence.
The research also challenges long-held assumptions about the gender of sacrificial victims at Shimao's East Gate. Contradicting prior hypotheses that female individuals dominated these sacrifices, genetic evidence shows that nine out of ten burials at the site were male. The study identified a clear sex-specific pattern: Male sacrifices were concentrated at the East Gate, while female sacrificial remains were associated with elite cemeteries such as Huangchengtai and Hanjiagedan. This suggests Shimao's sacrificial practices were highly structured, with gender-specific roles tied to distinct ritual purposes and locations.Carving stone at Shimao city.Image by IVPP.
This study provides genetic evidence that the Shimao cultural populations primarily originated from local Yangshao cultural ancestry in northern Shaanxi, establishing both regional cultural and genetic continuity for at least a millennium. It also reveals close genetic and cultural connections between the Shimao people and populations associated with Taosi Culture (southern Shanxi), steppe Yumin-related groups, and southern rice-farming communities—highlighting extensive interactions and exchanges among prehistoric farming and pastoral communities.
High-level burial (tomb 2020M4) at Zhaishan site (a tomb owner and a sacrificed victim).Image by IVPP.
Furthermore, the study offers the first direct genetic evidence for exploring power inheritance models and the composition of ruling families and social strata in the origins of early East Asian states.
Publication:
Geographic locations and Temporal distribution of newly sampled archaeological sites.Image by Prof. FU Qiaomei's team.
Map of sites within Shimao city.Image by Prof. FU Qiaomei's team.
The significance of these findings extends well beyond the social organisation of one prehistoric Chinese city. The people of Shimao were not the descendants of a recently arrived Mesopotamian family repopulating an empty world. They were predominantly descended from people who had lived in the same region for at least a thousand years, inheriting and developing local traditions while exchanging genes, crops and ideas with neighbouring populations.
That is precisely what should not be found if the biblical Flood had occurred. If every human outside Noah’s family had been exterminated in about 2350 BCE, the populations of China should have disappeared abruptly and been replaced by people bearing unmistakable genetic and cultural connections to Mesopotamia. Instead, ancient DNA reveals regional continuity, ordinary migration and gradual admixture—the normal processes of real human history.
China and Egypt are not isolated exceptions. From the Indus Valley and the Iranian Plateau to Japan and the Americas, archaeology documents populations and cultures continuing through the supposed date of the Flood. Local floods certainly occurred and sometimes devastated individual settlements, but there is no worldwide, synchronous horizon of destruction, sediment deposition, mass mortality and subsequent recolonisation. The evidence is not merely missing where a global flood should have left it; abundant evidence exists for events that could not have occurred had the story been true.
The rational conclusion is therefore not that every relevant branch of science has somehow failed simultaneously, but that the Flood is a myth inherited from earlier Mesopotamian traditions and enlarged into a tale of global divine genocide. Creationists can preserve it only by discarding archaeology, genetics, geology and history together—and the Flood survives only where evidence is not allowed to enter.
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