A Bermeya goat from the Principality of Asturias, Spain, one of the modern breeds showing the closest genetic affinity to the Neolithic goat from Cueva de los Murciélagos.
MUTERMUR Project in collaboration with ACRIBER, CC-BY 4.0
More than a thousand years before the traditional biblical date of creation, people in southern Spain were already using domestic goats to make leather. They belonged to an agricultural world with established skills in animal husbandry and the processing of animal products. A surviving piece of their handiwork now provides another awkward encounter between the physical evidence of human history and the compressed chronology of young-Earth creationism.
In a paper published in PLOS One, Jolijn A. M. Erven and colleagues report the recovery of ancient DNA from worked leather found in Cueva de los Murciélagos, near Albuñol in southern Spain. Radiocarbon dating places the specimen at approximately 5300–5060 BCE. Its manufacture therefore predates the familiar creation date of 4004 BCE by well over a millennium. This was already an artefact of human culture when, according to that chronology, there should have been neither humans nor goats — nor even an Earth on which they could live.
The genetic evidence identifies the hide as domestic goat rather than wild Iberian ibex, and links it with European goat populations, including the modern Bermeya breed of northern Spain. That does not mean that Bermeya goats existed as a distinct breed in the Neolithic. It indicates shared ancestry connecting ancient livestock with animals alive today. The leather thus preserves evidence both of prehistoric craftsmanship and of the population history of a domesticated species.
There are sensible limits to what can be inferred. One object cannot establish the history of goat husbandry throughout Iberia, and the surviving DNA is fragmented. Nevertheless, those limitations do not diminish the central finding: a manufactured object can retain genetic information that helps identify its animal source and place it within a much longer biological history.
The contrast with creationist reasoning is instructive. Here, researchers combine an archaeological object, radiocarbon measurements and genetic comparisons to reconstruct part of the past, while acknowledging what remains uncertain. There is no requirement that the evidence fit a predetermined sacred chronology. The resulting history is constrained by what survives and what can be tested — even when an unassuming piece of leather turns out to be older than the entire universe is supposed to be.
How can ancient DNA survive in leather — and how do scientists know it is ancient? Preservation does not mean that decay stopped. After an animal dies, its cells cease to repair their DNA. Enzymes, microorganisms and chemical reactions begin to destroy it. However, the rate of destruction depends on the conditions: drying can inhibit microbial activity and slow some of the reactions involved. At Cueva de los Murciélagos, exceptional preservation through desiccation allowed organic materials, including worked hide, to survive.The research paper was accompanied by a news release from PLOS via EurekAlert!:
Leather manufacture does not guarantee the destruction of every DNA molecule, but neither does surviving leather guarantee recoverable DNA. The visible material and the genetic information within it can deteriorate at different rates. In this specimen, the goat DNA fragments averaged only about 37 base pairs in length — tiny scraps of the original genetic material.
Identifying the animal Researchers sequence surviving fragments and compare them with reference genomes: genetic sequences against which the recovered material can be checked. Because related species share much of their DNA, a short sequence may match more than one species. Ambiguous matches therefore require careful filtering.
In this study, comparisons supported identification as a domestic goat rather than a wild Iberian ibex. The researchers also recovered sequences assigned to humans and canids. Such additional DNA requires separate interpretation: its presence does not establish who made the leather, who wore it, or when another animal came into contact with it.
Recognising ancient DNA Ancient DNA commonly shows both fragmentation and characteristic chemical damage. One useful signature is cytosine deamination: cytosine, one of DNA’s four bases, changes into uracil, which is generally read as thymine during sequencing. An excess of these apparent C-to-T changes near fragment ends helps researchers assess whether DNA is ancient.
These patterns are evidence to evaluate alongside contamination controls and other checks. They are not an exact clock, and a damaged fragment cannot, by itself, establish a particular archaeological age.
Dating the leather independently The specimen’s age was established by radiocarbon dating, rather than inferred from its resemblance to modern goat DNA. The calibrated range was 7,246–7,008 years before present, approximately 5300–5060 BCE. In radiocarbon reporting, “present” conventionally means 1950.
The methods therefore answer different questions: radiocarbon dating establishes when the animal lived; genetic analysis identifies its biological relationships. DNA damage helps assess the authenticity of the recovered sequences.
What does a connection to modern goats mean? Shared genetic variants can reveal ancestry even when only a small fraction of a genome survives. A close affinity with a modern breed does not mean that the breed already existed in its present form thousands of years ago. Descendant populations can retain ancestral variants while also changing through selection, genetic drift and interbreeding.
The essential distinction: recovering ancient DNA means recovering readable remnants. It does not mean finding living cells, an intact set of chromosomes or material untouched by decay. The surviving fragments carry evidence of that decay.
A 7,000-year-old piece of leather reveals a deep history of Spanish goats
Ancient DNA reveals that denizens of the Iberian Peninsula made leather from domestic goats as far back as 7,000 years ago, according to a study published November 4, 2026, in the open access journal PLOS One by Jolijn A. M. Erven of University College Dublin, Ireland and colleagues.
Research into the history of ancient livestock use and trade is helped immensely by ancient genetic data. Unfortunately, well-preserved ancient DNA is generally limited to cold and dry habitats, with much fewer examples from warm regions. In this study, Erven and colleagues report a rare well-preserved genetic sample from a fragment of goat leather found at the burial site of Cueva de los Murciélagos in southern Spain.
This leather was likely part of a garment or protective covering and shows evidence of having been tanned and perforated before being interred alongside human remains. Radiocarbon dating of the specimen recovered an age of around 7,000 years old, during the Early Neolithic period. Researchers were able to recover both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA from the specimen. The genetic material is extensively fragmented, but intact enough to be identified as domestic goat with a close relation to the modern-day Bermeya breed from northern Spain. This indicates that Neolithic people already used domestic goats rather than wild Iberian ibex, and it also demonstrates a continuous goat lineage in Spain going back several thousand years.
Approximately 7,000-year-old tanned goat leather preserved in Cueva de los Murciélagos, Albuñol (Granada, Spain), from which ancient DNA was recovered for this study.Credit: MUTERMUR Project, CC-BY 4.0
Of note is that this analysis recovered no African genetic heritage in the sample, contrasting with modern European goats. This might indicate that Iberian-African cultural connections weren’t established until after the Neolithic period, but the authors caution that the genetic sample is incomplete. With the recovery of well-preserved Iberian ancient DNA, the possibility exists that further samples might provide more details into the deep history of European livestock.
The preservation of this 7,000-year-old goat leather is exceptional. Cueva de los Murciélagos has preserved organic materials that rarely survive in the archaeological record, offering us a unique opportunity to investigate prehistoric technologies, animal husbandry, and the relationships between human communities and domestic animals.
Francisco Martínez-Sevilla, senior author
Departamento de Historia y Filosofía
Área de Prehistoria
Universidad de Alcalá
Alcalá de Henares, Spain.
It is rare to for such ancient, organic materials to retain DNA - but this was one of the few exceptions. With a tiny amount of surviving DNA, we were able to show a link with Iberian breeds today - a genetic connection spanning 7,000 years. This study demonstrates what can done through the collaboration of international multidisciplinary teams - transforming an archaeological object into a link with the living present.
Kevin Daly, corresponding author.
UCD School of Agriculture and Food Science
University College Dublin
Belfield, Ireland.
Publication:
This small piece of leather records a world that young-Earth creationism cannot accommodate: people keeping domestic goats, processing their skins and practising skilled crafts more than a thousand years before the traditional biblical date of creation. These were real people with their own knowledge, customs and histories. Their existence does not depend on whether the authors of Genesis knew anything about them.
That is the wider perspective such discoveries provide. The biblical creation stories emerged from a particular cultural setting, with all the limitations that implies. Their authors had no reliable account of the Neolithic communities that had lived at the other end of the Mediterranean thousands of years earlier. Whatever knowledge they possessed of their own world, they were not in a position to describe the origins of humanity or reconstruct the deep history of its many cultures. Treating their stories as a universal historical record gives local traditions an authority that the evidence does not support.
Science can now recover something of those otherwise forgotten lives from evidence their ancient contemporaries could never have read: radioactive isotopes and damaged fragments of DNA. There are limits to what one object can reveal, and the researchers acknowledge them. Yet uncertainty about the details of prehistoric goat populations does nothing to rescue a chronology that places the manufacture of this leather before the existence of the Earth.
The people who made and used it did not need to appear in a biblical genealogy to have existed. Nor did their history wait for a creation story to give it permission to begin. The failure belongs to those who mistake the limited horizons of ancient storytellers for the boundaries of human history. A scrap of worked goatskin is enough to show how much lay beyond those horizons.
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