"Triassic Mothers," a life reconstruction of a group of Chiniquodon theotonicus individuals, a pregnant female (left) as well as a female (right) breastfeeding few, relatively large neonates.
A newly published study suggests that one characteristic commonly associated with modern mammals—giving birth to live young—may have appeared in the mammalian lineage far earlier than palaeontologists previously realised.
Creationists prefer to imagine the major groups of organisms appearing fully formed, equipped from the outset with complete packages of supposedly defining characteristics. Evolution, however, produces no such conveniently bundled collections of features. Characteristics arise, change and sometimes disappear at different times, producing the mosaic of inherited and modified traits documented throughout the fossil record.
Creationists also rejoice at any suggestion that scientists might have to change their minds because, in their simplistic view of science, if something is not exactly and eternally true, it's wrong; there is no concept in creationism of incomplete truths or provisional conclusions contingent on future discoveries. Unlike creationism, though, changing one’s mind when the evidence changes is the hallmark of intellectual integrity, and what give science it's reliability and great strength as a tool for discovering the truth.
So here, to sow confusion in the minds of creationists, is an example of science changing its collective mind and still refuting creationists mythology, because it happened 236 million years before the mythical 'Creation Week'. Significantly too, the authors readily conceded that their conclusion is only provisional and they identify what additional information is needed to confirm or refute it. No such reasoning is ever advanced by creationist apologists because it must never be conceded that creationism could be falsified with evidence, lest that evidence be found.
The history of Homo sapiens in Africa between 44,000 and 3,000 years ago was one of isolation, migration, interaction and replacement a shown by characteristic inner ear labyrinth morphologies.
An international team of biological anthropologists has found a novel way to reconstruct tens of thousands of years of human population history in north-eastern Africa: by examining tiny variations in the shape of the bony cavities that once contained people’s inner ears. It's not good news for creationists so it'll be just one more thing for them to ignore one way or another.
The researchers, led by Nicolas Martin and Isabelle Crevecoeur of the PACEA laboratory at the University of Bordeaux and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), have published their findings in Nature Communications.
The bony labyrinth is a complex system of cavities within the temporal bone of the skull. It surrounds the cochlea, involved in hearing, and the semicircular canals, involved in balance. Although its shape varies subtly between individuals and populations, much of that variation reflects inherited ancestry. High-resolution micro-CT scanning allows the labyrinth to be reconstructed and measured in three dimensions without damaging the remains.
This makes it especially valuable in regions such as north-eastern Africa, where heat and other environmental conditions have frequently destroyed ancient DNA. When molecular evidence is unavailable, the shape of the inner ear can preserve an anatomical record of biological relationships between ancient populations.
Martin and his colleagues analysed 194 bony labyrinths belonging to 148 individuals. Their sample included people who lived between approximately 44,000 and 3,000 years ago in the Middle Nile Valley, the Horn of Africa and Central Africa, together with comparative specimens from elsewhere in Africa, Europe and the Levant. The researchers applied three different methods of shape analysis, all of which produced the same broad patterns.
Those patterns reveal a long and complicated history of regional continuity, isolation, migration, interaction and partial population replacement. Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene hunter-fisher-foragers from the Middle Nile Valley showed broad morphological similarities both to one another and to still earlier African Homo sapiens. This is consistent with deep regional ancestry and substantial biological continuity extending across many thousands of years.
That continuity was disrupted during the Neolithic transition. Beginning about 8,000 years ago, food-producing populations with distinctly different inner-ear morphologies appeared in the Middle Nile Valley, supporting the conclusion that pastoralism and agriculture arrived with migrating people rather than being adopted solely by the region’s existing foragers.
This was not necessarily a simple or complete replacement. Individuals retaining affinities with the earlier foragers survived for several millennia in areas bordering the Nile Valley, while some remains display combinations of characteristics consistent with limited interaction or admixture between the old and new populations. Samples from the Horn of Africa and Central Africa also showed considerable morphological diversity, indicating population substructure and differing regional demographic histories.
These results independently support earlier research by Martin and many of the same colleagues, which detected a similar Neolithic population discontinuity from the internal structure of ancient teeth. A CNRS account of that earlier study explains how enamel–dentine junctions revealed population replacement and continuing interaction along the Nile and its Saharan margins. Now two independent anatomical systems—teeth and inner ears—have produced compatible reconstructions of the region’s population history.
This presents creationists with the familiar problem of evidence that should not exist if their mythology were true. According to the young-Earth version of the biblical story, the entire human population was reduced to Noah’s family only a little over 4,000 years ago. Every population on Earth must therefore have descended from that tiny group after an extraordinarily rapid dispersal from somewhere in the Middle East.
Certain bacteriophages found in the human gut have mutation hotspots scattered throughout their genomes that help them modify key defense genes, researchers report.
Credit: Sundharraman Subramanian and Alaina Pabbathi Cryo-EM Core Facility Michigan State University
One of the more persistent creationist falsehoods is the claim that mutations can only damage or destroy genetic information and can therefore provide none of the variation needed for evolution. The claim is usually protected from contrary evidence by leaving “information” conveniently undefined or by dismissing every beneficial mutation as merely a “loss of function”.
However, a new study by Jasper B. Gomez, Jeffrey E. Barrick and Christopher M. Waters of Michigan State University provides an especially clear demonstration of mutation generating heritable variation on which natural selection can act. Their findings were published in Nature Microbiology.
The researchers found that the genomes of the bacteriophages T2 and T4 — viruses that infect bacteria such as Escherichia coli — contain regions of repetitive DNA called contingency loci. These are mutational hotspots in which the DNA-copying machinery is particularly liable to slip while copying a run of repeated bases. It may insert or omit one of the repeats, changing the way the remainder of a gene is read and consequently altering the protein it produces.
Such replication errors occur in these regions thousands of times more frequently than mutations across the rest of the phage genome. Far from producing a population of genetically identical copies, therefore, phage replication continually generates a mixture of variants with different inherited characteristics.
The discovery arose from experiments involving a bacterial antiviral system called TgvAB, normally found in Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera. The researchers transferred the genes for this defence system into laboratory E. coli and exposed the bacteria to T2 phages. Although the defence initially restricted the phages, the viral population began overcoming it within hours.
Now, most of Europe is watching bemused as America degenerates into warring factions over support for Donald Trump and the far-right extremism he advocates and the moderates in the Democrat Party and the few sane voices in Republicanism prepared to put their head above the parapet and risk their livelihood and even their lives, by criticising him.
Trump clearly depends on and enjoys being probably the most divisive American politician since the Civil War, but what bemuses us outside the USA the most is how he gets away with being so obviously a narcissist with an acute personality disorder who struggles to distinguish between fact and fantasy, and someone who struggles to understand even the simplest of evidence and can't utter a coherent sentence if ever he strays off script - which he does frequently.
The American press tore viciously into Joe Biden's declining physical and cognitive capacity during the early stages of the 2024 presidential election campaign, yet the evidence that Trump is going through obvious cognitive decline goes almost unnoticed in the American news media. For example, when asked, in September 2024 what he would do to make childcare affordable, he said:
A paper recently published in Science Advances by an international team led by researchers at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) will make disappointing reading for any creationist with enough courage to read a scientific paper—especially those pinning their hopes on science never closing their favourite gap: the gap between geochemistry and the first living systems.
Leaving that gap permanently open would allow them to declare, “God did it!”, without providing a scrap of supporting evidence or explaining how their preferred god supposedly made chemistry and physics behave in ways that they could not have done unaided. This combination of the god-of-the-gaps argument and a false dichotomy—either science already has a complete explanation, or magic must have been responsible—is standard creationist fare in the absence of positive evidence for a creator.
The new research does not, as some headlines might suggest, show that abiogenesis occurred twice independently. Instead, it presents evidence that the genetic code and a core metabolic network had a single origin before the ancestral lineage divided into Bacteria and Archaea, but that the two lineages subsequently completed the transition to free-living cells independently. As senior author William F. Martin expressed it, the findings point to “one origin of the genetic code, but two origins of life”—with “life” here referring specifically to autonomous, free-living cellular life.
The findings therefore do not overturn universal common ancestry. Both Bacteria and Archaea still trace their ancestry to the last universal common ancestor, or LUCA. What the researchers propose is that LUCA was not yet a fully independent cell equipped with enzymes for every essential metabolic reaction. It remained partly dependent on inorganic catalysts supplied by the hydrothermal environment in which its metabolism had evolved. Only after the bacterial and archaeal lineages had diverged did each independently evolve the remaining enzymes needed to become free-living.
A selection of dogs with a common ancestry. Creationists need to explain why this is not macro-evolution even though the scale of the differences between them and wolves is at least as great as that between humans, chimpanzees and gorillas
The story of how wolves became domestic dogs is one to which I have returned several times, for both scientific and personal reasons. It is one of the most remarkable examples of two species forming a relationship that changed the evolutionary future of one and the cultural history of the other.
It also provided the inspiration for two of my novels, The Girl and the Wolf and its sequel, The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic. These are, of course, works of fiction, not proposed reconstructions of an event for which the details will probably never be known. In them, however, I tried to imagine a biologically plausible way in which the process might have begun: not with people deciding suddenly to “invent” the dog, but with individual wolves and humans discovering that tolerance, cooperation and mutual protection could benefit both.
A point made many times but worth repeating so long as there re sill people who insist the Bible is the inerrant word of an omniscient god - and then demand the right to special privileges including the right to mandate us to comply with their Bronze Age morality, is that a simple comparison of the Bible's description of reality with the actual reality it purports to describe.
This should quickly reveal that what the Bible describes is not reality but the satisfying guesses of ignorant people who lacked the science and technology to discover the truth.
And there are few better examples of that than the childishly ridiculous description of the universe as the Bible claims it was created with what science is discovering. The Bible very clearly and unambiguously describes the universe as a small flat planet at the centre, over which there is a solid dome to keep the surrounding water out. The celestial bodies are described as lamps and small lights fixed to the dome so that we can tell day from night. Outside this construction there is nothing but water, apparently extending to infinity in all directions, but above which there is another realm reached by travelling upwards from the surface of the planet – centred then on the Middle East.
Of course, this bears no more relationship to reality than the sort of description a five-year-old might produce when asked to describe his or her world, and yet there are grown adults who believe it is the best available description of the real universe! And these people demand to be taken seriously because they believe that on 'faith', not on an examination of reality.
I'll again remind readers of what the Bible says because so few people who claim to be Bible-literalists actually ever seem to read the Bible, but instead rely on what preachers and creationist sources tell them to believe.
The results of a study co-led by researchers at UCLA and the University at Buffalo, published in Nature Communications in May 2026, provide another straightforward counterexample to the creationist claim that natural processes cannot add genetic material to a genome without the intervention of their particular magic creator. They also show how relatively recent human evolution can be detected, reconstructed and quantified from the DNA of living populations.
What cannot be observed is the intelligently designed caricature of evolution that creationists are conditioned to mistake for the scientific theory: a single dramatic event in which one species suddenly transforms into an unrelated form. There is no plausible biological mechanism for such a transformation, which is why evolutionary biologists have never proposed one. Biological evolution is a change in the frequency of heritable variants within a population over successive generations; larger differences, including those associated with speciation, accumulate through many such changes.
Young-Earth creationists are nevertheless prepared to invoke evolution at an absurdly accelerated rate when their mythology requires it. To squeeze the present diversity of life into the few millennia supposedly available after their genocidal global flood, a small number of vaguely defined ancestral “kinds” would have needed to diversify into hundreds of thousands of beetle species and countless other forms almost overnight. Yet the same creationists baulk at evidence that human populations have undergone much more modest evolutionary changes over thousands of years.
The new research concerns AMY1, the salivary amylase gene. Salivary amylase begins the digestion of starch in the mouth, and people differ considerably in the number of AMY1 copies they carry. An early duplication of the gene occurred in the hominin lineage at least 800,000 years ago, after which repeated duplications, deletions and inversions generated numerous structural variants containing different numbers of copies. These are mutations that change the amount and arrangement of genetic material in the genome — precisely the sort of naturally arising variation that creationists insist cannot occur.
Crucially, cultivating potatoes did not cause the ancestors of Indigenous Andeans to acquire additional AMY1 copies because they needed them. High-copy variants were already present in the population. When potatoes and other starch-rich crops became dietary staples, people carrying more copies probably produced more salivary amylase and obtained a reproductive or survival advantage. Natural selection then increased the frequency of those pre-existing variants — evolution acting as a filter, not as a designer working towards a predetermined goal.
The researchers analysed AMY1 copy numbers in 3,723 people representing 85 populations. Indigenous Peruvian Andeans had among the highest numbers found, with the Quechua participants carrying a median of ten copies, compared with six among the closely related Maya comparison group and seven across the worldwide sample. The genetic evidence indicates that a high-copy haplotype increased in frequency among Andeans from about 2 per cent to approximately 45 per cent after around 10,000 years ago, coinciding with permanent settlement of the high Andes and the domestication of potatoes between about 10,000 and 6,000 years ago.
Engraved ostrich eggshell fragments from around 60,000 years ago found in the Diepkloof Rock Shelter. Archaeologists believe the fragments probably originate from eggs used as storage containers.
Archaeologists led by researchers from the Università di Bologna, Italy have shown that designs carved more than 60,000 years ago on Ostrich shells were deliberate, structured designs, not random or casually improvised marks. They published their findings in PLOS ONE in February 2026.
The problem for creationists is that none of this evidence should exist if their favourite Bible myths were true. There could have been neither humans making these engravings nor ostriches producing the eggshells 60,000 years ago, because, according to the young-Earth creationist chronology, Earth itself did not yet exist. Nor could delicate engraved fragments have remained embedded in recognisable, archaeologically ordered deposits if the entire region had subsequently been submerged and violently rearranged by a planet-covering flood only a few thousand years ago.
And yet the evidence is there. Creationists must therefore perform the customary mental gymnastics—rejecting the dating, misrepresenting the geology, bearing false witness against the scientists or even presenting their god as a cosmic trickster who deliberately formed evidence such as this to fool us when it created the world — anything, apparently, rather than allowing demonstrable facts to modify a cherished belief.
The researchers assembled a dataset of images showing 112 engraved ostrich-eggshell fragments from Diepkloof and Klipdrift in South Africa and Apollo 11 in Namibia. Three badly worn fragments were excluded from the statistical analysis because their markings could not be reconstructed reliably. Using geometric and statistical techniques not previously applied systematically to these artefacts, the team traced the lines and examined their angles, alignments, intersections and spatial relationships.
The analysis identified recurring cognitive operations involving rotation, translation, iteration and “embedding”—the nesting of elements within additional hierarchical levels of a design. Parallel lines, near-right angles, hatched bands, grids and diamond-shaped motifs were combined according to consistent spatial rules. More than 90 per cent of the statistically assessed fragments conformed closely to models of regular parallel alignment or angular organisation, while orthogonality and spatial regularity characterised more than 80 per cent of the dataset overall.
These were therefore not merely scratches or repeated movements. The engravers exercised deliberate control over the placement and orientation of the lines, constructing what the researchers describe as a “geometric grammar”. The patterns indicate visual-spatial planning and suggest that their makers had an overall conception of the design before or while engraving it. They provide an early material expression of abstract, rule-governed graphic thought.
These artefacts do not, by themselves, identify the first appearance of abstract thought, nor do they provide a complete history of the evolution of human intelligence. What they offer is a remarkably ancient snapshot of sophisticated cognition in Homo sapiens. Together with the wider archaeological record, they fit an evolutionary history in which human cognitive and symbolic abilities arose and developed within the hominin lineage—not one in which fully modern humans, complete with all their intellectual abilities, were produced suddenly by magic a few thousand years ago.
There is enough for a substantial side-panel. One useful point to emphasise is that the famous painted stones from Apollo 11 are much younger than its engraved eggshell fragments and should not be conflated with them.
Diepkloof, Klipdrift and Apollo 11.
The engraved ostrich-eggshell fragments examined in this research came from three rock shelters associated with the Howiesons Poort, a Middle Stone Age technological tradition found across southern Africa. Dating broadly to about 65,000–60,000 years ago, Howiesons Poort assemblages include carefully made stone blades and backed tools, composite implements, the controlled heating of stone and evidence of symbolic or decorative behaviour.
The name describes a widespread technocomplex—a recurring combination of technologies and artefact types—not a single tribe or homogeneous culture.
Diepkloof Rock Shelter, South Africa
Diepkloof is a large quartzitic-sandstone shelter overlooking the Verlorenvlei River in South Africa’s Western Cape, about 17 kilometres from the present Atlantic shoreline. Its deposits preserve one of southern Africa’s most extensive Middle Stone Age sequences, recording intermittent human occupation from before 130,000 to approximately 45,000 years ago.
The shelter contains layers of ash, charcoal, hearth debris and burnt bedding left by successive groups of occupants. Archaeologists have also recovered stone tools, animal bones, marine shells and exceptionally well-preserved plant remains, providing evidence of the environment, diet and activities of the people who used the shelter.
Hundreds of engraved ostrich-eggshell fragments have been recovered from its Howiesons Poort layers. Some pieces preserve perforated openings, supporting the interpretation that the eggshells had been converted into portable water flasks. The engravings include parallel lines, intersecting lines, cross-hatching and especially hatched bands. Their distribution through numerous successive layers indicates a graphic tradition maintained for several thousand years rather than a single episode of decoration.
The precise chronology of some Diepkloof layers remains debated. The authors of the 2026 study adopted a date range of approximately 65,000–60,000 years ago for comparison with the other sites.
In 2024, Diepkloof was included in the UNESCO World Heritage property The Emergence of Modern Human Behaviour: The Pleistocene Occupation Sites of South Africa.
Klipdrift Shelter, South Africa
Klipdrift Shelter forms part of a cave complex in the De Hoop Nature Reserve on South Africa’s southern Cape coast. It should not be confused with the adjacent Klipdrift Cave: the shelter contains the relevant Middle Stone Age deposits, whereas the cave has principally yielded much younger Later Stone Age material.
Optically stimulated luminescence dating places the Howiesons Poort occupation of Klipdrift Shelter between approximately 65,500 and 59,400 years ago. Its well-preserved layers contain hearths, stone tools, ochre, marine shells, animal and plant remains and a human molar. The inhabitants exploited both terrestrial animals and coastal resources.
The site has also provided evidence that silcrete was deliberately heated to improve its suitability for making stone tools. Small backed pieces could have been mounted on wooden shafts using compound adhesives, demonstrating considerable technological knowledge and forward planning.
More than 95 engraved ostrich-eggshell fragments have been reported from its Howiesons Poort layers. Their designs include parallel lines, cross-hatching and diamond-shaped arrangements. In the 2026 analysis, the diamond motif was confined to Klipdrift and appeared in the final phase of its Howiesons Poort sequence, suggesting that particular designs could have local or chronological significance.
Apollo 11 Rockshelter, Namibia
Apollo 11 Rockshelter lies in the Huns Mountains of southern Namibia. It contains the longest known late-Pleistocene and Holocene archaeological sequence in the country, with deposits representing several Middle Stone Age traditions—including the Still Bay and Howiesons Poort—as well as later occupations.
The shelter received its modern name from archaeologist Wolfgang Erich Wendt, who was excavating there in 1969 when he heard of the safe return of the Apollo 11 lunar crew.
Only two engraved ostrich-eggshell fragments from Apollo 11 were available for the 2026 geometric analysis. Both carry intersecting, approximately parallel lines associated with the Howiesons Poort occupation. Although the sample is small, it extends the geographical distribution of this engraving practice well beyond the South African Cape.
Apollo 11 is better known for seven painted quartzite slabs recovered from a much later archaeological level. Painted with charcoal, ochre and white pigment and depicting animals or possible composite creatures, these portable artworks date to about 30,000 years ago and are among the earliest securely dated examples of figurative art in Africa. They are important in their own right but are not contemporary with the approximately 60,000-year-old engraved eggshells.
Why the three sites matter
Taken together, the sites show that engraving ostrich-eggshell containers was not an isolated accident or the idiosyncratic activity of one individual. Related geometric practices occurred across widely separated parts of southern Africa and persisted through multiple occupation layers.
At the same time, differences between the sites—hatched bands at Diepkloof, diamonds at Klipdrift and intersecting parallel lines at Apollo 11—suggest local traditions and changes through time. The engravers shared the cognitive ability to organise lines according to geometric rules, but they did not simply reproduce one rigid, unchanging design.
The paper in PLOS ONE was accompanied by an article in Unibo Magazine, the University of Bologna’s online news magazine:
Humanity’s oldest geometries, engraved on ostrich eggsAn analysis of the markings found on hundreds of eggshell fragments dating back more than 60,000 years, unearthed between South Africa and Namibia, has revealed our ancestors’ remarkable ability to organise visual space according to abstract principles
At several archaeological sites in southern Africa, hundreds of highly unusual fragments of ostrich eggs have been found. Dating back more than 60,000 years, the shells were engraved by groups of Homo sapiens who lived in that region.
A new investigation, led by researchers from the University of Bologna, has now revealed for the first time that these engravings on ostrich eggshells were not random or improvised, but followed recurring and surprisingly organised geometric rules. The study - published in the journal PLOS One - shows the presence of a genuine cognitive organisation of forms, based on parallelism, orthogonality and the repetition of lines and regular patterns.
These signs reveal a surprisingly structured, geometric way of thinking. We are talking about people who did not simply draw lines, but organised them according to recurring principles - parallelisms, grids, rotations and systematic repetitions: a visual grammar in embryo.
Professor Silvia Ferrara, senior author
Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies
University of Bologna
Bologna, Italy.
The ostrich eggshells were most likely used as water containers. The researchers carried out a quantitative and systematic investigation of 112 fragments from two South African archaeological sites (Diepkloof and Klipdrift) and one site in Namibia (Apollo 11). By applying methods of geometric and statistical analysis never previously used on these artefacts, the study made it possible to reconstruct in detail the lines, angles and trajectories of the markings.
The results show that more than 80% of the configurations analysed display coherent spatial regularities, with repeated use of angles close to 90° and groups of parallel lines. The most complex compositions - such as hatched bands, grids and diamond-shaped motifs - reveal cognitive operations of rotation, translation, repetition and “embedding”, i.e. the ability to build hierarchical levels of signs within the same surface.
These engravings are organised and consistent, and show mastery of geometric relationships. There is not only a process of repeating signs: there is real visuo-spatial planning, as if the authors already had an overall image of the figure in mind before engraving it.
Professor Silvia Ferrara, senior author
Beyond the possible meanings of the markings, the authors stress that the implications of the study concern above all the cognitive foundations that made it possible to create these decorations. The ability to construct visual configurations structured according to specific rules can be seen as a key indicator of the emergence of abstract thought - a crucial step in the evolution of human thinking.
Our analysis shows that Homo sapiens 60,000 years ago already possessed a remarkable ability to organise visual space according to abstract principles. Transforming simple forms into complex systems by following defined rules is a deeply human trait that has characterised our history over millennia, from the creation of decorations to the development of symbolic systems and, ultimately, writing.
Valentina Decembrini, first author
Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies
University of Bologna
Bologna, Italy.
Abstract
This article presents the first quantitative geometric and spatial analysis of engraved ostrich eggshell (EOES) fragments from the Howiesons Poort (HP) technocomplex of the African late Middle Stone Age (MSA), to evaluate whether the EOES demonstrates genuine formal structuring and visuo-spatial organization. By considering their ‘non-accidental properties’—such as curvature, parallelism, and co-termination—which remain consistent across different viewpoints, as well as their metric properties, including angular inclinations, based on empirical thresholds, we show that the HP dataset systematically employs salient geometric features. These features are combined and embedded through complex cognitive operations, including the iteration and alignment of parallel lines, rotation of lines generating intersections with variable angular openings, and translation of specific elements nested within organized spatial layouts. These engravings therefore constitute an early material expression of complex graphic representation, attesting to a species-specific human capacity for organizing geometric thought. Overall, the patterns reflect a system of rules through which Homo sapiens in the HP organized visual forms, revealing the cognitive foundations of structured graphic behavior.
What these engraved fragments preserve is not merely a collection of decorations but evidence of established human cultural traditions. Across three widely separated sites, people living about 60,000 years ago converted ostrich eggs into useful containers and embellished them with carefully planned geometric patterns. Differences between sites and between successive archaeological layers show that these traditions varied geographically and changed over time—precisely what we should expect from cultures developing through ordinary human invention, learning and transmission.
For young-Earth creationism, the chronology alone is fatal. These people were organising visual space according to abstract rules more than 50,000 years before the supposed “Creation Week”. The dates do not depend upon one questionable object or an isolated measurement: the fragments occur within ordered sequences containing stone tools, hearths, food remains and environmental evidence, all of which together document repeated human occupation over immense periods of time.
Nor is there any trace of the global catastrophe that creationists place only a few thousand years ago. The shelters preserve fine layers of ash, charcoal, burnt bedding and fragile eggshell accumulated during successive occupations. They have not been churned together, swept away or buried beneath the chaotic debris that a mountain-covering global flood would necessarily have produced. Instead, their stratigraphy records continuity, local environmental change and human activity—not planetary destruction.
The researchers needed neither a magical creation nor a supernatural injection of intelligence to explain what they found. They saw members of our own evolved species displaying sophisticated planning, abstraction and cultural learning deep in the African Stone Age. Once again, science reveals a richly detailed human past where creationism insists there could have been no past at all—and once again, it is the evidence, not the mythology, that survives examination.
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A team led by scientists at Eurac Research, a private research centre based in Bolzano, South Tyrol, Italy, has reconstructed a remarkably detailed picture of the microbial community associated with Ötzi, the Copper Age man whose naturally mummified body emerged from melting ice high in the Ötztal Alps in 1991. Their findings, like so much relevant scientific evidence, are utterly incompatible with Bible-based creationist mythology.
According to young-Earth creationist dogma, the creator god committed an act of global genocide by drowning almost every terrestrial human and animal beneath a flood deep enough to cover the highest mountains. The precise date varies even among creationist organisations: Answers in Genesis places the Flood in 2348 BCE, while the Institute for Creation Research has calculated a date of about 2472 BCE. Both accept the claim derived from the Masoretic text of Genesis that the Flood occurred just 1,656 years after “Creation Week”, when everything was supposedly made from nothing by magic.
Several centuries before either of those proposed Flood dates, however, a man died at an altitude of about 3,200 metres in the Ötztal Alps. His body, clothing and equipment were preserved in a protected, icy hollow until melting ice exposed them in 1991, more than 5,000 years later. That man, now known as Ötzi or the Iceman, is still providing scientists with information about the life, health and microbial companions of a Copper Age European.
The Eurac-led team combined microbial cultivation with DNA sequencing and metagenomic analysis to distinguish between different components of the microbial community associated with the mummy. These included remnants of Ötzi’s original intestinal microbiome, microorganisms that colonised his body after death in the glacial environment, and modern contaminants introduced during more than three decades of museum conservation.
Oblique view of the lower part of the surface from the east, showing the general extent of the exposed palaeosurface. People for scale. Red arrow indicates the pit.
Artistic reconstruction of the Mullurina Mayu bowl-shaped depression during the Late Cretaceous, depicting the probable tracemakers responsible for the Calorckosauripus trackways and possibly the bowl-shaped depression.
Some 67 million years before creationists believe their god created Earth during its mythical six-day “Creation Week”, a group of enormous, long-necked dinosaurs walked across the soft mud beside a river or lake in what is now Bolivia. At least one large animal may also have stopped to scrape repeatedly at the ground, leaving a great bowl-shaped depression surrounded by grooves and possible claw marks. Whether it was preparing a nest, digging for water or mineral salts, or doing something else entirely is uncertain, but the marks it left behind provide a rare glimpse of dinosaur behaviour shortly before the end of the Cretaceous Period.
The evidence comes from the Mullurina Mayu locality in the Maragua region, about 23 kilometres west of Sucre, Bolivia. There, an exposed surface of Maastrichtian-age claystone in the Lower Member of the El Molino Formation preserves several trackways attributed to titanosaurian sauropods. The tracks have been assigned to the trace-fossil species Calorckosauripus lazari, believed to have been made by comparatively non-derived titanosaurs.
Now, in a paper published in the journal Fossil Record, Christian A. Meyer, Jose Hugo Heymann, Edwin Chuca Ibarra, Eddy Laura Flores and Lara Sciscio have described an unusual structure preserved among those trackways. It is an irregular, bowl-shaped hollow measuring approximately 4.2 by 3.2 metres and reaching about 60 centimetres in depth. Around its walls are bundles of parallel grooves, roughly one centimetre wide and up to about 30 centimetres long, together with broader marks on the floor that may have been made by claws.
A heap of ancient bones does not come with a label explaining how it was formed. When large accumulations of woolly mammoth remains are found at Upper Palaeolithic sites, archaeologists must determine whether the animals were killed by people, scavenged after natural deaths, or accumulated through entirely natural processes such as floods, landslides or animals becoming trapped in bogs.
Cut marks, deliberately broken bones and stone projectile points embedded in mammoth remains show that humans sometimes hunted and butchered these enormous animals. But such evidence is not present on every bone, leaving open the possibility that some of the great mammoth bonebeds of Eurasia resulted largely from natural mortality rather than sustained human exploitation.
Now an international team led by researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm has approached the problem from an ingenious new direction: instead of asking only what happened to the bones, they used ancient DNA to determine whether the mammoths were male or female.
As described in a newly published paper in Current Biology, the researchers analysed genome data from 521 woolly mammoths, Mammuthus primigenius, recovered across Eurasia and North America. These included 448 animals sequenced for the first time, making this one of the largest palaeogenomic studies yet undertaken on an extinct species.
The contrast was striking. Among 421 mammoths recovered as dispersed remains from natural depositional settings, 66 per cent were male and only 34 per cent female. That male bias is consistent with the behaviour of modern elephants: adult males commonly leave their natal herds and live alone, making them more likely to take risks or become caught in natural traps such as bogs, sinkholes and landslides.
However, among 100 mammoths from large bone accumulations associated with Upper Palaeolithic people, the ratio was almost exactly reversed: 70 per cent were female and only 30 per cent male. As the researchers explain, this substantial difference provides population-scale evidence that human activity, rather than natural mortality alone, was the principal force creating these bone accumulations.
That does not necessarily mean that hunters deliberately selected females simply because they were smaller than adult males. If mammoths lived like modern elephants, females and their young would have travelled in matriarchal herds capable of mounting a formidable collective defence. However, such herds may also have followed more predictable routes than solitary males, making them easier for hunter-gatherers to locate repeatedly. People may have hunted them, scavenged animals that died along those routes, or—most probably—used a combination of both strategies.
Either way, the result opens a remarkable window onto human behaviour between about 30,000 and 20,000 years ago. Mammoths supplied meat and fat for food, hides for clothing and shelter, bones for construction, and ivory for tools, ornaments and works of art. By combining genetics with archaeology and knowledge of elephant social behaviour, scientists can now reconstruct something of how Upper Palaeolithic people located and exploited this critically important resource.
And all this human ingenuity, accumulated ecological knowledge and repeated interaction with mammoth herds was taking place tens of thousands of years before creationists believe their god created Earth and everything upon it. Once again, the evidence reveals not a recently created world interrupted by a global flood, but a deep and richly documented human past—one preserved not merely in tools and bones, but in fragments of ancient DNA surviving within those bones.
