Refuting Creationism - People Were Making Goatskin Leather Thousands Of Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated depiction of Neolithic leather-working in 5th century BCE Andalucia

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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

A 7,000-year-old piece of leather reveals a deep history of Spanish goats | EurekAlert!

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.

Creationism Refuted - Homo Erectus Genes In Modern Humans Via Denisovans

AI-generated depiction of a Homo erectus group

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Ancient tooth proteins suggest ‘Homo erectus’ may have left a genetic legacy in people today

One of the difficulties creationists face when trying to squeeze human origins into the Genesis story is that the evidence keeps revealing a history far richer than their mythology allows. Instead of a single founding couple appearing a few thousand years ago, we find an extended human family, with populations diverging, migrating and sometimes exchanging genes. Now, ancient proteins preserved in fossil teeth suggest that even Homo erectus may have left a genetic legacy in some people alive today.

In a paper published in Nature, researchers report enamel proteins recovered from six Homo erectus teeth from three Chinese sites, dating to approximately 400,000 years ago. They identified two shared variants in the enamel protein ameloblastin. One distinguishes these specimens from other sampled human lineages; the other also occurs in Denisovans, with its corresponding genetic variant present in some modern humans.

The intriguing possibility is that this variant passed from a population related to these Homo erectus individuals into Denisovans, and subsequently into Homo sapiens. This is a proposed route of inheritance, not a recovered Homo erectus genome or proof of direct mating between Homo erectus and our own species. Further molecular evidence will be needed to clarify the relationship.

Refuting Creationism - Violent Death But Also Care And Compassion in Neanderthal Society - No Religious Handbook Required

[caption]

[credit]

Neanderthal scapula with spear hole.

View of Shanidar Cave from approximately the south.

Photo: G. Barker.

Fatal Neanderthal wound may be earliest evidence of a wooden spear attack on a human ancestor | University of Cambridge

Some 75,000 years ago, a Neanderthal in what is now Iraqi Kurdistan survived a devastating facial injury, apparently with help from others, only to suffer a probably fatal penetrating wound later in life. The remains preserve a striking combination of vulnerability, probable compassion and possible interpersonal violence: recognisably human behaviour from a time tens of thousands of years before the biblical creation story places the beginning of human history.

The individual, designated Shanidar A, is described in a new paper in Scientific Reports. Researchers led by Dr Emma Pomeroy identified a roughly circular, 15-millimetre-wide perforation in the left shoulder blade, consistent with a sharpened wooden spear entering through the chest and passing through the body. The injury occurred around the time of death and was probably lethal. Its position and the force required suggest a deliberate attack, although a hunting accident remains a possibility. The evidence supports a violent death; it does not supply the identity or intentions of whoever held the spear.

Earlier in life, Shanidar A had suffered a severe blow to the mouth, splitting a lower incisor lengthways. Subsequent wear and the accumulation of dental calculus show that the individual survived the injury for a considerable period. Given the likely pain and difficulty eating, the researchers suggest that survival involved care from companions. This is not a fossilised moral code, nor proof that Neanderthals thought exactly as we do. It is, however, evidence consistent with practical compassion in an extinct human lineage closely related to our own. The capacity to help an injured companion evidently has a much deeper history than the religious traditions that now claim ownership of morality.

For young-Earth creationism, the chronology is already fatal: these events occurred around 69,000 years before the supposed creation of the Universe in the familiar six-thousand-year chronology. The archaeological context adds another difficulty. Fragile remains survived within a cave sequence that researchers can investigate in detail, including evidence that a local flash flood disturbed the bones after decomposition. That is evidence of a particular event in a particular landscape, not of a recent worldwide deluge. Any attempt to impose the biblical catastrophe on this record must explain the actual sequence of deposition, decay, disturbance and preservation, rather than treating every mention of flooding as confirmation of Genesis.

Refuting Creationism - Early Humans Lived In The Jordan Valley - 1.9 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A bifacial stone tool from ‘Ubeidiya

Credit: Omry Barzilai

A specialized imaging technique reveals mineral layers preserved within a fossilized Melanopsis shell (sample UB1).

Credit: Perach Nuriel

Study Finds 1.9 Million Year Out-of-Africa Migration wave leaves its mark in the Jordan Valley | EUROPEAN FRIENDS OF THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY

Long before anyone composed the biblical creation stories, early members of our genus were making stone tools and inhabiting the Jordan Valley. Research on the prehistoric site of ‘Ubeidiya, south of the Sea of Galilee, now suggests that this chapter of human history began earlier than previously thought — probably more than 1.9 million years ago. The landscape subsequently woven into biblical tradition preserves a much older history, written in sediments, fossils and archaeological remains.

The research, published in Quaternary Science Reviews brings together cosmogenic burial dating, ancient magnetic signatures and uranium–lead dating of fossil freshwater snail shells. Their combined interpretation favours an older chronology for the site, with implications for when tool-making hominins dispersed beyond Africa.

These inhabitants were not modern Homo sapiens. They were earlier members of our genus, probably associated with the Homo erectus/ergaster group, although the surviving fossils do not justify an unqualified species identification. Their presence, together with the site's Acheulean stone tools, contributes to an increasingly detailed picture of early human expansion into Eurasia.

Refuting Creationism - More On Denisovans Exposes Moronic Creationism

An artist's reconstruction of what a Denisovan might have looked like.

Image credit: Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology / Chinese Academy of Sciences

Chinese Scientists Solve Puzzle of Identifying Extinct Group of Hominins----Chinese Academy of Sciences

One of the strengths of science is its willingness to leave a question open until there is enough evidence to answer it. An incomplete picture is an invitation to investigate, and an explanation that changes when new evidence emerges is a demonstration that the method is working. The developing story of the Denisovans provides an excellent example: an extinct group of humans is acquiring a clearer identity through the patient accumulation and comparison of evidence.

As a Xinhua report reproduced by the Chinese Academy of Sciences explains, Denisovans were first identified in 2010 through DNA recovered from a tiny finger bone found in Siberia. Scientists could recognise a distinct evolutionary lineage before they had much idea of what its members looked like. That imbalance between molecular knowledge and anatomical knowledge presented a problem that further discoveries and improved analytical methods could address.

Creationism Refuted - Eland Collagen in Ocre In A South African Cave - From 50,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

The Kilpdrift Complex located within the coastal cliffs in the De Hoop Nature Reserve, South Africa, where the samples for the study were collected.

Credit: Ole F. Unhammer
Universitetet i Bergen

Common eland, Taurotragus oryx

Credit: David Clode / Unsplash.

Antelope collagen found in 60,000-year-old ochre offers clues to early human practices

Some 60,000 years ago, humans occupying a shelter in southern Africa left behind traces of activities that modern science is only now learning to recover. An ochre-rich surface at Kilpdrift Shelter preserves proteins identified as belonging to the common eland, Taurotragus oryx, a large African antelope.

For those who insist that the entire Universe was created only a few thousand years ago, the difficulty begins before we even consider what these people were doing: they were already there, handling animal materials and ochre, tens of thousands of years before the supposed creation of their ancestors.

The discovery is described in a paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B by researchers from Kyushu University, the University of Bergen and the University of Copenhagen.

What that contribution represents remains an open question. Animal-derived material may have been deliberately mixed with ochre, or the surface may preserve traces of eland hides treated with it. The finding establishes an association between ochre and animal material; it does not, by itself, establish a particular recipe, a hide-processing technique or a symbolic purpose. Nevertheless, it opens a valuable window onto the technical, and possibly symbolic, behaviour of early Homo sapiens, particularly in environments where ancient DNA is poorly preserved.

Here, then, is another example of archaeology producing inconvenient evidence for biblical literalism simply by investigating the human past. The researchers are asking what people did, which materials they used and how surviving molecules can help reconstruct their activities. There is room for uncertainty about the precise activity recorded on this ancient surface. That uncertainty is not permission to compress 60,000 years of human history into a creationist chronology of six to ten thousand years.

Creationism Refuted - Humans Were Leaving Footprints In Lakeside Mud 11,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Artist's rendition of the landscape at White Sands during the last Ice Age.

Karen Carr

Fig. 2. Ancient human footprints and other ichnological features.

(A) A large canid track superimposed on a human footprint excavated on TH3. Photo Credit: K.B.S., US Geological Survey (USGS). (B) Linear features (LF) on TH2 that have been interpreted as travois pulled by humans, presumably during transport of resources (2). Photo Credit: K.B.S., USGS. (C) Orthomosaic of the surface of TP15 showing human footprints (Photo Credit: M.R.B., Bournemouth University). (D) Color rendered height map of multiple human footprints on TH0. (E) Color rendered height map of human footprints on TH(−3).

From: Kathleen B. Springer et al.(2026).

Footprints in the (white) sand: Humans experienced abrupt environmental shifts during the last ice age | University of Arizona News

More than 20,000 years before the present, people were walking along a lakeshore in what is now New Mexico, leaving footprints that would eventually become a serious inconvenience for biblical literalists. At White Sands National Park, those tracks preserve evidence of human lives during the Last Glacial Maximum — long before the supposed creation of the Universe in the chronology favoured by young-Earth creationists, let alone their alleged global flood and subsequent repopulation of the Americas.

Now, research published open access in Science Advances reaffirms that the footprints date to approximately 23,500–21,700 years ago. It also reconstructs a changing landscape: retreating Lake Otero, shifts from conifer forest towards steppe vegetation, and episodes of severe aridity. Some changes occurred within a human lifetime. These were people inhabiting a dynamic Ice Age environment, leaving their tracks alongside those of mammoths, giant sloths and dire wolves.

The history of the dating is itself an instructive example of how science works. The original age estimates, announced in 2021, attracted criticism because they relied on seeds from aquatic plants. Such plants can absorb dissolved ancient carbon, potentially making radiocarbon dates appear older than they really are. That was a legitimate methodological objection, and the appropriate response was to test it. A follow-up study reported in 2023 used pollen from terrestrial conifers and an independent technique that measures when mineral grains were last exposed to sunlight. Both supported the ancient chronology.

Refuting Creationism - Kyushu, Japan Was Devastated By A Volcano 73,000 Years Ago - But There Is No Trace Of Noah's Global Flood

Mount Iō, Iōjima, Japan, on the edge of the Kikai caldera

By 名古屋太郎 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Kikai caldera (dotted outline) is mostly below sea level. Iōjima in on its northern rim.

By Batholith - Topographic data: NASA's SRTM-1 30m Mesh (ver.3 2014) Rendering software: KASHMIR 3D, Public Domain, Link

How one of Earth’s worst volcanic disasters affected societies | Lund University

A real catastrophe leaves evidence. In prehistoric Japan, an enormous volcanic eruption left a recognisable layer of ash, devastated ecosystems and disrupted human communities. Thousands of years later, archaeologists can still investigate its consequences. Yet the supposedly global catastrophe described in Genesis — a flood intended to destroy almost all terrestrial life — finds no corresponding place in Japan’s long archaeological history. The contrast could hardly be more awkward for biblical literalism.

The real disaster was the Kikai-Akahoya eruption, which occurred about 7,300 years ago, approximately 5300 BCE. That places it roughly three millennia before the Flood date of 2348 BCE in Archbishop Ussher’s chronology, and even before his supposed creation of the world in 4004 BCE. Japan was already inhabited by Jōmon communities who obtained their food through hunting, fishing and gathering. These were real people living in established societies, confronting a natural disaster in a world that, according to that biblical timetable, did not yet exist.
Now, an international team has investigated how those communities responded. Their findings, published in Science Advances reveal a more complicated history than either universal collapse or undisturbed survival. Southern Kyushu was already experiencing population decline before the eruption, whereas population growth in northern Kyushu continued through the disaster and its aftermath. Some more distant regions experienced stagnation or decline.

How can researchers reconstruct population changes without written records or a prehistoric census? They used radiocarbon dates from archaeological remains as an indirect measure of human activity, analysing their distribution through time and across the landscape with Bayesian statistical models. The underlying principle is that larger populations generally leave more traces of occupation that can subsequently be recovered and dated. Such evidence provides estimates of demographic trends rather than exact headcounts, and its interpretation must allow for dating uncertainty and the limitations of the archaeological record.

Creationism Refuted - Polynesian Genetics Refute Biblical Mythology And Confirm Evolutionary Theory

AI depiction of Polynesian migration in outrigger canoes

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Hawai'ian outrigger (Holopuni) canoe

Polynesian Wayfinding Is Written in the Genomes of Island Populations

Human history is written in more than ancient texts. It is also preserved in the genetic material passed from generation to generation, where migrations and changes in population size leave patterns that scientists can investigate. For creationists who would compress humanity’s ancestry into the descendants of a single family emerging from a mythical global flood, this presents a demanding test: their story must explain the actual distribution of genetic variation, rather than merely assert that people dispersed.

A new study published in Science on 8 October 2026 examines whole-genome sequences from 1,050 Polynesian people. It reveals successive founder effects associated with the settlement of Pacific islands: small founding groups carried only part of their source population’s genetic diversity, and subsequent departures repeated that sampling process.

The result is a nested pattern of inheritance. Particularly striking is the close genetic relationship between the populations of Hawaiʻi and Rapa Nui, despite their separation by roughly 7,000 kilometres. The researchers interpret this as evidence that both populations have deeper ancestral roots in Mangareva. Their reconstruction also involves repeated movement between islands, rather than a simple procession of isolated, one-way journeys.

These demographic events have medical consequences too. Variants that were rare in an ancestral population can become relatively common among descendants of a small founding group. The study identifies several disease-associated variants at elevated frequencies, showing how the legacy of settlement can remain relevant to health today.

This is also an accessible example of why evolution cannot be reduced to natural selection alone. Genetic drift — chance changes in the frequencies of genetic variants — can shape populations without making them better adapted. A variant does not have to be beneficial to become more common; sometimes its frequency reflects who happened to found a community and which descendants subsequently reproduced. The voyages were purposeful human achievements, but their genetic consequences required neither foresight nor a designer.

The challenge for biblical literalism is therefore more substantial than finding room for Polynesian voyagers somewhere after Noah. A scientific explanation must account for which populations share particular variants, how those variants are distributed, and which demographic history best explains the pattern. These findings do not, by themselves, constitute a test of every claim about a global flood. They do demonstrate what an evidence-based account of human dispersal looks like: a reconstruction open to scrutiny and revision, with consequences that can be checked against independent evidence. Simply invoking Genesis supplies none of that explanatory detail.

Refuting Creationism - Stone Tool-Making In The Tennessee River Valley - 3,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Stone tool-making on the banks of the Tennessee River, 13,000 years ago

AI-generated (ChatGPT-6 Astra)

Map showing the location of the Tennessee River Valley and the distribution of Clovis and Cumberland points with known provenience data. Hatching indicates geologic deposits containing chert-bearing deposits. Inset indicates the location of study area.

Tune, J.W., Miller, D.S. (2027).

Ancient Tools Reveal How Ice Age Humans Learned the Land | Ole Miss

Some 13,000 years ago, people in what is now the Tennessee River Valley were making stone spear points, maintaining their equipment and adapting to the demands of their surroundings. For young-Earth creationism, this presents a rather fundamental difficulty: these human societies were living in North America thousands of years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’. They were getting on with the practical business of survival before a literal reading of Genesis permits either them or their continent to have existed.

These inconvenient people are the subject of a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory by Jesse W. Tune and D. Shane Miller. The researchers examined approximately 500 projectile points from the region, comparing the earlier Clovis tradition with the later Cumberland tradition. Their question was how the treatment of these tools might reveal changes in people’s knowledge of the landscape.

The contrast was revealing. Clovis toolmakers tended to resharpen their points more extensively, extracting more use from the stone before discarding it. Cumberland toolmakers more often discarded points with useful life remaining. The authors interpret this as evidence that growing familiarity with local stone sources changed the economics of keeping or replacing a tool. People uncertain where their next suitable supply would come from had stronger reasons to conserve what they already carried; later communities could draw on knowledge accumulated and transmitted across generations.

That explanation is an inference tested against patterns in the artefacts, not a direct observation of prehistoric intentions. The distinction matters: archaeology can compare explanations of ancient behaviour without pretending that discarded tools tell us everything about the people who made them. What is not dependent on accepting this particular explanation is the broader chronological problem for creationists. These toolmaking traditions belong to the closing stages of the last Ice Age, well before the 6,000–10,000-year timescale commonly assigned to the entire universe by young-Earth believers.

Nor does the wider evidence support a recent arrival from the Mesopotamian world of biblical mythology. This particular study does not investigate ancestry, but ancient DNA research places Indigenous American origins within a much older population history involving northeast Asia and Beringia, the region that once connected Siberia and Alaska. There is no evidential basis here for replacing that history with a recent dispersal from Babel or a repopulation of the Americas by Noah’s descendants. The biblical account supplies the assertion; the archaeological and genetic records supply a different history.

What emerges is a recognisably human story of ingenuity, experience and cultural inheritance. Long before the supposed beginning of the world, people were already making decisions about resources, refining their technologies and passing useful knowledge to the next generation. Science asks how those societies lived and learned. Young-Earth creationism must first explain how they managed to exist before its creation date.

Refuting Creationist - The Case For Science Keeps Getting Stronger - Science Works While Creationism Fails

DNH 8 mandible a) Occlusal View, c) Inferior view.

Martin, J. M., et al (2026).

a. DNH 8 occlusal view; b. DNH 8 left lateral view; c. DNH 8 inferior view; d. DNH 8 right lateral view.

Martin, J. M., et al (2026).

Fossils confirm human ancestors first appearance, News, La Trobe University

Two million years ago, southern Africa was home to different human relatives sharing the same landscape and following different evolutionary trajectories. That is the picture strengthened by newly described fossils from Drimolen Main Quarry in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind. For creationists, the difficulties begin with the date: these hominins lived almost two million years before the supposed magical creation of the Universe out of nothing in a literal reading of Genesis. But the evidence also challenges the familiar caricature of human evolution as a single procession of increasingly human creatures, marching towards a predetermined destination.

In a paper published in Annals of Human Biology, Jesse M. Martin and colleagues describe 18 previously undescribed cranial and mandibular specimens from Drimolen. Among them is DNH 127, an adult skull fragment attributed to Homo erectus. This provides valuable support for the earlier identification of DNH 134, a young child’s partial skull from the same site. Identifying a species from an immature individual can be difficult because some diagnostic features develop during growth; an adult specimen provides an additional test of that interpretation.

The significance is therefore corroboration: DNH 127 strengthens the case that Homo erectus was present in South Africa approximately 2.04–1.95 million years ago. It does not, by itself, establish that the species originated there. The earliest fossil yet recognised is evidence of a species’ presence at a particular place and time, rather than a birth certificate identifying its evolutionary birthplace.

Creationism In Crisis - People Were Living In A Serbian Village From Before 'Creation Week' - The Archeology Shows No Signs of A Genocidal Flood

AI-generated impression of life in Neolithic Opovo

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A minimally invasive look into the late Neolithic

One recurring difficulty for young-Earth creationism is that people were apparently building communities before the Earth on which they built them had been created. At Opovo Ugar-Bajbuk, in present-day Serbia, archaeologists place the principal occupation of a substantial Neolithic settlement around 4850–4725 BCE. That is more than seven centuries before Archbishop Ussher’s famous creation date of 4004 BCE, and long before the supposed global Flood of conventional young-Earth chronologies. These people were inconveniently getting on with their lives before that particular biblical timetable allowed them to exist.

The settlement covered more than nine hectares, with up to 220 identified house structures across its development and an estimated peak population exceeding 700. This was a substantial community whose inhabitants could organise the labour needed to construct extensive enclosing ditches. The findings are reported by Fynn Wilkes and an international team in Archaeologia Austriaca.

There is another lesson here that creationist polemics routinely misrepresent: scientists revise their conclusions. Earlier investigations, based on a much more limited excavated area, had produced a picture of a smaller settlement, estimated at about five hectares. The new researchers returned with geomagnetic surveying, coring, systematic surface collection and targeted excavation, combining their findings with radiocarbon evidence. The resulting reconstruction changes our understanding of the settlement’s scale and development. Indeed, Ruth Tringham, who led the research project in the 1980s, is herself a co-author of the reassessment.

That is how scientific knowledge improves. Earlier interpretations remain open to testing, and better evidence produced by improved techniques and better technology, can require them to change. A revision does not make every alternative explanation equally credible, nor does it give an ancient religious narrative a free pass. In this case, the revised chronology still places the community centuries before Ussher’s proposed Creation Week. Changing the reconstructed size and history of a Neolithic settlement does nothing to rescue a timetable that places the creation of the entire planet after its inhabitants had already lived there.

The researchers also distinguish evidence from interpretation. House sizes suggest relatively limited differences in material wealth, while the enclosing ditches indicate an ability to coordinate substantial communal work. Those observations are consistent with a comparatively egalitarian community, but they cannot establish that everyone enjoyed equal status or that coercion was absent. Such qualifications express the limits of the evidence — precisely the limits that responsible scholarship should acknowledge.

Opovo therefore presents two related difficulties for biblical literalism: a human history that refuses to fit its preferred chronology, and a demonstration of how knowledge advances when conclusions remain accountable to evidence. Archaeologists can reconsider what they thought they knew about the settlement because their task is to discover what happened. The evidence is allowed to change the story. Creationism by contrast refuses to change the story and attempts to change the inconvenient evidence.

Refuting Creationism - The People of Sulawesi Were Chewing Betel Nuts Thousands Of Years Before Creationism's God 'Created The World'

Areca 'betel' nuts, Areca catechu

By Praveenmnaik - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Areca 'betel' nut (Areca catechu)

By LBM1948 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Ice Age origins of one of humanity’s oldest drug habits - Griffith News

One of the recurring problems for Bible-literalist creationism is that people were living ordinary human lives long before its chronology permits them to have existed. They were finding food, acquiring knowledge of local plants and developing habits that left recognisable traces on their bodies. Two ancient individuals from Sulawesi, Indonesia, now provide a particularly revealing example: their teeth preserve evidence of betel-nut consumption thousands of years before the supposed biblical Flood—and, in the older individual’s case, long before “Creation Week” itself.

The research, published in Science Advances, concerns two hunter-gatherers, one dated to approximately 25,000–16,000 years ago and the other to 7,600–6,300 years ago. Even the youngest end of the older specimen’s age range places that person well before the entire universe supposedly appeared, according to young-Earth creationism. The younger individual also predates the legendary genocidal Flood in conventional biblical chronologies; indeed, both individuals predate creation itself under the familiar approximately 6,000-year scheme. These are awkward people to accommodate in a history constructed from Genesis.

As the Griffith University news report, researchers detected arecoline, a psychoactive compound found in betel nut, in the individuals’ dental tissues. Both also had unusual rounded grooves in their teeth, interpreted as evidence of habitually sucking whole nuts. Experiments showed that soaking intact nuts in artificial saliva released enough of the compound to produce effects in laboratory receptor tests. Together, the chemical evidence, tooth wear and experiments make a strong case for an ancient practice of consuming a neuroactive plant.

Refuting Creationism - The Evidence For Denisovans Just Keeps Getting Better

Map showing the geographic locations of Denisovan fossils determined by molecular evidence. The colours of the map reflect a combination of elevation and environmental context.

From: Rao, H., Xing, S., Ruan, Q. et al. (2026).

Denisovan Radius Discovered for First Time in Southwest China----Chinese Academy of Sciences

Fragments of Denisovan teeth, and bones recovered from Bianfu Cave in Southwest China

From: Rao, H., Xing, S., Ruan, Q. et al. (2026).

Long before the universe supposedly existed, according to Young-Earth creationism, human relatives were making tools and processing animal carcasses in what is now south-western China. Two complementary papers in Nature reveal another chapter of this inconvenient prehistory, combining ancient proteins, fossil anatomy and archaeology to investigate the Denisovans of Bianfu Cave in Yunnan Province.

In the first paper, Huiyun Rao and colleagues identify five Denisovan remains: two teeth, two skull fragments and part of a radius, one of the forearm bones. These come from layers dated to approximately 167,000–134,000 years ago. The radius provides the first securely identified example of this bone from a Denisovan, adding valuable evidence about a human lineage whose skeleton remains frustratingly poorly known.

The identification depended on proteins preserved within the fossils. Researchers screened more than 60,000 bone fragments before selecting promising specimens for molecular analysis. Surviving protein sequences contained diagnostic Denisovan variants, allowing small fragments to acquire an evolutionary identity that their appearance alone could not securely establish. The study also places another confirmed Denisovan locality within a previously conspicuous gap in their known Asian distribution.

A second paper in Nature, by Qijun Ruan and colleagues examines the wider archaeological record. Evidence of cave use extends from approximately 190,000 to 70,000 years ago — a span of around 120,000 years. Its inhabitants hunted medium-sized and large animals, produced stone tools and made extensive use of bones without elaborate modification. These practices suggest practical exploitation of available materials in a landscape of coniferous forest and forest-steppe.

An important distinction remains: the identified Denisovan fossils cover only part of that longer sequence. Attributing the wider archaeological record to Denisovans is the researchers’ most economical interpretation, rather than direct proof that Denisovans occupied the cave throughout. Nor does the sequence establish uninterrupted residence. That qualification illustrates how scientific conclusions are bounded by the evidence.

Creationism Refuted - Arrowheads From Uzbekistan Shoot Creationism Down

Micropoints from Obi-Rakhmat, layers 20-21

From: Plisson H, et al (2025)

Obi-Rakhmat rock shelter

From: Plisson H, et al (2025)

Arrowhead points found in Central Asia could prove the presence of ‘Homo sapiens’ 80,000 years ago

A handful of tiny stone points from a rock shelter in Uzbekistan presents several difficulties for creationism. They come from deposits dated to around 80,000 years ago, placing their manufacture tens of thousands of years before the supposed creation of the Universe according to young-Earth biblical literalism. They belong to an archaeological record that demands an explanation grounded in prolonged human occupation and sediment accumulation. And their publication demonstrates something creationist propagandists routinely deny: scientists can publish evidence that challenges established interpretations of human history.

The research, by Hugues Plisson and an international team, appeared in PLOS One. Examining stone artefacts from the oldest occupation layers at Obi-Rakhmat, the researchers identified damage consistent with their use as projectile tips. Particularly intriguing are tiny triangular points whose dimensions suggest mounting on light, arrow-like shafts. The authors interpret these as possible evidence of archery approximately 80,000 years ago. Their further suggestion—that the technology indicates the presence of *Homo sapiens*—is an inference from archaeological comparisons, rather than a definitive identification of the toolmakers.

For young-Earth creationism, the chronological problem exists regardless of whether that interpretation ultimately prevails. Disagreement about which human population made an ancient weapon does nothing to bring its manufacture within a biblical timescale. Uncertainty about one aspect of the evidence is not uncertainty about everything, however useful that confusion might be to those trying to dismiss an inconvenient past.

The site also raises an awkward question for advocates of a recent, catastrophic global flood. Its archaeological sequence extends through more than ten metres of deposits representing tens of thousands of years. This is evidence of a lengthy local history that any alternative account must explain. It would be too sweeping to claim that no stone artefact could survive a flood; the stronger objection concerns the preservation and formation of the deposits in which those artefacts occur. Invoking a catastrophe that supposedly reshaped the entire Earth does not explain an ordered archaeological sequence merely by adding water to the story. The paper itself does not investigate Noah’s flood, but its findings add to the ancient history that biblical literalists must somehow compress into a few thousand years.

Creationism Refuted - The People Of Gansu, China Did Not Have Ancestors In The Middle East - Another Bible Blunder

Depiction of Bronze Age Life in Gansu, China

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Astra)

Geographic locations of the studied sites in Gansu and nearby regions (color-filled circles) and published ancient sites in East Asia co-analyzed in this study (white-filled circles).

From: Shi H, Bennett E, Chen G, et al (2026)

Multidisciplinary Study Sheds Light on Agricultural Diffusion, Population Movement, and Funeral Practices in Ancient Gansu----Chinese Academy of Sciences

Archaeologists have long warned that “pots are not people”. The distribution of a particular style of pottery does not necessarily trace the movement of the people who first made it, because pots can be traded, copied or carried through a succession of neighbouring communities. Much the same principle applies to crops, livestock and agricultural techniques: wheat can travel without wheat farmers, sheep without shepherds, and an effective method can spread simply because other people adopt it.

Distinguishing between the movement of people and the movement of their culture is therefore essential when reconstructing prehistory. Agriculture sometimes spread by demic diffusion, in which expanding farming populations moved into new territory and brought their domesticates with them. In other cases, it spread principally by cultural diffusion, as existing populations acquired crops, animals or knowledge through trade, imitation and intermediate exchange networks. Archaeological remains alone do not always reveal which process occurred, but ancient DNA can now test the alternatives directly.

Gansu, in north-western China, provides an especially important case. Situated between the Yellow River basin, the Tibetan Plateau, the Mongolian Steppe and the routes leading towards Central Asia, the region became a major corridor of prehistoric trans-Eurasian exchange. Crops and livestock domesticated much farther west eventually appeared there, raising the obvious question of whether they arrived with migrating western farmers or passed between the established populations of Inner and East Asia.

A multidisciplinary study published in Cell has now examined genomic data from 149 people who lived at eleven Gansu sites between approximately 4,700 and 3,000 years ago. Western-derived crops or livestock were present at nine of those sites, yet the researchers found no corresponding influx of western Eurasian or Central Asian ancestry. The principal genetic components instead derived from populations associated with the Yellow River basin, the south-eastern Mongolian Plateau and the Tibetan Plateau. A few genetic outliers testify to regional mobility and contact, but not to wholesale population replacement.

The evidence therefore indicates that the western domesticates reached Gansu largely through cultural transmission—possibly along the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor or through chains of intermediary communities across the Mongolian Steppe. Crops, animals and ideas crossed Eurasia farther and more readily than the people among whom they had originated. The finding also shows why neither pottery, farming nor any other cultural innovation can safely be treated as a proxy for mass migration.

This carefully reconstructed picture bears little resemblance to the simplistic human history imagined by biblical literalists. It contains no recently dispersed descendants of a single family spreading from Babel with fixed cultures and divinely assigned identities. Instead, it reveals long-established, genetically differentiated populations connected by shifting networks of exchange, occasional mobility and selective cultural borrowing. People did not need to migrate en masse for useful innovations to spread across a continent.

Creationism Refuted - Hominin Footprints - 1.4 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

One of the large, 1.4-million-year-old footprints that the team excavated.
A 6-inch (~15 cm) ruler is shown for scale.

© Kay Behrensmeyer

Reconstruction of Parathropus boisei from holotype specimen OH5

By Daderot - Own work, CC0, Link

Fossil footprints show large body size and group dynamics in 1.4-million-year-old human relatives | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

One of the more tangible problems for Bible-literalist creationism is that the rocks beneath our feet contain evidence of creatures that lived and died long before the supposed biblical “Creation Week”. Fossilised bones can sometimes appear remote and abstract, but footprints are different. They record a fleeting moment in the life of an individual: a foot pressed into soft mud, weight transferred forwards, toes lifted and another step taken. For a few seconds, an extinct relative of ours occupied that precise spot—and the impression it left can remain for more than a million years.

At GaJi10, on the eastern side of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, researchers have now documented 21 hominin footprints made by at least eight individuals approximately 1.43 million years ago. The tracks occur alongside those of hippopotamuses, antelopes and other animals that crossed the same muddy lakeshore during the Early Pleistocene. Volcanic ash associated with the surrounding sediments allowed the track-bearing surface to be dated.

As an international research team reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the footprints provide much more than evidence that hominins were present. Their shape and the pattern of movement recorded in them differ from the more modern-looking tracks attributed to contemporary Homo erectus. The researchers therefore consider them most likely to have been made by Paranthropus boisei—an extinct, bipedal cousin of our own lineage, best known from its enormous chewing teeth, powerful jaws and heavily built skull. The attribution is an inference from footprint anatomy and locomotion rather than an identification that can be made with absolute certainty.

Creationism Refuted - Eurasian Homo sapiens Stopped Eating Insects - Thousands Of Years Before 'Creation Week'

Insects in Chang Moi, Mueang Chiang Mai District, Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Credit: mohigan. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

European Homo sapiens ate fewer insects than Neanderthals and tropical populations - Institut de Biologia Evolutiva - CSIC UPF (UPF)

Humans are strange creatures. While we recoil at the thought of tucking into a dish of sautéed maggots, fried grasshoppers or other insects, we happily eat their close arthropod relatives, crabs, lobsters and prawns, and yet the evidence is that this has only been so for Northern Eurasians for about the last 9,000 year.

People are also strange in another way: despite all the evidence to the contrary and with no supporting evidence at all, there are people who believe the whole of history can be compressed into a few thousand years and that animals can be created by magic without ancestors.

For biblical literalists, every human who has ever lived must be squeezed into the few thousand years since the supposed creation of the first couple. Yet evidence preserved in something as commonplace as calcified plaque on ancient teeth tells a very different story: one of several human lineages, changing diets, inherited genetic variation and adaptation to contrasting environments over tens of thousands of years.

In a paper published in Science Advances, Manuel Piñero and Pablo Librado of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona combined two independent sources of evidence to investigate the history of human insect-eating, or entomophagy. They searched ancient dental calculus for insect DNA and examined genetic variants affecting our ability to digest chitin—the tough polysaccharide forming much of an insect’s exoskeleton.

Refuting Creationism - Denisovans Show Why Scepticism Is The Stuff Of Good Science, But Toxic To Creationism

The Harbin cranium

From: Fu Q, Cao P, Dai Q (2025)

Reconstruction of Homo longi from the Harbin cranium, now identified as that of a Denisovan.

© Nobu Tamura, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Were Denisovans tall compared to other ancient humans? We should be sceptical

One of the most important differences between science and creationism is not that science possesses absolute certainty while creationism does not. It is that science has procedures for recognising uncertainty, testing assumptions and preventing an interesting possibility from being promoted prematurely into an established fact. Creationism, by contrast, begins with an asserted certainty and then selects, distorts or dismisses the evidence according to whether it supports the required conclusion.

That distinction is illustrated particularly well by the recent suggestion that Denisovans may have been exceptionally tall. The claim originated in a preprint by Yousuke Kaifu and colleagues describing an incomplete femur and tibia recovered by dredging from the Penghu Channel between Taiwan and mainland China. Ancient proteins preserved in the bones identify them as Denisovan, giving scientists the first known Denisovan leg bones and potentially valuable information about the bodies of these enigmatic archaic humans.

Penghu 2 and Penghu 3 hominin leg bones.
Anterior (a), medial (b), and distal (c) views of the Penghu 2 right femoral shaft. Anterior (d), lateral (e) and distal (f) views of the Penghu 3 right tibia. Symbols: m=medial, p=posterior. Scale bar=10cm.

Kaifu, Y., et al.(2026)

Reconstructions suggest that the owner of the femur, known as Penghu 2, may have stood about 1.8 metres tall and weighed approximately 83 kilograms. The owner of the Penghu 3 tibia may have been about 1.9 metres tall and weighed around 91 kilograms. These were undoubtedly large individuals by Pleistocene standards, and their estimated dimensions compare with those of some of the largest ancient humans known from Africa and Europe.

But two large individuals do not establish that Denisovans as a population were exceptionally tall. Modern humans vary considerably in height, and no responsible anthropologist would attempt to calculate the average stature of the entire species from two people selected from a crowd. The problem is even greater when dealing with two incomplete bones recovered by trawling rather than from a documented archaeological excavation. Their exact discovery locations and original geological contexts are unknown, while large, robust bones are more likely than small or fragile ones to survive, become caught in fishing nets and be recognised as scientifically interesting.

This is the point made by palaeoanthropologist Sally Christine Reynolds in an article in The Conversation. The height estimates may be perfectly reasonable for the two individuals concerned, but extending those estimates to Denisovans generally would require a much larger and more representative sample. At present, “two Denisovans were tall” is a defensible conclusion; “Denisovans were a tall species” remains an intriguing but weakly supported generalisation.

This is evolutionary population thinking in practice. Species are not collections of identical specimens conforming to an ideal form. They are variable populations in which individuals differ because of their genes, sex, nutrition, health, environment and developmental history. Treating one or two specimens as definitive representatives of an entire species is a remnant of the typological thinking that sits much more comfortably with the creationist notion of separately manufactured and essentially unchanging “kinds”.

Creationists habitually misrepresent scientific disagreements about details as evidence that scientists are abandoning evolution. Nothing of the sort is happening here. Reynolds is not questioning whether Denisovans existed, whether they shared common ancestry with Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, or whether they interbred with the ancestors of some living people. She is questioning whether two bones provide sufficient evidence for one proposed characteristic of the Denisovan population.

Indeed, identifying these bones as Denisovan depended upon evolutionary science. Proteins change through inherited mutations, so similarities and differences in their amino-acid sequences retain evidence of common ancestry. Even when recoverable DNA and diagnostic skeletal features are unavailable, palaeoproteomics can place a fossil within an evolutionary family tree. Creationism supplies no corresponding method for predicting those nested molecular relationships and no explanation for why the history recorded by fossil proteins should agree with that reconstructed from DNA and anatomy.

One qualification should be added to the account in The Conversation. Reynolds states that neither bone has been dated directly. However, a companion preprint reporting radiocarbon and stable-isotope analyses gives Penghu 3 a direct radiocarbon age of approximately 45,575–44,522 calibrated years before the present. Penghu 2 remains undated, and the lack of stratigraphic provenance still prevents the two individuals from being assumed to have lived together or even during the same period. Both studies are also preprints and have yet to complete peer review.

Scientific scepticism therefore does not weaken the evolutionary account; it protects it from exaggeration. Scientists can accept that the bones belonged to two large Denisovans, recognise the importance of their molecular identification and direct dating, and nevertheless withhold judgement on whether Denisovans generally were unusually tall. That willingness to make the conclusion no larger than the evidence can support is one of the defining strengths of science—and the antithesis of a creationist doctrine in which the conclusion was declared infallible before any evidence was examined.

Sally Christine Reynolds's article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commone License, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Rationalising The Complex Hominin Taxonomy

Evolution is a process not an event

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Where does red become blue?

Why it might be time to rethink the human family tree.

Taxonomy is an indispensable tool for organising the living world, but it can also create a misleading impression of nature divided into sharply separated compartments. The familiar Linnaean hierarchy was devised in a pre-evolutionary age, principally to classify organisms as distinct types. It was not designed to accommodate fragmentary snapshots of populations undergoing continuous change over millions of years.

That problem becomes particularly acute in palaeoanthropology. Fossils do not come with labels identifying their species and genus, and palaeoanthropologists cannot test whether their owners could have interbred. They must infer relationships from incomplete and often distorted remains, sometimes consisting of little more than a few teeth or part of a jaw. They must then assign those remains to discrete taxonomic boxes, even though evolution within each lineage was continuous, while populations were also branching, diverging, coexisting and sometimes exchanging genes.

The boundary traditionally drawn between Australopithecus and Homo has always seemed especially arbitrary. It gives the impression that, at some point between the two, evolution took a sudden stride and produced something qualitatively different: a creature sufficiently human to be admitted into our genus. In reality, the characteristics once used to define Homo did not appear together as a package. Bipedalism preceded substantial brain enlargement by millions of years; tool use is no longer regarded as the exclusive preserve of Homo; and fossils repeatedly present mosaics of supposedly “primitive” and “advanced” features.

Nor is there a universally objective amount of anatomical difference that separates one genus from another. A genus is a humanly constructed rank, not something that can be excavated from the ground alongside the fossil. Drawing a firm boundary across a gradually changing lineage can therefore exaggerate the differences on either side of it, artificially turning a succession of small evolutionary changes into an apparent leap.

This is the problem addressed by Monash University palaeoanthropologist Dr Ian Towle in a new paper, Clades, grades, and the genus problem: A case for revising hominin taxonomy, published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology. Towle proposes expanding the genus Homo to include the species currently assigned to Australopithecus and Paranthropus—in effect placing the closely related hominins of the past four or five million years within one broadly defined genus.