Creationism Refuted - Poisoned Arrows 50,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Preparing poison arrowheads, 60,000 years ago at the Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Both sides of one of the arrowheads analysed. The left-hand image shows the organic remains in which the arrowhead residues were identified.

Photo: Marlize Lombard.

World’s oldest arrow poison – 60,000-year-old traces reveal early advanced hunting techniques - Stockholms universitet

Creationism’s Biblical narrative has just become even harder to defend, with news that researchers from South Africa and Sweden, led by Professor Sven Isaksson of the Archaeological Research Laboratory at Stockholm University, have identified the oldest traces of arrow poison yet discovered. These were found on 60,000-year-old quartz arrowheads from Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

That is a full 50,000 years before creationist mythology claims the world was created, but entirely consistent with the palaeontological and archaeological evidence that fully modern humans had already evolved in Africa and were developing increasingly sophisticated technologies.

The discovery is reported open access in Science Advances.

The significance of this find is two-fold. Firstly, it shows that early humans had invented the bow and arrow as a hunting weapon much earlier than previously thought. Secondly, it demonstrates that they also understood how to exploit natural toxins — specifically the alkaloids buphanidrine and epibuphanisine — found in the plant Boophone disticha, commonly known as gifbol or “poison onion”. Traces of these compounds had previously been identified on arrowheads only around 250 years old, so this remarkable discovery reveals that the knowledge and use of such poison technology persisted among hunter-gatherer groups for tens of millennia.

Creationism Refuted - The Oldest Known Human Remains in Northern Britain Are From 1,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'!

A Mesolithic burial, 11,000 years ago

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Figure 3. View facing west over the surface of the deposits in the main chamber at the start of the current fieldwork, showing the paint markings made by Mr Redshaw.

Photo by Martin Stables.

DNA analysis reveals Northern Britain’s oldest human remains are of a young female child

A good thousand years before creationism’s god allegedly created the first two humans, the body of a young girl was being buried in a cave in Cumbria, northern England.

This unwelcome news for creationists comes from an international team led by archaeologists at the University of Lancashire, who have just published their findings in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society.

The girl’s remains were discovered about three years ago in Heaning Wood Bone Cave by local archaeologist Martin Stables, from the nearby village of Great Urswick. The University of Lancashire team have now succeeded in extracting enough DNA to determine that she was between about 2.5 and 3.5 years old when she died.

Jewellery in the form of a deer tooth pendant and pierced beads has been radiocarbon dated to around 11,000 years ago, strongly suggesting this was a deliberate burial. This raises the question of why the cave held such significance as a burial site. Modern hunter-gatherer groups often regard caves as gateways to a spirit world, so it is possible that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in northern Europe held similar beliefs.

The team also showed that at least eight other individuals were buried in the cave over a period spanning roughly 4,000–11,000 years ago, from the Early Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age — ironically, the latter being the period when the creation myths of the Bible were being invented. The authors of those Bronze Age stories, of course, would have known nothing whatever of hunter-gatherer societies in northern Europe, their cultural history, or their spiritual traditions.

No doubt we will see the traditional creationist misrepresentation of this evidence, with unfounded assertions that radiocarbon dating “doesn’t work” and that scientists simply make things up to conform to some notional Darwinian narrative. Making things up to fit a pre-existing story is something creationists themselves routinely do. It seems to be characteristic of those who set out to deceive that they accuse others of doing exactly what they themselves practise.

Refuting Creationism - Conflict and Ritual Killings In Europe - Evidence That Wouldn't Be There If The Bible Tales Were True

Locations of the massacres.

From: Teresa Fernández-Crespo et al. (2025).

New research reconstructs the identity of victims from one of the earliest victory celebrations in Europe. | School of Archaeology

Of course — and this is a really strong draft already: clear, punchy, and very much in your usual style. I’ve just smoothed the grammar, corrected spelling, tightened a few phrases, and made the flow a little more polished while keeping your voice intact. Evidence revealed in a paper just published in Science Advances tells a grim story of ritualised killings in Europe about 6,000 years ago. The paper is the work of a team led by Dr Teresa Fernández-Crespo of the University of Valladolid, a Research Associate at Oxford’s School of Archaeology, together with Professor Rick J. Schulting of Oxford University. The killings appear to have been carried out as a victory celebration or demonstration of power, and they speak of conflict and struggles for regional dominance between rival Neolithic groups.

Two things about this research should trouble creationists who cling to patently absurd beliefs despite the vast array of evidence showing them to be wrong.

Firstly, this ritual slaughter took place at a time when, according to the biblical narrative, there would supposedly have been too few people on the planet to form rival groups competing for power and territory in Europe.

Secondly, none of this evidence ought to exist at all if the genocidal Flood described in Genesis had really occurred just a few thousand years ago, because it would either have been swept away entirely or, at best, buried beneath a thick layer of flood-deposited silt containing the fossils of all the dead animals and plants such a catastrophe would have produced.

The isotopic analysis of the remains tells a story of conflict on two levels: rivalry between local groups, in which severed left arms were collected as war trophies, and conflict with outsiders, prisoners from whom were ritually slaughtered in grim victory celebrations.

Refuting Creationism - How The Evidence Refuses To Comply With Creationist Requirements

Reconstruction of life in the Matjes River Rock Shelter, South Africa, 100,000 years ago

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Ten-thousand-year-old genomes from southern Africa change picture of human evolution – Uppsala University

The story emerging from the latest palaeogenomic research reads like a science fiction epic — only it’s real, deep, and immutably ancient. A new study published in Nature reports that prehistoric humans in southern Africa lived in virtual genetic isolation for tens of thousands of years, diverging so far from other branches of Homo sapiens that their genomes fall “outside the range of genetic variation” seen in any living people. These weren’t minor differences; the DNA of individuals who lived south of the Limpopo River for much of the last 100,000–200,000 years retains an astonishing reservoir of variation, some of which has since vanished from other populations.

This isn’t an update to a dusty side-note in human history. It’s a profound rewriting of our origin story. Instead of a simple, uniform lineage emerging neatly from a single place and time, the evidence shows a complex mosaic of populations, genomes and adaptations evolving in parallel, sometimes in long-term isolation, sometimes intermingling. What we once thought of as the “standard” range of human genetic diversity was simply a tiny slice of a much richer prehistoric past.

For those committed to a literal reading of ancient texts like the Bible, discoveries like this pose a stark challenge. The creationist narrative — anchored in a literal six-day creation a few thousand years ago, followed by the dispersion of humankind from a single family — simply cannot grapple with human populations that were genetically distinct for hundreds of millennia before any traditionally assumed timeline. And yet, even here, one predictable excuse will surface: “God planted the evidence as a test of faith.”

That response, however, collapses under the very theological claims it purports to defend. The Bible repeatedly asserts that God is truthful and incapable of deceit — that “God cannot lie” (Titus 1:2; Numbers 23:19; Hebrews 6:18). If we accept those texts at face value, it follows that the Creator would not embed misleading evidence in the earth’s deepest strata as a cosmic trap for intellect. Instead, what we see in the genetic record is precisely what natural processes — mutation, isolation, selection, drift and admixture — predict and what evolutionary theory models with remarkable fidelity.

Refuting Creationism - Stone Tool Sophistication and Multiple Hominin Species in East Asia - 150,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Stone tool manufacture in China

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Discovery challenges long-held beliefs on early human technology in East Asia - Griffith News

Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with palaeoanthropologist Michael Petraglia of Griffith University, have just published an open-access paper in Nature Communications presenting evidence of advanced stone-tool technology dating to between 160,000 and 72,000 years ago in China.

This represents a significant shift in our understanding of the development and diversity of stone-tool technologies in East Asia. For many years it was assumed that stone technology in China lacked complexity and sophistication because bamboo provided a more versatile alternative — the so-called “Bamboo Hypothesis”. Archaeologists now have compelling reasons to revise that view.

If there is one thing calculated to excite creationists, it is the fact that scientists frequently change their minds when the evidence changes — an essential feature of the scientific method. In the simplistic binary worldview common to creationism, however, science is either right or wrong. Any revision of conclusions is therefore taken as proof that science is “wrong”, and that creationism wins by default, without needing to provide any supporting evidence of its own.

From this it follows, in the creationist imagination, that if scientists were wrong about stone-tool technology in China, they must also be wrong about human evolution and the age of the Earth. Consequently, the very evidence that caused scientists to revise their views — sophisticated tools securely dated to 160,000–72,000 years ago — must itself also be wrong. Few creationists seem to notice the paradox of arguing that science must be wrong because evidence corrected it, while simultaneously insisting that the correcting evidence is also wrong. Within the confines of the creationist rabbit hole, believing six impossible things before breakfast merely requires practice.

Nevertheless, the evidence from Xigou, in the Danjiangkou Reservoir region of central China, shows that stone-tool manufacture was not only an advanced skill but may also have been practised by more than one species of hominin. By this time, humans had already diversified into several relatively large-brained species, well before modern Homo sapiens had migrated into Eurasia in significant numbers.

The tools themselves show clear evidence of hafting — the fitting of handles to stone implements — representing the earliest known composite tools in East Asia. This implies an ability to plan ahead and to understand how tool performance could be enhanced, combined with a high level of technical skill and craftsmanship.

Refuting Creationism - The Unintelligently Designed Ancestral Potato and How Humans Improved It

S. jamesii tubers in a ceremonial basket.

Credit: Alastair Bístoí

S. jamseii flowers

Credit: Tim Lee/NHMU

This wild potato may change the agricultural story in the American Southwest – @theU

Anthropologists at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah have traced the anthropogenic spread and cultivation of a relative of the potato, Solanum jamesii (the Four Corners potato). Their findings are published in PLOS ONE. This plant has been a culinary, medicinally and culturally important food crop across the Colorado Plateau for millennia.

Until now, despite its long history, the extent to which indigenous people domesticated S. jamesii has been unknown. Genetic evidence has shown that it had been transported and cultivated far from its natural range and had acquired frost resistance, longer dormancy and sprouting resilience, all of which made it more suitable for cultivation in its anthropogenic range. The Utah team have now shown how it arrived on the Colorado Plateau from its origins in the south-west USA, probably through a trading network.

A problem which I have found impossible to get a creationist to address without them running for the bolt-hole of ‘mysterious ways’ is the fact that, with only a very few exceptions, every domesticated animal and cultivated plant has been considerably improved on the wild stock and is always the result of a human-mediated evolutionary process. The result is often almost unrecognisable as the same species as their wild ancestor.

Yet according to the Bible, all animals and plants were created for the sole benefit of humankind by a supposedly omnipotent, omniscient god. Had that been so, we could expect them to have been created fit for purpose and perfectly suited to the uses to which we put them. The fact that we have had to adapt them and change them so drastically to make them fit for purpose gives the lie to claims of intelligent design by an omniscient designer.

This relative of the potato therefore serves as an illustration of how humans, unwittingly or otherwise, have modified and changed the distribution of cultivated plants by inadvertently mimicking the process of evolution — mutation → selection → reproduction. S. jamesii is native to the Mogollon Rim, a region spanning south-central Arizona and into the Mogollon Mountains of New Mexico. The researchers were able to build a picture of how this plant was transported from there to the Four Corners region of southern Utah, south-west Colorado and north-west New Mexico by extracting the characteristic starch granules embedded in the stone tools used to process the tubers, recovered from 14 archaeological sites within and beyond the tuber’s natural range.

This research adds to the growing body of evidence that indigenous people in the south-western USA actively cultivated crops of their own and did not just acquire them from other peoples. It had previously been believed that they relied primarily on crops domesticated in Mesoamerica, such as maize, beans or squash. It also adds another species to the long list of plants and animals that have had to be modified from their wild type, and for which creationists are at a loss to explain why their supposed omniscient designer god did not do a very good job of it to begin with.

Creationism Refuted - Messages From Nearly 70,000 Years Ago.

Adhi Agus Oktaviana illuminating a hand stencil.

Max Aubert

Humanity’s oldest known cave art has been discovered in Sulawesi.

There's nothing quite like leaving a message behind to tell future generations that you were here.

Creationists, of course, have a message from about 5,000 years ago telling them that there were ignorant Bronze Age storytellers living in the Middle East — but sadly the only truth in their stories was the one they didn’t explicitly state: that they were making things up to explain what they didn’t know, which meant a great many stories to invent. They couldn’t have guessed, of course, that their tales would later be written down, bound up in a book, and then proclaimed to be the inerrant word of a creator god; otherwise they might have made more of an effort to get it right, or at least admitted they didn’t know. As it is, all we really learn from them is just how ignorant they were, and how vivid their imaginations must have been.

To be fair, it may not have been their intention to mislead and misinform, but that has been the result — mostly, it has to be said, through the fault of those who later declared their tales to be the authentic word of a god, because that conveniently suited their political agenda.

People living much earlier, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, left a much clearer and more honest message in the form of cave art, and particularly hand stencils. All they really say is, “Hi there! I was here!” — with no attempt to elevate themselves to a special status or claim to know things they didn’t know. Where they depicted the animals around them, they showed them just as they saw them: wild and free.

This cave art, which precedes the celebrated art of the French and Spanish caves by tens of thousands of years, has now been identified as the oldest known cave art, telling an unambiguous story of people living there around 70,000 years ago — long before anatomically modern humans made their presence felt in Western Eurasia. The discovery and the methods used to date the art were published in Nature, in a paper that marks a defining moment in our understanding of early symbolic behaviour.

Four of the researchers — Maxime Aubert, Professor of Archaeological Science, Griffith University; Adam Brumm, Professor of Archaeology, Griffith University; Adhi Oktaviana, Research Centre of Archeometry, Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional (BRIN), Jakarta, Indonesia; and Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Professor of Geochronology and Geochemistry, Southern Cross University, New South Wales, Australia — have also written an article in The Conversation that explains the significance of the find in accessible terms. Their piece is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Adding A Little Bit More To The Human Evolutionary Story

Top: Multiple views of MLP-3000-1, the newly discovered Paranthropus partial left mandible and molar crown. Bottom: MLP-3000-1 in side-by-side comparison with mandible fossils from other species — Australopithecus afarensis (A.L. 266-1), Paranthropus aethiopicus (OMO-57/4-1968-41 and OMO-18-1967-18), and early Homo (LD 350-1).

Alemseged Research Group

Two fragments of the newly discovered mandible specimen in the location they were originally found.

Alemseged Research Group.

New 2.6-million-year-old Paranthropus fossil reshapes understanding of early hominins | Biological Sciences Division | The University of Chicago

Research published two days ago in Nature by a team led by University of Chicago paleoanthropologist Professor Zeresenay Alemseged will dismay and delight creationists in about equal measure — especially those who manage to rationalise a fossil dating from about 2.6 million years before they believe Earth and everything on it was created — because it shows that scientists were wrong about something.

It is the news that the jawbone of an archaic hominin, Paranthropus, has been found in Ethiopia some 200 miles further north than the previously believed northern limit of these hominins.

Normally, to a binary-thinking creationist, science being wrong about even the most minor and unimportant detail is “proof” that science is wrong about everything. This childish belief probably stems from them having a single source-book which has been deemed to be inerrant, so even the slightest falsehood in it renders that claim untenable. They assume it is the same with science: that what scientists believe comes from supposedly inerrant textbooks written by “prophets” such as Charles Darwin, serving as the source-books from which all scientists get their information. So, if scientists are ever wrong, all the books from the science libraries of the world can be thrown in the waste bin, leaving creationism’s book of “inerrant” origin myths as the winner.

What they find hard to comprehend, apparently, is that scientific knowledge is cumulative, with current thinking always provisional, pending further confirmation or in need of revision in the light of new information, and that facts are neutral in any dispute, so can be objective referees. They fail to realise that because science works this way, scientists from all over the world will eventually converge on a single answer. Religions, by contrast, because they are not based on evidence but on the tenuous thread of interpretation of an ancient book which itself presents no evidence for its claims, continue to diversify into ever smaller sects, each claiming to have the one true answer but having no evidence to referee the dispute.

But of course, in the best scientific tradition, this jawbone simply adds richness to the hominin evolutionary story and raises the possibility that Paranthropus, like Australopithecus and Homo, was present in the Afar region of Ethiopia. And that opens up the intriguing possibility — given the propensity of hominins to diverge and then hybridise — that modern Homo sapiens could have some Paranthropus ancestry.

Creationism Refuted - A 'Transitional Species' That is Probably Another Ancestral Hominin

Dr Jesse Martin of LaTrobe University thinks Little Foot could be a whole new branch of the human family tree.

Photograph: La Trobe University

Iconic fossil may be new type of human ancestor, News, La Trobe University

A brief communication, published last November in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology may, if creationists never read past the title (as usual), have produced a frisson of excitement in those circles. It questioned the taxonomic status of one of the most complete fossil skeletons of an early ancestral hominin, Australopithecus prometheus, popularly known as “Little Foot”.

However, reading even a little further would have turned that excitement into disappointment — assuming, of course, that they understood what they were reading. The authors were not questioning whether the fossil was ancestral at all, but whether it had been assigned to the correct position in the hominin family tree, or whether it should instead be recognised as a distinct ancestral hominin species. In other words, this was a discussion about how many transitional species there are, not whether transitional species exist at all.

The only crumb of comfort available to creationists is the familiar claim that this demonstrates how science “keeps changing its mind”, something they take as evidence that science is fundamentally unreliable—presumably including even those parts they routinely misrepresent as supporting their beliefs.

For anyone who understands the scientific method, and the importance of treating all knowledge as provisional and contingent on the best available evidence, this paper represents the principle functioning exactly as it should. Far from being a weakness, this willingness to revise conclusions in the light of new information is what makes science self-correcting and progressively more accurate over time.

The authors of the paper — a team led by La Trobe University adjunct Dr Jesse Martin—carried out a new analysis of the “Little Foot” fossils and concluded that the specimen was probably placed in the wrong taxon when first described on the basis that it does not share the same “unique suite of primitive and derived features” as Australopithecus africanus. Since that initial assessment, additional fossils of A. prometheus have been discovered, and it has become clear that “Little Foot” also differs from those specimens. At the same time, it remains sufficiently distinct from A. africanus that reassignment to that species is not justified. In short, it possesses its own unique combination of primitive and derived traits and should therefore be recognised as a separate species.

Naturally, there is no real comfort here for creationists. The phrase “suite of primitive and derived features” is simply palaeontological shorthand for evidence of descent with modification—what Darwin referred to as transitional forms. It follows that the researchers involved have no doubt whatsoever that the species under discussion evolved from earlier ancestors, and there is no hint that they believe it was spontaneously created, without ancestry, by magic.

Refuting Creationism - Now It's Evidence of Bipedalism in a Hominin From 7 Million Years Ago

Cast of the skull of Sahelanthropus tchadensis
a species discovered in the early 2000s.

By Didier Descouens - Own work
CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

S. tchadensis fossils (TM 266) compared to a chimpanzee and a human.

Anthropologists Offer New Evidence of Bipedalism in Long-Debated Fossil Discovery

We are only three days into 2026 and already creationism is facing an avalanche of new evidence against it and in favour of evolution on an ancient Earth in a vastly older Universe — directly contradicting the Bronze Age origin myths that creationists cling to with the desperation of a drunk clutching a lamppost.

The latest blow comes from the New York University Department of Anthropology, where a team of researchers led by Associate Professor Scott Williams, working with colleagues from the University of Washington, Chaffey College, and the University of Chicago, have carried out a detailed re-examination of fossil remains attributed to Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Their analysis provides strong evidence that this species was bipedal and shared several key skeletal characteristics with later bipedal hominins, including the australopithecines and members of the genus Homo.

Sahelanthropus tchadensis was discovered in the early 2000s, and its place in human evolution has been debated ever since. Some researchers argued it might represent an extinct ape rather than a stem hominin. Evidence for habitual bipedalism, however, strongly favours the latter interpretation, making S. tchadensis the earliest known human ancestor currently identified in the fossil record.

As such, it becomes yet another example of the transitional species that creationists continue to insist do not exist, often under the mistaken belief that Charles Darwin — whom they treat as the final authority on all matters evolutionary — admitted that the absence of transitional forms was a serious problem for his theory. In reality, Darwin explicitly predicted that such fossils would eventually be found, and the subsequent century and a half of palaeontology has repeatedly confirmed that prediction.

The discovery is of a point of attachment on the femur of a ligament only found in bipedal hominins. The importance of bipedalism in human evolution cannot be overstated. Habitual upright walking is one of the defining characteristics that separates hominins from other apes, reflecting a fundamental shift in anatomy, locomotion, and behaviour. It requires extensive reorganisation of the skeleton, including changes to the position of the foramen magnum, the curvature of the spine, the shape of the pelvis, the proportions of the limbs, and the structure of the feet. Because these adaptations are complex, interdependent, and leave clear signatures in fossilised bones, bipedalism is not a trivial or ambiguous trait. Evidence for it in Sahelanthropus tchadensis therefore places this species firmly on the human lineage and pushes the origin of upright walking — and with it the human evolutionary trajectory — back far earlier than creationist models allow.

Scott Williams’ team have now published their findings, open access, in Science Advances.

Refuting Creationism - 'Lucy' Had a Cousin Species Who Lived Alongside Her

The Burtele Foot with its elements in the anatomical position.

Photo by Yohannes Haile-Selassie/ASU

New research by ASU paleoanthropologists: 2 ancient human ancestors were neighbors | ASU News.

According to new open-access research just published in Nature by a team led by Arizona State University palaeoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie, ‘Lucy’ (Australopithecus afarensis) was not the only hominin living on the Ethiopian Highlands 3.4 million years ago. This was part of the vast span of human evolutionary history that occurred long before creationists believe Earth was made as a small, flat world with a dome over it somewhere in the Middle East. Living alongside ‘Lucy’ was another species, now named Australopithecus deyiremeda.

However, A. deyiremeda differed from A. afarensis in several important ways — differences that reflect how two species can coexist in the same region by adapting to distinct ecological niches. A. deyiremeda, for instance, had an opposable big toe suited to climbing, indicating a more arboreal lifestyle than A. afarensis. Isotope analysis of A. deyiremeda’s teeth also shows that it had a different diet.

The first indication that another species might be present came in 2009 with the discovery of foot bones, announced publicly in 2012. In palaeontology, it is standard practice not to name a new species based on such fragmentary remains, especially when cranial bones are absent. Although teeth were also found in the same area, there was initially insufficient evidence to link them definitively to the foot bones.

Then, in 2015, the team had enough material to announce and name the new species, though they were still unable to demonstrate that the foot bones belonged to it. Now, ten years on, they believe they finally have sufficient fossil evidence to make that connection.

This news is unlikely to trouble creationists, who already have a ready supply of scientifically baseless excuses for dismissing ‘Lucy’: that it was forged; that scientists fabricated the evidence; that it was assembled from scattered bones found six miles apart; that ‘carbon dating’ was used (despite not being applicable at that age); or that radioactive decay rates have changed in the last 6,000–10,000 years, making 6,000 years only appear to be 3.4 million.

For those with the intellectual honesty and humility to form opinions based on evidence, however, the discovery offers a fascinating example of how multiple ancient hominins coexisted — and, in evolutionary terms, how two species sharing a common ancestor can diverge to occupy different ecological niches.

Refuting Creationism - 300,000 Years Of Stone Technology In Africa - Over 2 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Fig. 1: Map of Turkana Basin with the Namorotukunan Archeological Site and timeline of currently known events in the Plio-Pleistocene.

a Geographical context of the Koobi Fora Formation (red stripes), the paleontological collection area 40 (green square), and the location of the site of Namorotukunan (black dot); [map produced Natural Earth and NOAAA ETOPO 202295]; b Stratigraphic context of the Koobi Fora Formation highlighting members and key volcanic ash marker levels, yellow bars refer to the age of archeological horizons (tephrostratigraphy after McDougall et al.⁹⁶); c A chronology of key Plio-Pleistocene hominins from the East African Rift System (EARS)^11,74,97,98 d A chronology and key localities associated with hominin lithic technology^3,6,12 (images of Nyayanga provided by E. Finestone; images of Lomekwi and BD1 based on 3D models; artifact images are for representation and not to scale) and the investigations at Namorotukunan: red arrows represent the artifact levels in the archeological excavations (photos DRB), and colored circles (lettered A-G) represent geologic sections investigated to develop a synthetic stratigraphic column (presented in Figs. 2 and 3).

Braun, D.R., Palcu Rolier, D.V., Advokaat, E.L. et al (2025)

Stone Tools Through Generations: 300,000 Years of Human Technology | Media Relations | The George Washington University

The story of our origins is written in the ground of Africa. It is real, tangible, and objective — a record that doesn’t rely on belief or interpretation, but on physical evidence left behind by our ancient ancestors. A fresh chapter of that record has just been described in a new open-access paper in Nature Communications, authored by an international team of palaeoanthropologists led by Professor David R. Braun of the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology at George Washington University, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

By comparison, the origins narrative found in Genesis reflects the worldview and assumptions of people who believed the Earth was small, flat, and covered by a solid dome. It is astonishing that, even today, some treat that ancient cosmology as a more reliable account of human history than the rich and expanding fossil and archaeological record in Africa. Yet such individuals continue to seek influence over policy, law, morality, and social institutions, grounding their authority not in evidence, but in pre-scientific tradition — a worldview formed long before the wheel, let alone modern science.

The Girl And The Wolf - A Novel From The Infancy Of Our Species

The Girl And The Wolf: Bill Hounslow: 9798272050014: Amazon.com: Books

In Ice Age Europe, when modern humans were spreading across the continent and the last Neanderthals were fading from our story, something remarkable happened deep beneath the limestone hills of southern France. In the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, in the Ardèche valley, a young human child walked through a dark passage and left her footprints in the soft clay floor.

Beside her walked a wolf.

That much we know. Frozen in time for over 30,000 years, those parallel tracks hint at a moment of curiosity, courage, and perhaps companionship long before the first domesticated dogs trotted at our heels. They offer a tantalising glimpse into a forgotten world — the world that inspired my new novel.

The Girl and the Wolf is a story that imagines how such a bond might have begun. It follows Almora, an inquisitive, strong-willed child of the Drognai clan, raised alongside a rescued wolf cub named Sharma. As Almora grows into a capable young woman, her life takes an extraordinary turn when she meets Tanu — one of the last Neanderthals in Europe. Their unlikely love, and Tanu’s struggle to be accepted by Almora’s people, explores themes of kinship, belonging, and the courage to overcome fear of the Other.

Refuting Creationism - How Dynamic Geology Influenced Early Civilisation

The Great Ziggurat of Ur dedicated to the Moon god. Sumerians believed that the gods lived in the temple at the top of the ziggurats.

Photo credits: Reed Goodman,
Clemson University

Geography of Mesopotamian Plain (dashed black line) and its joint watershed (black line)

Giosan L, Goodman R (2025)

Urban civilization rose in Southern Mesopotamia on the back of tides – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have shown, in a paper just published in PLOS ONE, that the rise of Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia was strongly influenced by the dynamic interplay of tides, rivers, and sedimentation at the head of the Arabian Gulf. In doing so, they remind us just how parochial and derivative the culture that produced the origin myths in Genesis really was.

According to Genesis — which places the Middle East, and the Hebrews in particular, at the centre of everything — humans were created fully formed, without ancestry, in a ready-made Bronze Age civilisation.

Within just five generations of a supposed genocidal global flood that allegedly reset life on Earth, eight survivors are said to have produced a population large and skilled enough to embark on a massive civil engineering project: building a tower up to Heaven. In this worldview, Heaven lay just above the clouds over the Middle East, on a flat Earth watched over by a creator god who could apparently be taken by surprise.

Meanwhile, several other ancient civilisations were continuing uninterrupted, apparently unknown to the author of Genesis — despite the fact that some of the stories in Genesis are clearly derived from older Mesopotamian and Egyptian myths. Both the genocidal flood myth and the Tower of Babel narrative draw directly on Mesopotamian sources: the flood from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the tower itself from the Great Ziggurat at Ur.

What the Genesis myths fail to acknowledge is the fundamental role of geological and environmental change in shaping human civilisation. The authors of these myths believed they lived in an unchanging world, created especially for them by a perfect god. There is no hint of plate tectonics shifting continents, no awareness that volcanic gases can alter climates, or that major rivers can change course or silt up. Yet such processes could and did disrupt the regular flooding on which early agriculture depended. Silting and delta formation could leave once-coastal communities stranded inland, while blocking the twice-daily tidal ebb and flow that once reached deep upriver.

Refuting Creationism - Eating Carrion Made Us Human

Factors influencing scavenging behavior in humans.

Carmen Cañizares (@canitanatura).

Eating carrion made us human | CENIEH

One of the most telling weaknesses of creationism is how heavily it depends on piling assumption upon assumption to sustain its narrative. As Stephen Hawking observed in The Grand Design, the more assumptions a theory requires, the less likely it is to be true. This is simply the reverse of Occam's razor, the principle that the simplest explanation consistent with the evidence is usually the most plausible.

Creationists take the simplistic story of human origins from the Bible and build layers of speculation upon it — not derived from scripture or evidence, but from the circular reasoning of “this must have been true, or my beliefs are wrong.”

A classic example is their claim that there could have been no death before Eve’s supposed sin, because death is ‘evil’ and evil only entered the world after the Fall. From this, they conclude that Adam and Eve — and indeed all animals — must have been vegetarian. To prop up this contrivance, they add yet another assumption: that plants aren’t really ‘alive’ in the same way as animals, so eating them doesn’t count as causing death.

This is a textbook case of a weak theory being shored up by multiplying entities and assumptions — the very opposite of sound scientific reasoning. It also collapses under biological scrutiny. There is no evidence in the Bible to support it, and human anatomy and physiology clearly reveal that we are omnivores with a long evolutionary history of meat consumption.

And now, a team of evolutionary anthropologists led by Ana Mateos of Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) has published a research paper in the Journal of Human Evolution, in which they argue that before early hominins developed the technology to hunt large game for themselves, they were probably dependent on scavenging carrion—often from the kills of apex predators.

An important advantage of scavenging is that it provides a reliable source of high-protein food with relatively low energy expenditure. Carcasses can also sustain a population through periods of drought, when prey is scarce and some animals die from natural causes. Early hominins could have used sticks and stones to drive off predators, while their highly acidic stomachs minimised the risk of disease from decaying meat. Later, cooking provided additional protection against pathogens.

After what was likely a brief evolutionary phase as scavengers, humans developed the tools and cooperative strategies to become apex predators themselves. This reliance on carrion may even have been one of the critical factors that set our lineage on a different path from the other African apes, driving both physical and physiological changes.

Creationism Refuted - Time For A Bible Re-Write

A Palaeolithic handaxe with a broken distal end, discovered during the Ayvalık survey

Early humans may have walked from Türkiye to mainland Europe, new groundbreaking research suggests - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

A phrase much loved by journalists (and creationists) is “the history/science books will need to be re-written”. It’s a convenient bit of lazy journalistic rhetoric — but in this case, the book that actually needs to be re-written is the Bible.

The discovery in question concerns the migration of early Homo sapiens, who may have spread from the Levant across Asia Minor (modern-day Türkiye) and then into Greece via a northern Aegean land bridge, exposed when sea levels were much lower during the last Ice Age — between 115,000 and 11,700 years ago.

This new evidence challenges some existing models of early human migration routes. However, it represents only a refinement of the broader, well-established story of humanity’s dispersal out of Africa, not a challenge to it. What it does completely undermine, however, is the Biblical narrative claiming that all humans descended from a single, ahistorical couple created without ancestors some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago — followed by a supposed global “reset” just 4,000 years ago when a genocidal flood left only eight related survivors.

The evidence for this Ice Age land bridge comes from the recovery of 138 stone tools at ten sites within a 200 km² area around Ayvalık in north-west Türkiye, opposite the Greek island of Lesbos.

Refuting Creationism - Rock Art From Arabia - 2,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

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12,000-year-old monumental camel rock art acted as ancient 'road signs' to water sources - Griffith News

Thousands of years before creationism’s god supposedly decided to create a small, flat planet with a dome over it, centred on a tiny patch of the Middle East, humans were already leaving road signs and directions to water sources carved into rocks in what is now the Arabian desert. These carvings offer a fascinating insight into the region’s prehistoric megafauna—and, of course, all such evidence of early human activity would have been completely obliterated by the biblical genocidal flood, had such an event really occurred as described.

The rock carvings were discovered by an international team of archaeologists, led by the Heritage Commission of the Saudi Ministry of Culture, and including scholars from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), University College London, Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), and others. Their findings were published open access in Nature Communications a few days ago.

At the time, the region that is now arid desert was made habitable by a humid period following the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), when surface water was abundant. Stone tool manufacture from the site shows clear cultural links with Neolithic societies in the Levant—ironically, the very region where the authors of Genesis set most of their imaginative origin myths, apparently oblivious to the deeper history of the area or the existence of earlier human populations beyond their narrow horizons.

Refuting Creationism - Hominins Hunted Elephants in Italy - 400,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Hunting straight-tusked mammoths, Palaeoloxodon antiquus

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)

Butchering the carcass with small flint blades

AI-generated (ChatGPT 5)

Early humans butchered elephants using small tools and made big tools from their bones | EurekAlert!

A recent archaeological finding, by Beniamino Mecozzi of Sapienza University of Rome, Italy and colleagues, at the site of Casal Lumbroso in northwest Rome, has once again refuted the Bible narrative by extending the known depth of human prehistory far beyond the limits imposed by biblical literalism.

In sediments dated to some 400,000 years before creationism’s mythical 'Creation Week', the research team has uncovered evidence that early humans were butchering elephants with small stone tools and then fashioning large implements from the animals’ bones. These traces of planning, adaptation, and technological innovation demonstrate that human ingenuity was already well advanced hundreds of millennia before the supposed creation of Adam.

More interestingly from a scientific perspective is not the incidental refutation of ancient creation myths, which happens with almost every archaeological and palaeontological discovery, but the fact that these hominins predate the successful Homo sapiens migration out of African and into Eurasia by tens of thousands of years and pre-date even the earliest evidence of Neanderthals in western Eurasia. Such discoveries highlight the sheer scale of time over which our lineage evolved—an evolutionary saga measured not in millennia but in hundreds of thousands of years. The people who left these marks were not modern humans, but archaic members of the genus Homo, close relatives or ancestors of the Neanderthals. Their world was already ancient when the earliest chapters of Genesis were imagined.

Refuting Creationism - Evidence From Ancient China Buries the Bible Creation and Genocidal Flood Myths

Excavation at Baligang in 2004, showing house, storage and burial pits.

Chi, Zhang & Hung, Hsiao-Chun (2013)
© Antiquity Publications Ltd. 2013

Weisskopf, A., et al; (2015) (CC BY 4.0)

Ancient DNA reveals the population interactions and a Neolithic patrilineal community in Northern Yangtze Region | Nature Communications

The bad news for creationists continues unabated - because science continues unabated to reveal the truth.

Creationists like to insist that the Bible’s tales of creation and Noah’s flood are real history, not myth. But once again, science has delivered a devastating blow to that fantasy. A new open access paper in Nature Communications reports the DNA of 58 individuals from the Baligang archaeological site in central China, spanning from the Middle Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age (6,500 BP - 2,500 BP). Far from supporting the idea of a world repopulated just a few thousand years ago by Noah’s family, the evidence shows continuous human settlement, migration, and cultural development stretching back thousands of years before, during and after the supposed date of the Biblical flood - about 4,000 years BP.

The genetics reveal a population that was anything but “reset.” Northern and southern East Asian groups repeatedly mixed at Baligang, leaving detectable signatures of long-term population movement and exchange. Around 4,200 years ago, southern ancestry became especially prominent, signalling migration into the region. Burial evidence adds further depth: the males were closely related along the paternal line, while the females carried diverse maternal lineages—clear evidence of patrilineal clans drawing in women from outside communities. This is a picture of a complex, interconnected society developing steadily over time.

Refuting Creationism - A Jewellery Factory in France, At Least 32,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Meticulous excavation work at La Roche-à-Pierrot

Late Neanderthals and early European Homo sapiens may have lived and worked together in southwest France.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)

The oldest shell jewellery workshop in Western Europe | CNRS

The creationism cult took another blow yesterday with the publication of details of the oldest jewellery workshop yet found in Western Europe—dating to at least 32,000 years before the mythical six-day creation of everything from nothing. The site appears to have been used for the organised manufacture of shell ornaments, suggesting a society in which the production and trade of personal adornment already played an important role.

The discovery, made by a team of scientists from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Université de Bordeaux, the ministère de la Culture, and Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). It records the excavation of a Palaeolithic site in southwest France, dating from a period when Homo sapiens were spreading into the region and Neanderthals were in decline.

However, the evidence points to a more complex story — one of coexistence and cultural exchange, or even the absorption of Neanderthals into the expanding H. sapiens populations, with traditions and technologies merging. It also raises the possibility that H. sapiens had been established in the area far earlier, perhaps through an earlier migration wave.