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.
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:
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.
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.
Paranthropus^ the “robust” hominins.
Paranthropus is an extinct genus of hominins that lived in eastern and southern Africa between about 2.7 and 1.2 million years ago. It is best known for its so-called “robust” anatomy — not in the sense of being especially large or powerful overall, but because of its massively built jaws, large molar teeth, thick enamel, and prominent cheekbones. Many species also had a sagittal crest (a ridge along the top of the skull) for the attachment of powerful chewing muscles.
These hominins were specialised for processing tough, fibrous, or gritty foods such as roots, tubers, sedges, and possibly hard seeds. Stable-isotope and microwear studies show that different species exploited different diets, but all appear adapted for heavy chewing.
Despite their imposing jaws, Paranthropus species had relatively small brains (roughly 400–550 cm³), similar to or only slightly larger than those of Australopithecus.
Where Paranthropus sits in the hominin family tree
Paranthropus is generally regarded as a specialised side-branch of the hominin lineage rather than a direct ancestor of modern humans. Most palaeoanthropologists think it diverged from an australopithecine-like ancestor sometime after about 3 million years ago, around the same time that the genus Homo was emerging.
In simplified terms:
An australopithecine ancestor gave rise to at least two major lineages:
one leading to Homo (eventually Homo sapiens),
another leading to the robust, chewing-adapted Paranthropus.
This makes Paranthropus a cousin lineage rather than a direct ancestor of modern humans.
However, the family tree is not a neat, branching diagram. The early hominin record shows multiple contemporaneous species living side by side, sometimes in the same regions. Genetic evidence from later hominins (such as Neanderthals and Denisovans) shows that hybridisation between hominin lineages did occur. Although no ancient DNA has yet been recovered from Paranthropus fossils, the possibility that early hominin species occasionally interbred cannot be ruled out.
Why Paranthropus matters
The existence of Paranthropus shows that human evolution was not a straight line from “ape” to “human”, but a bushy, experimental process with multiple lineages trying different ecological strategies. While the robust hominins ultimately went extinct, they represent a successful and long-lived adaptation that coexisted with early members of the genus Homo for over a million years.
Their story underlines a central point of evolutionary biology: most evolutionary experiments fail — not because they were “badly designed”, but because changing environments favour some adaptations over others.
The discovery of the jawbone and what it means for our understanding of the history of the hominins is explained in a University of Chicago news item:
New 2.6-million-year-old Paranthropus fossil reshapes understanding of early homininsA partial lower jaw discovered in Afar, Ethiopia expands the known geographic distribution of Paranthropus northward by 1000 km, revealing the genus to be more widespread and adaptively versatile than previously thought.
In a new paper published in Nature, a team led by University of Chicago paleoanthropologist Professor Zeresenay Alemseged reports the discovery of the first Paranthropus specimen from the Afar region of Ethiopia, 1000 km north of the genus’ previous northernmost occurrence. This finding offers significant new information about when and where Paranthropus existed, its adaptation to diverse environmental conditions, and how it may have interacted with other ancient relatives of modern humans including our genus Homo.
If we are to understand our own evolutionary trajectory as a genus and species, we need to understand the environmental, ecological, and competitive factors that shaped our evolution. This discovery is so much more than a simple snapshot of Paranthropus’ occurrence: It sheds fresh light on the driving forces behind the evolution of the genus.
Professor Zeresenay Alemseged, lead author
Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy
University of Chicago
Chicago, IL, USA.
Alemseged sifts through unidentified fossil fragments in the field to find parts of a Paranthropus specimen.
Alemseged Research Group.
Paranthropus previously “missing” among hominins in the Afar and northeast Africa.
Since the human and chimpanzee lineages diverged around 7 million years ago, human ancestors went through a dramatic evolutionary process that ultimately led to the emergence of Homo sapiens around 300,000 years ago.
We strive to understand who we are and how we became to be human, and that has implications for how we behave and how we are going to impact the environment around us, and how that, in turn, is going to impact us.
Professor Zeresenay Alemseged.
In the fossil record, the human lineage is represented by over 15 hominin species that generally fit into four groups:
Facultative bipeds, e.g. Ardipithecus — Occasionally bipedal but mostly living in trees and walking on all four limbs.
Habitual bipeds: Australopithecus — Retained arboreality to some degree but mostly practiced upright walking and experimented with stone tools.
Obligate bipeds: Homo— The genus to which modern humans belong, characterized by a larger brain, sophisticated tools and obligate bipedalism.
Robust hominins: Paranthropus (also known as robust australopithecines) — Habitually bipedal like Australopithecus but distinguished by extremely large molars capped by thick enamel and facial and muscular configurations that suggest a powerful chewing apparatus.
Hundreds of fossils representing over a dozen species of Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, and Homo had been found in the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, so the apparent absence of Paranthropus was conspicuous and puzzling to paleoanthropologists, many of whom had concluded the genus simply never ventured that far north. While some experts suggested that dietary specialization restricted Paranthropus to southern regions, others hypothesized that this could have been the result of Paranthropus’ inability to compete with the more versatile Homo, [however] neither was the case: Paranthropus was as widespread and versatile as Homo and the new find shows that its absence in the Afar was an artifact of the fossil record.
Professor Zeresenay Alemseged.
Professor Zeresenay Alemseged demonstrates how fragments of the newly discovered mandible specimen fit together.
Alemseged Research Group.
Rethinking hominin biogeography, adaptation, and competition.
The 2.6-million-year-old partial jaw reported in Nature comes from the Mille-Logya research area in the Afar and is one of the oldest Paranthropus specimens unearthed to date. After recovering as many fragments as possible from the field site, the team brought them back to Chicago to analyze internal anatomy and morphology with powerful micro-CT scanning.
It’s a remarkable nexus: an ultra-modern technology being applied to a 2.6-million-year-old fossil to tell a story that is common to us all.
Professor Zeresenay Alemseged.
This new find shows that Paranthropus was as widespread and versatile as Homo and was not necessarily outcompeted by Homo.
Paranthropus was previously nicknamed the “nutcracker” genus, highlighting the very large molars, thick enamel, and heavy jaws and reflecting assumptions that this chewing apparatus caused Paranthropus to occupy a highly specialized and narrower dietary niche. But the new Paranthropus from Afar reveals that starting from its earliest origins, Paranthropus was widespread, versatile, and able to crack more than just nuts.
The new discovery gives us insight into the competitive edges that each group had, the type of diet they were consuming, the type of muscular and skeletal adaptations that they had, whether they were using stone tools or not — all parts of their adaptation and behavior that we are trying to figure out. Discoveries like this really trigger interesting questions in terms of reviewing, revising, and then coming up with new hypotheses as to what the key differences were between the main hominin groups.
Professor Zeresenay Alemseged.
Two fragments of the newly discovered mandible specimen in the location they were originally found.
Abstract
The Afar depression in northeastern Ethiopia contains a rich palaeontological and archaeological record, which documents 6 million years of human evolution. Abundant faunal evidence links evolutionary patterns with palaeoenvironmental change as a principal underlying force1. Many of the earlier hominin taxa recognized today are found in the Afar, but Paranthropus has been conspicuously absent from the region. Here we report on the discovery, in the Mille-Logya research area, of a partial mandible that we attribute to Paranthropus, dated to between 2.5 and 2.9 million years ago and found in a well-understood chronological and faunal context. The find is among the oldest fossils attributable to Paranthropus and indicates that this genus, from its earliest known appearance, had a greater geographic distribution than previously documented2. Often seen as a dietary specialist feeding on tough food, the range of diverse habitats with which eastern African Paranthropus can now be associated shows that this suggested adaptive niche did not restrict its ability to disperse as widely as species of Australopithecus and early Homo. The discovery of Paranthropus in the Afar emphasizes how little is known about hominin evolution in eastern Africa during the crucial period between 3 and 2.5 million years ago, when this genus and the Homo lineage presumably emerged.
For creationists, then, this discovery is a double embarrassment. On the one hand, it further extends the fossil record of hominins into yet another inconvenient corner of deep time and geography, while on the other it neatly illustrates how science actually works: hypotheses are refined, boundaries are adjusted, and understanding improves as new evidence comes in. What it does *not* do is undermine the entire enterprise of palaeoanthropology or cast doubt on the reality of human evolution, despite the fevered hopes of those who imagine that any minor correction is a fatal blow to all of science.
Notably, the authors themselves show no difficulty whatsoever in fitting this new find into an evolutionary framework. There is no hand-wringing, no talk of “crisis” or “collapse” of evolutionary theory, and no appeal to supernatural intervention to plug a supposed gap. Instead, the jawbone is treated exactly as it should be: as a new data point that enriches our picture of early hominin diversity, biogeography, and ecological flexibility. It refines our understanding of where Paranthropus lived, how widely it ranged, and how complex the early hominin landscape really was.
In other words, this is not a problem for evolution at all — it is a routine success story for it. The fossil record continues to grow, predictions continue to be borne out, and the messy, branching, occasionally hybridising reality of human evolution becomes ever clearer. What remains conspicuously absent, as ever, is any comparable explanatory framework from creationism — only a set of immovable dogmas that must be defended by denial, distortion, or special pleading whenever the evidence refuses to cooperate.
Once again, the facts turn out to be neutral referees in the dispute. And once again, they come down firmly on the side of an evidence-based, evolutionary account of our origins rather than on a handful of ancient origin myths that cannot be updated, tested, or corrected when they are shown to be wrong.
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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.
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.
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.
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)11,74,97,98d A chronology and key localities associated with hominin lithic technology3,6,12 (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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
