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.

The Real Chauvet Child and Wolf Tracks. In 1994, archaeologists exploring the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in the Ardèche region of France made an astonishing discovery: some of the oldest known human art on Earth — and something even more unexpected was to come.

In 2022, on the soft clay floor of a deep passageway, they discovered the footprints of a child, estimated to be around eight years old. Alongside them were the impressions of a large canid, likely a wolf. The tracks run side by side for several metres before disappearing into darkness, untouched for more than 30,000 years.

There is no evidence the animal was tamed, and it may simply have been following the child’s scent or path. But the fossil record occasionally offers us moments like this — fleeting hints of ancient encounters between humans and wolves before the process of domestication began.

The footprints raise intriguing possibilities:

• Were early humans already forming tentative bonds with wild wolves?
• Did shared hunting grounds foster familiarity and cautious tolerance?
• Could small acts of curiosity and courage have eventually led to true companionship?

We cannot know with certainty what happened that day in Chauvet Cave. But those footprints remind us that the story of humans and wolves began long before the first village dogs lay beside our hearths — deep in the Ice Age, when the world was young and full of wonder.

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'

[left caption]

[right caption]

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.

Refuting Creationism - Origins of the People of Papua New-Guinea

Male Huli tribe member in Tari area of Papua New Guinea in traditional clothes and face paint.

Image Credit: By Amy Nichole Harris / Shutterstock

New AI Study Clarifies the Origins of Papua New Guineans | University of Tartu

A team of researchers led by Dr. Mayukh Mondal of the Centre for Genomics, Evolution & Medicine, Institute of Genomics, University of Tartu, Estonia, have used AI-powered demographic modelling to estimate the genetic ancestry of the people of Papua New Guinea (PNG), whose origins have long been debated.

Papua New Guineans have physical features that differ noticeably from many Asian populations, and some superficial similarities to sub-Saharan Africans have led to speculation that they might descend from a very early migration out of Africa, predating most other non-African Homo sapiens. This new study strongly challenges that hypothesis: it attributes PNG’s genetic distinctiveness instead to a substantial Denisovan admixture followed by a prolonged period of isolation, a severe population bottleneck, and slower population growth.

According to the creationist mythologies, all human beings alive today descend from Adam and Eve—or, in some versions, from Noah and his family after a global flood. If that were literally true, then all living humans would share a very narrow genetic base: mitochondrial DNA (passed via the maternal line) would be limited to a very small number of variants, and all males would share essentially the same Y-chromosome (barring mutation) tracing back to the same male ancestor.

However, the observable facts are that human genetic diversity is much richer than those narratives predict. The mitochondrial DNA lineages in living people trace back to multiple distinct haplogroups with divergence times of tens to hundreds of thousands of years within Africa and beyond into archaic ancestors; similarly, Y-chromosome diversity indicates many lineages. Our human genome tells a far more complex story: long periods of evolution in isolation, multiple migrations, re-mixing, and interbreeding with related hominin species.

The same applies to other species which creationists mythology insists are the descendants of a small number of survivors of the same genocidal flood. Few living species show evidence of such a narrow genetic bottleneck, which would probably have resulted in far too much inbreeding resulting in extinction for most of them.

All non-African humans today are descended from the major “Out-of-Africa” (OOA) migration(s) of Homo sapiens. As populations moved into Eurasia, they interbred first with Neanderthals, then with Denisovans. Underlying all this, there is also the possibility of genetic contributions from even earlier human migrations (e.g. H. erectus) into the ancestors of Neanderthals, Denisovans, or earlier modern humans. Given the evidence that hominin populations often interbred when they came into contact, it would be surprising if there were no admixture between H. erectus (or similar early lineages) and the predecessors of Neanderthals and Denisovans (often thought to include H. heidelbergensis or H. antecessor).

Refuting Creationism - Tool-Making Humans In Indonesia - 1 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Stone tools from Sulawesi, dated to over 1.04mya, scale bars are 10mm.Credit: M W Moore

Credit: M W Moore

Map of Southeast Asia showing the location of Calio in southern Sulawesi.

Oldest evidence of humans on ‘Hobbit’s’ island neighbour discovered – who they were remains a mystery - Griffith News

Archaeologists led by Budianto Hakim of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) and Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution have uncovered evidence of tool-making on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi dating back 1.04 million years. The identity of the toolmakers remains unknown, as no hominin fossils have yet been found on the island. Their discovery has just been published open-access in Nature.

The most likely candidates are Homo erectus or a descendant population that adapted to Sulawesi’s distinctive environment. The island lies close to Flores, home of the diminutive ‘Hobbit’ (H. floresiensis), thought to have evolved from H. erectus through island dwarfism, a process that also produced the miniature elephants of Flores. A related discovery was made in 2019 on Luzon in the Philippines, where H. luzonensis—another likely offshoot of H. erectus—was identified. It is therefore entirely plausible that H. erectus, or one of its evolutionary branches, was present and making tools on Sulawesi more than a million years ago.

For creationists, such finds are troublesome because they align seamlessly with evolutionary theory, showing hominins branching, adapting, and diversifying in different environments, just as Darwin and Wallace first described in 1859. They also highlight the profound role of environment in shaping evolutionary outcomes.

For science, the discovery is particularly significant because it implies that an early hominin was capable of undertaking sea crossings across the formidable ‘Wallace Line’—a biogeographic boundary that long isolated the fauna of Australasia from mainland Asia by preventing the natural dispersal of terrestrial animals.

Refuting Creationism - How Bronze Age Brittons Refute the Bible Flood Tale

East Chisenbury midden under excavation.

Credit: Cardiff University

Landscape location of All Cannings Cross midden.

Credit: Cardiff University.

The Age of Feasting: Late Bronze Age networks developed through massive food festivals, with animals brought from far and wide | EurekAlert!

Archaeologists from Cardiff University have published the largest study of its kind into animal remains from Late Bronze Age Britain, and their findings reveal a surprisingly complex picture of feasting, farming, and far-reaching social networks. The research, published in iScience, reports on multi-isotope analysis of more than 3,500 bones from six prehistoric middens in Wiltshire and the Thames Valley. These vast heaps of discarded remains are the archaeological traces of large communal feasts held some 3,000 years ago.

The team found that the animals consumed—cattle, pigs, and sheep—were not all raised locally. Some were brought from considerable distances, suggesting both a sophisticated agricultural economy and a culture in which travel and exchange linked communities across southern Britain. Such large-scale gatherings, the researchers conclude, were central to forging alliances, maintaining social bonds, and reinforcing ritual practices in the closing centuries of the Bronze Age.

In other words, these middens are the material testimony of thriving societies in Britain whose development ran seamlessly from the Neolithic into the Bronze Age, without any trace of a catastrophic global flood. If Genesis were literal history, such sites could not exist. But they do. The Cardiff findings are therefore another piece of hard archaeological evidence that exposes the biblical flood as a myth, not a record of real events.

Far from being isolated farming villages, Late Bronze Age communities in Britain were enmeshed in a dynamic cultural landscape with trade and ritual at its heart. I have previously written about the political control and economic development in Britain being sufficient to command and supply the manpower needed to undertake massive civil engineering projects such as building Stonehenge and Silbury Hill. Silbury Hill alone took an estimates 18 million man-hours to build (i.e. 500 men working for 15 years) - a level of political and economic development which would have been impossible within the Bible's framework.

And here lies the striking problem for biblical literalism. If we take the chronology given in Genesis at face value, Noah’s Flood is supposed to have occurred around 2348 BCE. By that reckoning, all humans and animals on earth, save those aboard the Ark, were annihilated. The Late Bronze Age middens, however, date to between 1200 and 800 BCE—well after the supposed global deluge. The isotope evidence shows continuity of local herds, supplemented by long-distance transport of animals, not a sudden repopulation from a single Middle Eastern source.

Refuting Creationism - A Potted History of Egypt Shows No Sign Of A Global Flood

Pottery vessel in which the Nuwayrat individual was discovered.

Morez Jacobs, A. et al. (2025). Nature (CC-BY 4.0)

We decoded the oldest genetic data from an Egyptian; a man buried around 4,500 years ago – what it told us

Geographic location of the Nuwayrat cemetery (red dot) and the previously sequenced Third Intermediate Period individuals from Abusir el-Meleq²⁰ (purple diamond).

Round about the time when the Bible’s timeline claims there was a global genocidal flood deep enough to cover the highest mountains, the body of a man was being interred in a large earthenware pot in a tomb in Egypt. If there had been a flood such as that described in the Bible, this burial would have been swept away or at least buried under a deep layer of sediment containing the jumbled remains of animals and plants killed in the flood — including species from disconnected landmasses, since there would have been no barriers to how far they could have been transported by the floodwaters.

Yet none of this appears to be true. Egyptian civilisation, which can trace its origins back to around 5,500 BCE, continued unbroken, with no record of a flood other than the annual Nile inundations on which their agriculture depended, until Egypt was absorbed first into the Greek Empire of Alexander and then into the Roman Empire. There is quite simply no record of a global flood in any Egyptian sources, and no evidence that the country was repopulated by people radiating out from a centre somewhere in the Middle East who could miraculously read and write in the hieroglyphics used by pre-“Flood” Egyptians.

Instead, we now have the genetic evidence of the man’s DNA, which tells a story of Egyptian origins that includes both North African and Mesopotamian ancestry.

How the remains of this pot burial were discovered and analysed is the subject of an open-access paper in Nature by an international team of archaeologists led by Dr Adeline Morez Jacobs, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padua, Italy, and a visiting lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, UK.

Dr Morez has also described the research and its significance in an open-access article in The Conversation, in the form of an interview. This article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Origin of a People - The Migration of the Slavs

The Slavs in their Original Homeland

Alphons Mucha (1912)

Excavation in 2020 at the pre-Slavic cemetery of Brücken, Mansfeld-Südharz District (Saxony-Anhalt).

© Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt

How the Slavic migration reshaped Central and Eastern Europe

This blog post is something of a departure from my usual refutations of creationism. At times, that exercise can feel like shooting fish in a barrel, since almost every scientific paper on palaeontology, cosmology, or evolutionary biology casually refutes creationism simply by presenting the facts and evidence—something creationism singularly lacks.

This, however, is only tangentially related to creationism, in that it concerns the diversification of humans into distinct regional cultural and genetic populations. That richness and complexity is utterly incompatible with the notion that all of humanity radiated out from a single founder population of eight related individuals in the Middle East.

Instead, it is about the genetic evidence for the origins of the Slavic peoples, for whom I feel a special affinity. My youngest son is married to a Slav woman from Czechia and now lives and works there. Former Czechoslovakia also played a formative role in my political development during the 1960s, when the Prague Spring gave those of us on the left hope for a form of socialism that was democratic, open, and inclusive — rather than the totalitarian system into which Soviet Communism had degenerated. The self-sacrifice of the young idealists Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc, in response to the Soviet-led invasion that suppressed the reforms, was a profound inspiration — about which I wrote after a visit to Prague in December 2011, when a visit to their memorial in Wenceslaus Square, on the site of their self-immolation, reduced me to tears.

Since then, we have returned to Czechia several times. On our most recent trip in the summer of 2024, we visited the museum in the Moravský Krumlov castle near Brno, which currently houses a series of immense art nouveau paintings by the Czech artist Alphons Maria Mucha—perhaps better known in the West for his commercial art nouveau designs for chocolate boxes, biscuit tins, and soap packages that epitomised the 1920s and 30s. The series — a Czech national treasure I described at length soon after our return — titled The Epic of the Slavs, was pained between 1912 and 1926. It depicts the story of the Slavic peoples’ development in Eastern Europe up to the mid-1920s: a people struggling to forge an identity under political pressure from surrounding religious powers, from Eastern Orthodoxy in the south and east, to Catholicism in the west, followed later by German Protestantism. Like the Irish, the Czech people’s identity was forged in this power struggle, eventually emerging as proud and independent. Today, Czechia is one of the most atheist countries in Europe.

This article, however, is about the deeper origins of the Slavic peoples, as described in a recent open-access paper in Nature by an international team of researchers led by Joscha Gretzinger of the Department of Archaeogenetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.

Refuting Creationism - Where Our Earliest Common Primate Ancestor Lived

Early primates survived in cold, not tropical climates

Japanese snow macaque - unusual for a modern primate but our common ancestor may have lived in a similar climate.

New research, led by Dr Jorge Avaria-Llautureo of the University of Reading, UK, suggests that our early ancestors evolved in a cold climate rather than the tropical environment traditionally assumed.

Ever-hopeful creationists will no doubt seize on this as evidence that science keeps “getting everything wrong” and is now supposedly admitting that humans did not evolve in Africa but… somewhere else. (Not in Mesopotamia either, and certainly not just 10,000 years ago, but we can worry about that later — the important thing is that science got it wrong again, right?).

But of course, this is a distortion. The new findings don’t overturn evolution, nor do they suggest humans suddenly popped up in the “wrong” place. The study doesn’t even concern early human ancestors directly. Instead, it examines the very earliest primates — the common ancestor of the entire primate clade, which includes monkeys, apes, and humans, but also tree shrews, tarsiers, bush babies, and lemurs.

So the debate here isn’t about whether primates share a common ancestor — that fact is firmly established — but about where that ancestor first evolved. The conventional view has long been that primates arose in warm, tropical forests, because that’s where the majority of them live today. But by examining genetic data, ecological modelling, and the fossil record, Avaria-Llautureo and colleagues argue that the earliest primates actually adapted to cooler conditions. In other words, the roots of the primate family tree may lie in temperate regions, not the tropics.

Far from being a “crisis for evolution”, this is science doing what it always does: refining our understanding in light of new evidence. No biologist doubts that primates, including humans, share common ancestry going back tens of millions of years — far beyond the Bible’s compressed and mythical 6,000–10,000-year timeline. What changes is our picture of the environment in which those ancestors thrived.

As Dr Jason Gilchrist of Edinburgh Napier University — who was not involved in the study — points out in his article in The Conversation, this research challenges old assumptions but also enriches our understanding of primate resilience. If our lineage began in colder settings, it helps explain how primates could later spread and diversify into such a wide range of habitats, from the tropics to the highlands, deserts, and even urban environments where some species now live.

So the take-home message is not “science was wrong again” but rather “science is working as it should”. Each new finding gives us a sharper, more accurate picture of our evolutionary story — a story that remains completely at odds with creationist myth-making, but endlessly fascinating in its complexity.

Refuting Creationism - A Denisovan Gene Helped Humans Populate The Americas

An artist's rendering shows the first-ever portrait of a Denisovan woman, recreated from an ancient DNA sample.

Maayan Harel.

The proposed evolutionary history of MUC19.
The Denisovan-like haplotype (in orange) was first introgressed from Denisovans into Neanderthals and then introgressed into modern humans. The introgressed haplotype later experienced positive selection in populations from the Americas. The introgressed MUC19 haplotype is composed of a 742-kb region that contains Neanderthal-specific variants (blue). Embedded within this Neanderthal-like region is a 72-kb region containing a high density of Denisovan-specific variants (orange), and an exonic variable number tandem repeat (VNTR) region (gray). The box below the 742-kb region depicts zooming into the MUC19 VNTR region, in which admixed American individuals carry an elevated number of tandem repeat copies.

Fernando A. Villanea et al. (2025)

Extinct human relatives left a genetic gift that helped people thrive in the Americas | Brown University

Another day; another scientific paper showing the Bible to be wrong — not just slightly wrong, but fundamentally, demonstrably, and irretrievably wrong.

This latest blow comes from researchers at Brown University, who have traced a variant of the gene MUC19, originally identified in the extinct archaic hominins known as Denisovans, and found it alive and well today in modern Latin Americans with Indigenous ancestry. They also detected it in ancient DNA recovered from archaeological sites across both North and South America.

The variant is far too common in modern populations to be a trivial accident. Its persistence screams survival advantage. Natural selection has kept it in play because it helps its carriers thrive in the environments the earliest migrants into the Americas encountered.

What does MUC19 do? It helps build mucus — not glamorous, but life-saving. From the saliva that begins digestion to the mucosal barriers in the gut and respiratory tract that fend off infection, this gene equips its owners with a stronger shield against disease.

And where did it come from? The Denisovans. But it likely reached us by way of Neanderthals, with whom Homo sapiens also interbred. In other words, modern humans are not some isolated “special creation” freshly minted out of clay a few thousand years ago; we are a patchwork of lineages, woven together by repeated episodes of interbreeding over tens of thousands of years.

For creationists, this paper is a nightmare. First, the scientists are explicit: the explanation rests entirely on Evolution and the blind, natural processes that drive it. Second, the mere fact that extinct species like Denisovans and Neanderthals could successfully mate with our ancestors drives a stake through the heart of biblical literalism. Instead of Adam and Eve, what we see is gradual emergence — modern humans arising by incomplete speciation across a broad geographical spread, with genes flowing back and forth whenever populations met again. This pattern repeats itself throughout hominin history, and it unfolds on a timeline that makes the biblical six-thousand-year fantasy look laughably naïve.

Creationism Refuted - Neanderthals And Modern Humans Interbreeding in Israel - 130,000 Years Before Creation Week

AI reconstruction of mixed Neanderthal-
Homo sapiens family.

ChatGPT 5

AI reconstruction of mixed Neanderthal-Homo sapiens family (enhanced).

Earliest Evidence of Neanderthal–Homo sapiens Interbreeding Found in Israel | Tel Aviv University | Tel Aviv University

Another day, another paper refuting creationism and the Bible narrative.

Creationism suffered yet another body blow a few days ago with the announcement that a Tel Aviv University (TAU)-led international team has concluded that 140,000-year-old fossilised remains of a child, found 90 years ago in the Skhūl Cave on Mount Carmel, show unmistakable evidence of being a hybrid between a modern Homo sapiens and a Neanderthal.

Whether this news will penetrate the impervious defences of creationists — who resemble a brain-dead boxer long since counted out, the crowd gone home, yet still convinced he is winning — remains to be seen.

Not only does this timeline, which places anatomically modern humans outside Africa living alongside another hominin species, utterly contradict the Bible’s creation myth, but so does the very fact that there were multiple hominin species at all. The problem for Bible literalists is not just the incompatibility of dates, but the clear evidence of human evolution and divergence — evidence that rules out the notion of a single ancestral couple committing an “original sin” that supposedly condemns all their descendants to seek “salvation” from the wrath of an eternally unforgiving creator god.

To make matters worse for creationism, this fossil was found in the very region that later became central to the Bronze Age mythology of the Bible.

From a scientific perspective, this discovery — confirming what has long been suspected — shows that there were several earlier, ultimately unsuccessful migrations of H. sapiens out of Africa. During these early dispersals, modern humans met and interbred with Neanderthals, introducing *H. sapiens

DNA into Neanderthal populations long before the successful migration around 60,000–40,000 years ago, when further interbreeding occurred.

Refuting Creationism - Earliest Known Hominins In Europe - 1.4 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A researcher holds a stone tool in Korolevo.

CAS Prague Institute of Archaeology

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Press release | The First Humans Came to Europe 1.4 Million Years Ago - ARUP

A map showing the migration of hominins through Europe.

CAS Prague Institute of Archaeology

This news release slipped beneath my radar back in March 2024, but as it’s now being discussed on social media, I thought I’d take a look and track down the original press release and the publication in Nature.

The news came from the Czech Institute of Archaeology: research by an international team led by Roman Garba, from the Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, has uncovered the earliest evidence of hominins in Europe at a site in Ukraine.

This is, like most discoveries in biology, archaeology, and geology, compelling evidence that the Bible’s account of creation is not only wrong, but so far removed from reality that it can’t even be rescued as metaphor or allegory. Increasingly large portions of the Bible now have to be explained away in this manner as mainstream Christianity retreats from the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy and the idea of a creator god. What’s left is a dwindling rump of die-hard creationists, clinging desperately to the wreckage of their beliefs as the tsunami of evidence sweeps them further into irrelevance.

The discovery was made at Korolevo, Ukraine, and consisted of stone tools—sadly, no bones were found. If confirmed, this pushes back the timeline of hominin migration into Eurasia by 200,000 to 300,000 years from the previous earliest known date at Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, Spain. The scale of denialism required to dismiss this discovery can be measured in the response of one such creationist on Facebook:

since the earth is less then [sic] 6,000 years old where was this skeliton [sic – it’s actually a stone tool] for the remiander [sic] of that time seeing there was no universe?

Refuting Creationism - A Human And An Australopithecine Co-Existed - 2.7 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Arrowsmith (left) and ASU Associate Professor Christopher Campisano examine the geology near the Asboli Homo teeth site

Photo by Virginia Commonwealth University Professor Amy Rector

ASU scientists uncover new fossils — and a new species of ancient human ancestor | ASU News

It is generally accepted by palaeoanthropologists that the genus Homo evolved from an Australopithecus species somewhere in East Africa, most likely in the Afar region of Ethiopia, where the famous Australopithecus afarensis specimen “Lucy” was found. However, it is now widely recognised that the hominin evolutionary tree was far from straightforward, resembling more a tangled bush with side-branches that went extinct, rather than a simple, linear progression.

Given the tendency of our ancestors to diversify and occasionally interbreed, it is entirely possible that the genus Homo emerged from a hybrid population, or even that early Homo back-bred with ancestral australopithecines — especially when two or more species lived in close proximity, as new evidence suggests they did in the Afar region.

Maps showing (left) the location of the Ledi-Geraru site within the Horn of Africa on the left, and the location of the Australopithecus and Homo teeth on the right

Images by Penn State Associate Research Professor Erin DiMaggio.

Fossils of a previously unknown Australopithecus species and of early Homo have been found in the same area, apparently coexisting. The newly discovered australopithecine is known only from teeth, and there is currently insufficient information to formally name the species. Teeth are often distinctive enough to indicate a previously unrecognised species, but palaeoanthropologists usually require additional skeletal remains — such as jaws, skulls, or postcranial bones — to confirm unique anatomical features and avoid naming a species prematurely.

Of course, because evolution operates over entire populations and across thousands of years, the distinction between the immediately ancestral Australopithecus and the descendant Homo is inherently arbitrary. It likely means far more to modern palaeoanthropologists than it ever did to the hominins themselves.

This new evidence, discovered by an international team working on The Ledi-Geraru Research Project, led by scientists at Arizona State University, indicates that both the unidentified Australopithecus and early Homo lived in the area between 2.6 and 2.8 million years ago. The age estimates were reliably established using volcanic ash layers immediately above and below the fossil-bearing strata. The team’s findings were published recently, open access, in Nature.

Refuting Creationism - How Denisovans Created Modern Non-African Humans

A reconstruction of the hominin source of the ‘Dragon Man’ cranium in his habitat. The fossil has now been identified as coming from a Denisovan.

Chuang Zhao

An artist's rendering shows the first-ever portrait of a Denisovan woman, recreated from an ancient DNA sample.

Maayan Harel.

New insights into the Denisovans – the new hominin group that interbred with modern day humans - News & Events | Trinity College Dublin

There is increasing evidence that the human evolutionary story is far richer and more complex than was once assumed, back when many expected a neat series of fossils showing a linear descent from a single African ancestor.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that the Bronze Age human-origin myth in the Bible has about as much historical credibility as Enid Blyton’s Noddy’s Adventures in Toyland — and at least Blyton never claimed her stories were literal truth or the basis of moral authority. Unlike creation myths, Noddy’s adventures were always meant for the nursery, not the classroom.

We now understand that hominin populations frequently split into regional varieties which diversified as more or less isolated groups, only to merge again later into a single population. This process appears to have begun even as we were diverging from the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees. For around a million years after that split, interbreeding remained possible, with chimpanzee genes entering the hominin genome and vice versa.

The interbreeding that most shaped modern, non-African Homo sapiens occurred when African H. sapiens encountered Neanderthals—or their immediate ancestors—during successive waves of migration, permitted by changes in climate and geography. These contacts culminated in the last and only successful migration between roughly 60,000 and 40,000 years ago.

The Neanderthals themselves were descended from an earlier migration that had followed H. erectus into Eurasia, later splitting into Neanderthals in western Eurasia and Denisovans in eastern and south-eastern Eurasia. Modern genomics now shows that it was the Denisovans who contributed even more to the ancestry of non-African H. sapiens than the Neanderthals did. The Denisovans—likely to be reclassified as H. longi, the name given to a skull found in China—appear to have diversified into populations adapted to environments as varied as the Tibetan Plateau and the subtropical coasts of Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Austronesia.