Showing posts with label Anthropology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anthropology. Show all posts

Sunday, 24 August 2025

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.
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.

The MUC19 Gene
  • What it is:

    MUC19 belongs to the mucin family of genes. Mucins are large, heavily glycosylated proteins that make up mucus — the slimy, protective coating that lines our respiratory, digestive, and reproductive tracts.
  • Function:

    MUC19 helps produce the gel-like consistency of mucus, contributing to:
    • Lubrication of food in the mouth (via saliva).
    • Protection of epithelial surfaces from pathogens.
    • Formation of mucosal barriers that trap microbes and particles before they can cause infection.
  • Evolutionary origins:
    • The mucin gene family is ancient, with roots stretching back hundreds of millions of years in vertebrates.
    • MUC19 itself arose by gene duplication and diversification within this family. Different mucins have been recruited for specialised roles — for example, MUC2 in the gut and MUC5 in the lungs.
    • The Denisovan variant of MUC19 is one such adaptation, likely honed in Ice Age Eurasia where pathogens and harsh environments placed strong selective pressures on immune defences.
  • Human inheritance:
    • Genetic evidence suggests that Homo sapiens acquired this variant of MUC19 through introgression — the flow of genes from Denisovans (probably via Neanderthals) into the modern human gene pool.
    • The variant persisted at high frequencies in the Americas because it provided a survival advantage against local environmental challenges.
  • Why it matters:

    The story of MUC19 illustrates how evolution works not only through slow accumulation of mutations, but also by horizontal gene transfers from related species. Human biology today is a mosaic assembled from many ancestral sources.
The research team, led by Professor Emilia Huerta-Sánchez of Brown University’s Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, have published their findings in Science, with further details explained in a Brown University news release by Kevin Stacey.

Another brick out of the crumbling wall of creationist delusion; another win for science.
Extinct human relatives left a genetic gift that helped people thrive in the Americas
A new study found that a gene passed down from extinct archaic humans provided an adaptive advantage for Indigenous people of the Americas and is still common today in people of Indigenous descent.
A new study provides fresh evidence that ancient interbreeding with archaic human species may have provided modern humans with a genetic variant that helped them adapt to new environments as they dispersed across the globe.

The study, published in Science, focused on a gene known as MUC19, which is involved in the production of proteins that form saliva and mucosal barriers in the respiratory and digestive tracts. The researchers show that a variant of that gene derived from Denisovans, an enigmatic species of archaic humans, is present in modern Latin Americans with Indigenous American ancestry, as well as in DNA collected from individuals excavated at archeological sites across North and South America.

The frequency at which the gene appears in modern human populations suggests the gene was under significant natural selection, meaning it provided a survival or reproductive advantage to those who carried it. It’s not clear exactly what that advantage might have been — but given the gene’s involvement in immune processes, it may have helped populations fight off pathogens encountered as they migrated into the Americas thousands of years ago.

From an evolutionary standpoint, this finding shows how ancient interbreeding can have effects that we still see today. From a biological standpoint, we identify a gene that appears to be adaptive, but whose function hasn’t yet been characterized. We hope that leads to additional study of what this gene is actually doing.

Professor Emilia Huerta-Sánchez, senior author.
Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology
Brown University, Providence, RI, USA.

Not much is known about the Denisovans, who lived in Asia between 300,000 and 30,000 years ago, aside from a few small fossils from Denisova cave in Siberia, two jaw bones found in Tibet and Taiwan, and a nearly complete skull from China found this year. A finger fossil from Siberia contained ancient DNA, which has enabled scientists to look for common genes between Denisovans and modern humans. Prior research led by Huerta-Sánchez found that a version of a gene called EPAS1 acquired from Denisovans may have helped Sherpas and other Tibetans to adapt to high altitudes.

For this study, the researchers compared Denisovan DNA with modern genomes collected through the 1,000 Genomes Project, a survey of worldwide genetic variation. The researchers found that the Denisovan-derived MUC19 gene is present in high frequencies in Latino populations who harbor Indigenous American genetic ancestry. The researchers also looked for the gene in the DNA of 23 individuals collected from archeological sites in Alaska, California, Mexico and elsewhere in the Americas. The Denisovan-derived variant was present at high frequency in these ancient individuals as well.

The team used several independent statistical tests to show that the Denisovan MUC19 gene variant rose to unusually high frequencies in ancient Indigenous American populations and present-day people of Indigenous descent, and that the gene sits on an unusually long stretch of archaic DNA — both signs that natural selection had boosted its prevalence. The research also revealed that the gene was likely passed through interbreeding from Denisovans to another archaic population, the Neanderthals, who then interbred with modern humans.

Huerta-Sánchez said the findings demonstrate the importance that interbreeding had in introducing new and potentially useful genetic variation in the human lineage.

Typically, genetic novelty is generated through a very slow process, but these interbreeding events were a sudden way to introduce a lot of new variation.

Professor Emilia Huerta-Sánchez.

In this case, she said, that “new reservoir of genetic variation” appears to have helped modern humans as they migrated into the Americas, perhaps providing a boost to the immune system.

Something about this gene was clearly useful for these populations — and maybe still is or will be in the future.

Professor Emilia Huerta-Sánchez.

She’s hopeful that the recognition of the gene’s importance will spur new research into its function to reveal novel biological mechanisms, especially since it involves coding genetic variants that alter the protein sequence.

Huerta-Sánchez co-authored the study with Fernando Villanea, a former postdoctoral researcher at Brown who is now at University of Colorado, Boulder; David Peede, a graduate student at Brown; and an international team of collaborators.

Publication:
Structured Abstract

INTRODUCTION
Modern human genomes contain a small number of archaic variants, the legacy of past interbreeding events with Neanderthals and Denisovans. Most of these variants are putatively neutral, but some archaic variants found in modern humans have been targets of positive natural selection and may have been pivotal for adapting to new environments as humans populated the world. American populations encountered a myriad of novel environments, providing the opportunity for natural selection to favor archaic variants in these new environmental contexts. Indigenous and admixed American populations have been understudied in this regard but present great potential for studying the underlying evolutionary processes of local adaptation.

RATIONALE
Previous studies identified the gene MUC19—which codes for a mucin involved in immunity—as a candidate for introgression from Denisovans as well as a candidate for positive natural selection in present-day Indigenous and admixed American populations. Therefore, we sought to confirm and further characterize signatures of both archaic introgression and positive selection at MUC19, with particular interest in modern and ancient American populations.

RESULTS
We identify an archaic haplotype segregating at high frequency in most admixed American populations, and among ancient genomes from 23 ancient Indigenous American individuals who predate admixture with Europeans and Africans. We conclude that the archaic haplotype has undergone positive natural selection in these populations, which is tied to their Indigenous components of ancestry. We also find that modern admixed American individuals exhibit an elevated number of variable number tandem repeats (VNTRs) at MUC19, which codes for the functional domain of the MUC19 protein, where it binds to oligosaccharides to form a glycoprotein, a characteristic of the mucins. Remarkably, we find an association between the number of VNTRs and the number of introgressed haplotypes; individuals harboring introgressed haplotypes tend to have a higher number of VNTRs. In addition to the differences in VNTRs, we find that the archaic MUC19 haplotype contains nine Denisovan-specific, nonsynonymous variants found at high frequencies in American populations. Finally, we observed that the Denisovan-specific variants are contained in a 72-kb region of the MUC19 gene, but that region is embedded in a larger 742-kb region that contains Neanderthal-specific variants. When we studied MUC19 in three high-coverage Neanderthal individuals, we found that the Chagyrskaya and Vindija Neanderthals carry the Denisovan-like haplotype in its heterozygous form. These two Neanderthals also carry another haplotype that is shared with the Altai Neanderthals.

CONCLUSION
Our study identifies several aspects of the gene MUC19 that highlight its importance for studying adaptive introgression: One of the haplotypes that span this gene in modern humans is of archaic origin, and modern humans inherited this haplotype from Neanderthals who likely inherited it from Denisovans. Then, as modern human populations expanded into the Americas, our results suggest that they experienced a massive coding VNTR expansion, which occurred on an archaic haplotype background in MUC19. The functional impact of the variation at this gene may help explain how mainland Indigenous Americans adapted to their environments, which remains underexplored. Our results point to a complex pattern of multiple introgression events, from Denisovans to Neanderthals and Neanderthals to modern humans, which may have later played a distinct role in the evolutionary history of Indigenous American populations.
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.
Abstract
We study the gene MUC19, for which some modern humans carry a Denisovan-like haplotype. MUC19 is a mucin, a glycoprotein that forms gels with various biological functions. We find diagnostic variants for the Denisovan-like MUC19 haplotype at high frequencies in admixed American individuals and at highest frequency in 23 ancient Indigenous American individuals, all pre-dating population admixture with Europeans and Africans. We find that the Denisovan-like MUC19 haplotype is under positive selection and carries a higher copy number of a 30–base-pair variable number tandem repeat, and that copy numbers of this repeat are exceedingly high in admixed American populations. Finally, we find that some Neanderthals carry the Denisovan-like MUC19 haplotype, and that it was likely introgressed into modern human populations through Neanderthal introgression rather than Denisovan introgression.


So here we have it yet again: a gene that entered the human lineage not by divine fiat, but by the messy, natural processes of interbreeding, survival, and selection. It is hard to imagine a clearer demonstration of how evolution operates in practice — reshaping our genomes, blending lineages, and preserving whatever works in the long struggle against disease and death.

For creationists, this isn’t just inconvenient; it’s catastrophic. Their worldview depends on a myth of humans created fully formed, apart from and above the rest of nature, a few thousand years ago. But the evidence of MUC19 is another reminder that we are not passengers on a separate track. We are part of the same evolutionary story as Neanderthals, Denisovans, and the countless other hominins who walked the Earth before us.

Science doesn’t just explain our origins better than Genesis — it explains them *at all*. The biblical account collapses under the weight of real data, while evolution continues to weave a coherent, testable, and beautifully messy picture of our past. Each discovery like this adds another nail in the coffin of creationism and another stone in the foundation of our true evolutionary heritage.

The Bible’s story may comfort creationists and make them feel important, but the genome tells the truth.

Friday, 22 August 2025

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.

  • Wednesday, 20 August 2025

    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

    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?


    Saturday, 16 August 2025

    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.

    Friday, 15 August 2025

    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.

    Saturday, 2 August 2025

    Creationism Refuted - What Caused Our Teeth To Shrink Until 690,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

    Chronologically from left, the molars of human ancestors got longer over millennia to suit a diet of high-carb grassy plants.
    Photo credits: Public domain; Don Hitchcock; Fernando Losada Rodríguez (rotated)

    Changes in Diet Drove Physical Evolution in Early Humans | Dartmouth

    A recent discovery by palaeoanthropologists, led by researchers from Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA, highlights the stark difference between how a teleological thinker—such as a creationist—imagines evolution works and how it actually proceeds. The study found that the teeth of ancient hominins evolved over a period of some 700,000 years in response to the increasing availability of soft, starchy foods, which began to replace the coarse, fibrous plant matter they had previously consumed.

    A teleological thinker—someone who sees purpose and agency in natural processes—would assume that something *caused* the teeth to evolve in order to better process the new food. However, as the theory of evolution predicts, any variation that improves efficiency in food processing or reduces the now-unnecessary cost of growing and maintaining large teeth will be favoured by natural selection. Over evolutionary time, such traits become more common. In the case of archaic hominins, this meant their teeth gradually became smaller.

    Teleological thinkers often make the mistake of believing that asking, "Who or what told the teeth they needed to change?" or "How did the teeth know they had to evolve?" is a meaningful challenge to evolutionary theory. To them, it seems reasonable to assume a supernatural intelligence must be involved.

    This simplistic view of evolution is actively encouraged by creationist pseudo-scientists such as William A. Dembski and his colleagues at the Discovery Institute, who claim that the genetic information resulting from such optimisation must have been intelligently designed because it is "specified" for a purpose. Of course, at every stage of human evolution, the genetic information that produced a particular tooth shape was necessarily "specified" for that outcome. Dembski never discloses this to his audience, nor does he attempt to correct the teleological bias on which his movement depends.

    An interesting aspect of this discovery is that the evolutionary change in this case was driven not so much by environmental change - the starch foods had always been there - as by a change in behaviour - a case of meme-gene co-evolution, using the term 'meme' in the original sense as coined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, to mean a unit of cultural inheritance - the analogue of the gene in genetic inheritance.

    Friday, 1 August 2025

    Refuting Creationism - A Diverse Human Population in China - 290,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'


    Members of the research team.
    A study reveals the human diversity in China during Middle Pleistocene | CENIEH

    A study recently published in the Journal of Human Evolution reports the discovery of a mixture of archaic and modern traits in the dentition of 300,000-year-old hominin fossils unearthed at the Hualongdong site in Anhui Province, China.

    These fossils predate the migration of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) out of Africa by around 250,000 years. They indicate that hominin populations in East Asia were already diversifying and possibly interbreeding with archaic humans, such as Homo erectus, to form lineages distinct from both Neanderthals and Denisovans.

    The research, led by Professor Wu Xiujie, director of the Hualongdong excavations, is the result of a longstanding collaboration between scientists from the Dental Anthropology Group at CENIEH — María Martinón-Torres, Director of CENIEH and corresponding author of the paper, and José María Bermúdez de Castro, researcher ad honorem at CENIEH — and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing.

    The findings reveal a rich and complex picture of human evolution in East Asia, wholly at odds with the simplistic biblical narrative still clung to by creationists. That account, written by ancient people with no knowledge of the broader world, reflects a worldview in which Earth was small, flat, covered by a dome, and located at the centre of the universe.

    Refuting Creationism - Our Ancestors Evolved To Walk Upright In Trees - Like Modern Savannah Chimpanzees

    A young male chimp feeds on woodland seeds (cropped).
    Image by Rhianna C. Drummond-Clarke/Greater Mahale Ecosystem Research and Conservation (GMERC)

    How much time did our ancestors spend up trees? Studying these chimpanzees might help us find out
    A group of Issa Valley chimpanzees navigate an open woodland crown to forage on new leaves.

    Image by Rhianna C. Drummond-Clarke/Greater Mahale Ecosystem Research and Conservation (GMERC)
    A new study published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution delivers yet more evidence for the Theory of Evolution and decisively contradicts Bible-literalist creationism. By closely studying wild chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Issa Valley—an environment that mirrors the mixed woodland–savannah habitats of our early ancestors—researchers found that these apes still spend most of their time in trees and conduct over 85 % of their bipedal movements arboreally. This finding strongly supports the evolutionary view that human bipedalism did not emerge from a sudden exodus from trees but evolved gradually while our ancestors still relied heavily on arboreal habitats.

    What is particularly striking is the complete absence of any doubt among the scientists that evolution, driven by natural selection, is the correct framework for interpreting these observations. At no point do they resort to supernatural explanations or even hint that evolution might be insufficient to explain the data. On the contrary, their conclusions seamlessly integrate with the existing evolutionary narrative, demonstrating how behaviours seen in modern chimpanzees provide a living window into the adaptations of our shared ancestors. This directly undermines the creationist claim that mainstream biologists are “abandoning” evolution in favour of unproven religious explanations—a claim that has no basis in reality.

    Creationist dogma insists on static, unchanging “kinds” and appeals to unverifiable supernatural causes. Yet, studies like this show that every aspect of our evolutionary past—anatomical, genetic, and behavioural—can be explained through natural processes, without the need for divine intervention. The evidence for a shared ancestry between humans and other primates grows with every new study, while creationism remains stuck with no predictive power and no scientific methodology.

    In short, this research reinforces the power and universality of the Theory of Evolution. The scientists involved didn’t set out to “disprove creationism”; they simply applied rigorous observation and analysis, and the results—once again—fell squarely on the side of evolution. Far from being abandoned, the ToE continues to thrive as the backbone of modern biology, while creationism, with its untestable supernatural entities, offers no explanation at all.

    Thursday, 31 July 2025

    Creationism Refuted - How Neanderthals Were Getting Fat - 125,000 before 'Creation Week'

    Neanderthals smashing bones to extract the fat
    AI generated image (ChatGPT 4o)

    Excavation at the Neumark-Nord 2 in central Germany.
    Photo: Professor Wil Roebroeks, Leiden University
    125,000-year-old Neanderthal ‘fat factory’ discovered in Germany - Leiden University
    More evidence has emerged that Neanderthals were far from the slow-witted, lumbering brutes of popular myth. In fact, they were highly organised, culturally sophisticated, and capable of processing food on what can only be described as an industrial scale.

    This latest insight comes from a team of archaeologists led by researchers from MONREPOS (Leibniz Centre for Archaeology, Germany) and Leiden University (The Netherlands), in collaboration with the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt (Germany). Their findings were recently published in Science Advances.

    At a site known as Neumark-Nord 2 in central Germany, dating back 125,000 years, the researchers have discovered compelling evidence of a bone-processing ‘factory’. Here, Neanderthals systematically broke up the massive bones of straight-tusked elephants and other large mammals—including deer, horses, and aurochs—to extract fat from the marrow by steeping the fragments in hot water. The straight-tusked elephant, which could weigh up to 13 tonnes, would have yielded enough meat to feed 2,000 adult humans their daily caloric needs.

    This site predates the arrival of modern humans in Europe by tens of thousands of years, placing it firmly within the Neanderthal era. At the time, Europe was enjoying an interglacial period with a climate comparable to today's.

    Wednesday, 30 July 2025

    Creationism Refuted - Ancient DNA Shows Origins Of Finns, Estonians & Hungarians Before 'Creation Week'

    Map of all the sites that are sources of samples used in the study.

    Co-lead author Alexander Mee-Woong Kim in Kazakhstan.
    Ancient DNA solves mystery of Hungarian, Finnish language origins — Harvard Gazette

    A recent paper in Nature marks a landmark advance in historical linguistics and ancient human migration studies.

    Properly understood, the paper devastates Bible literalist dogmas. In solving what had been something of a mystery for linguistics and anthropology, it utterly refutes basic Bible narratives such as a global genocidal flood and a resetting of the human population of Earth some 4,300 years ago, followed by a repopulation from a focal point in the Middle East.

    By sequencing and analysing 180 previously unstudied ancient Siberian genomes and integrating them with over 1,300 global ancient DNA datasets spanning 11,000 years, the study robustly traces the prehistoric roots of the Uralic language family—including Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian—to Central Siberia nearly 4,500 years ago [1, 2]. In doing so, it offers scientific clarity on how languages—and by extension cultures—spread via human migrations over millennia. This extends far beyond simplistic literal interpretations of Bible genealogies, emphasising the deep time, continuous migrations and cultural dynamics that falsify any notion of sudden, static origination of peoples as posited in young‑earth creation narratives.

    Likewise, the Harvard Gazette article contextualises these genetic findings for a broader audience, highlighting how interdisciplinary scholarship — particularly the work led by recent graduates under guidance from ancient DNA expert David Reich — identifies a distinct genetic signature (“Yakutia\_LNBA”) strongly associated with speakers of Uralic languages who migrated from Eastern Siberia westward over thousands of years [2]. The piece explicitly notes that language transmission is not genetically deterministic, and warns against over‑simplified correlations. By underscoring the necessity of large data, critical caution, and peer‑reviewed methodology, the article reinforces the fundamentally scientific (not scriptural) basis for understanding human prehistory. From a Bible‑literalist creationist perspective—which often assumes humanity’s origins in specific, recent Middle Eastern events described in scripture—these studies are significant because they offer:
    • Robust empirical timelines: ancient DNA data covering up to 11,000 years, demonstrating population movements and admixture across Eurasia.
    • Clear geographic origins far from the traditional Biblical settings, with linguistic groups emerging from Central Siberian ancestries—not from post‑Flood dispersion from Babel.
    • Methodological transparency: ancient genomes, radiocarbon dating, linguistic phylogenies, and cultural archaeology collectively underpin conclusions, in stark contrast to dogmatic, text‑based literalism.

    What is known of the Yamnaya, their migration and their impact on European society? The Yamnaya (or Yamna) culture was a highly influential Bronze Age population that emerged on the Pontic–Caspian steppe (modern-day Ukraine and southern Russia) around 3300–2600 BCE. They are best known for their role in a major migratory event that reshaped the genetic, cultural, and linguistic landscape of Europe and parts of Asia.



    Key Features of the Yamnaya Culture
    • Pastoralist Lifestyle: The Yamnaya were semi-nomadic herders, primarily of cattle, sheep, and horses.
    • Kurgan Burials: They are associated with the construction of kurgans — large burial mounds containing individual or family graves, often with grave goods, indicating social stratification.
    • Use of Wagons and Domesticated Horses: The Yamnaya are among the earliest groups to use wheeled transport and to domesticate horses for riding and traction, dramatically improving mobility across the steppe.
    • Patriarchal and Warrior-Oriented Society: Burial practices and grave goods suggest a male-dominated society with an emphasis on warfare and prestige.



    Migration and Expansion

    From around 3000 BCE, the Yamnaya expanded both westward into Europe and eastward into Central Asia:

    Westward Migration (into Europe)
    • The Yamnaya migrated into Central and Northern Europe, mixing with local Neolithic farming populations.
    • This movement is thought to correspond with the Corded Ware culture (~2900–2300 BCE), which displays strong Yamnaya ancestry and cultural influences.
    • Genetic studies indicate that Yamnaya-related ancestry accounts for a significant portion (up to 75%) of the ancestry in many modern northern and central Europeans.

    Eastward Expansion (into Asia)
    • Yamnaya groups moved into the Altai region and Central Asia, laying foundations for cultures such as the Afanasievo culture.
    • This eastward movement has implications for the spread of Indo-European languages deep into Asia, including links to the Tocharian branch.



    Impact on European Society

    The Yamnaya migration was transformative:
    1. Genetic Legacy
      • Ancient DNA studies (notably by David Reich and colleagues) have shown that Yamnaya-related ancestry replaced or substantially mixed with earlier Neolithic farming populations across Europe.
      • Their arrival is associated with a massive genetic turnover, particularly in northern Europe.

    2. Linguistic Impact
      • The Yamnaya are widely considered prime candidates for the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the reconstructed ancestral language of most modern European and many Asian languages.
      • Their migrations likely spread PIE or its early offshoots into Europe and Asia.

    3. Technological and Cultural Influence
      • They introduced or accelerated the adoption of:
        • Horse riding and chariotry.
        • Wheeled vehicles and carts.
        • New burial customs and metallurgy.

      • These innovations had a cascading effect on social organisation, warfare, and mobility.
    4. Social Structures
      • Archaeological and genetic evidence suggests the formation of patrilineal kin-based chiefdoms, with dominant Y-chromosome lineages spreading rapidly, reflecting elite male dominance in expanding societies.


    Significance in Refuting Creationism

    The Yamnaya's role in shaping European prehistory is incompatible with young-Earth or Biblical-literalist timelines:
    • Their migrations and cultural influence spanned thousands of years, beginning well before any supposed Biblical Flood (~2400 BCE) or the Tower of Babel.
    • The evidence for their existence and movements comes from radiocarbon dating, stratigraphy, and genomics — methods rejected or undermined by creationist models.
    • The Yamnaya language dispersal supports evolutionary linguistics, not the sudden emergence of multiple languages as described in Genesis 11.



    In Summary

    The Yamnaya were a Bronze Age steppe people whose vast migrations and cultural innovations played a pivotal role in shaping the genetics, languages, and social systems of much of Europe and Asia. Their legacy stands as a powerful testament to deep-time human history, migration, and cultural change—firmly grounded in empirical evidence and thoroughly incompatible with literalist interpretations of the Bible.
    Together, the Nature paper and Harvard Gazette explanation represent not only a breakthrough in our scientific understanding of language family origins, but also a powerful rebuttal to any worldview that insists on a literal‑historical reading of Genesis to explain the diversity and dispersal of peoples.
    Ancient DNA solves mystery of Hungarian, Finnish language family’s origins
    Parent emerged over 4,000 years ago in Siberia, farther east than many thought, then rapidly spread west
    Where did Europe’s distinct Uralic family of languages — which includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian — come from? New research puts their origins a lot farther east than many thought.

    The analysis, led by a pair of recent graduates with oversight from ancient DNA expert David Reich, integrated genetic data on 180 newly sequenced Siberians with more than 1,000 existing samples covering many continents and about 11,000 years of human history. The results, published this month in the journal Nature, identify the prehistoric progenitors of two important language families, including Uralic, spoken today by more than 25 million people.

    The study finds the ancestors of present-day Uralic speakers living about 4,500 years ago in northeastern Siberia, within an area now known as Yakutia.

    Geographically, it’s closer to Alaska or Japan than to Finland.

    Alexander Mee-Woong Kim, co-lead author.
    Department of Genetics
    Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.

    Linguists and archaeologists have been split on the origins of Uralic languages. The mainstream school of thought put their homeland in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, a range running north to south about 860 miles due east of Moscow. A minority view, noting convergences with Turkic and Mongolic languages, theorized a more easterly emergence.

    Our paper helps show that the latter scenario is more likely. We can see this genetic pulse coming from the east just as Uralic languages were expanding.

    Dr. Tian Chen Zeng, co-lead author
    Department of Human Evolutionary Biology
    Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

    The discovery was made possible by Kim’s long-term effort to gather ancient DNA data from some of Siberia’s under-sampled regions. As he helped establish, many modern-day Uralic-speaking populations carry the same genetic signature that first appeared, in unmixed form, in the 4,500-year-old samples from Yakutia. People from all other ethnolinguistic groups were found, by and large, to lack this distinct ancestry.

    Genetic ties to Yakutia also show up in sets of hyper-mobile forager hunter-gatherers believed to have spread Uralic languages to northern Scandinavia’s indigenous Sámi people and as far south as Hungary, now a linguistic island surrounded by German, Slovak, and other Indo-European languages.

    Proto-Uralic speakers overlapped in time with the Yamnaya, the culture of horseback herders credited with transmitting Indo-European across Eurasia’s grasslands. A pair of recent papers, led by Reich and others in his Harvard-based lab, zeroed in on the Yamnaya homeland, showing it was mostly likely within the current borders of Ukraine just over 5,000 years ago.

    We can see these waves going back and forth — and interacting — as these two major language families expanded. Just as we see Yakutia ancestry moving east to west, our genetic data show Indo-Europeans spreading west to east.

    Professor David Reich, co-corresponding author.
    Department of Human Evolutionary Biology
    Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.

    But Uralic’s influence was largely anchored in the north.

    We’re talking about the taiga — the large expanse of boreal forest that goes from Scandinavia almost to the Bering Strait. This isn’t territory you can simply ride a horse through.

    Alexander Mee-Woong Kim

    Kim... concentrated in organismic and evolutionary biology at the College and studied archaeology at the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

    Archaeologists have long connected Uralic’s spread with what is called the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, or the sudden appearance around 4,000 years ago of technologically advanced bronze-casting methods across northern Eurasia.

    The resulting artifacts, primarily weapons and other displays of power, have also been tied to an era of global climate changes that could have advantaged the small-scale cultures that spoke Uralic languages during and after the Seima-Turbino phenomenon.

    Bronze often had a transformative effect on the cultures that used it. Bronze really catalyzed long-distance trade. To start using it, societies really needed to develop new social connections and institutions. [the need to source raw materials — largely copper and tin — from select locations.]

    Dr. Tian Chen Zeng.

    A picture of the genetically diverse communities who practiced Seima-Turbino techniques became clear with the advent of ancient DNA science.

    Some of them had genetic ancestry from Yakutia, some of them were Iranic, some of them were Baltic hunter-gatherers from Europe. They’re all buried together at the same sites.

    Professor David Reich.

    The newest genetic samples, assembled by Kim with the help of other archaeologists, including third co-lead author Leonid Vyazov at Czechia’s University of Ostrava, revealed strong currents of Yakutia ancestry at a succession of ancient burial sites stretching gradually to the west, with each bearing rich reserves of Seima-Turbino objects.

    This is a story about the will, the agency of populations who were not numerically dominant in any way but were able to have continental-scale effects on language and culture.

    Alexander Mee-Woong Kim

    Previous studies established that Finns, Estonians, and other Uralic-speaking populations today share an Eastern Eurasian genetic signature. Ancient DNA researchers ruled out the region’s best-known archaeological cultures from contributing to the Uralic expansion

    That just meant we needed more data on obscure cultures, or obscure time periods where it was unclear what was happening

    Dr. Tian Chen Zeng.

    Today, he found, Uralic-speaking cultures vary in how much Yakutia ancestry they carry.

    Estonians retain about 2 percent, Finns about 10. At the eastern end of the distribution, the Nganasan people — clustered at the northernmost tip of Russia — have close to 100 percent Yakutia ancestry. At the other extreme, modern-day Hungarians have lost nearly all of theirs.

    But we know, based on ancient DNA work from the medieval conquerors of Hungary, that the people who brought the language there did carry this ancestry.

    Dr. Tian Chen Zeng.

    A separate finding concerns another group of Siberian-spawned languages, once widely spoken across the region. The Yeniseian language family may be contracting today, with the last survivor being central Siberia’s critically endangered Ket, now spoken by just a handful of the culture’s elders. But Yeniseian’s influence was long evident to linguists and archaeologists alike.

    Just like ‘Mississippi’ and ‘Missouri’ are from Algonquian, there are Yeniseian toponyms in regions that today speak Mongolic or Turkic languages. When you consider this trace on the landscape, its influence extends far beyond where Yeniseian languages are spoken.

    Alexander Mee-Woong Kim

    The study locates the first speakers of the Yeniseian family some 5,400 years ago near the deep waters of Lake Baikal, its southern shores just a few hours by car from the current border with Mongolia.

    The genetic findings also provide the first genetic signal — albeit a tentative one — for Western Washington University linguist Edward Vajda’s Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis, which proposed genealogical connections between Yeniseian and the Na-Dene family of North American Indigenous languages.


    Publication:
    Abstract
    The North Eurasian forest and forest-steppe zones have sustained millennia of sociocultural connections among northern peoples, but much of their history is poorly understood. In particular, the genomic formation of populations that speak Uralic and Yeniseian languages today is unknown. Here, by generating genome-wide data for 180 ancient individuals spanning this region, we show that the Early-to-Mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers harboured a continuous gradient of ancestry from fully European-related in the Baltic, to fully East Asian-related in the Transbaikal. Contemporaneous groups in Northeast Siberia were off-gradient and descended from a population that was the primary source for Native Americans, which then mixed with populations of Inland East Asia and the Amur River Basin to produce two populations whose expansion coincided with the collapse of pre-Bronze Age population structure. Ancestry from the first population, Cis-Baikal Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Cisbaikal_LNBA), is associated with Yeniseian-speaking groups and those that admixed with them, and ancestry from the second, Yakutia Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Yakutia_LNBA), is associated with migrations of prehistoric Uralic speakers. We show that Yakutia_LNBA first dispersed westwards from the Lena River Basin around 4,000 years ago into the Altai-Sayan region and into West Siberian communities associated with Seima-Turbino metallurgy—a suite of advanced bronze casting techniques that expanded explosively from the Altai1. The 16 Seima-Turbino period individuals were diverse in their ancestry, also harbouring DNA from Indo-Iranian-associated pastoralists and from a range of hunter-gatherer groups. Thus, both cultural transmission and migration were key to the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, which was involved in the initial spread of early Uralic-speaking communities.

    From around 3000 BCE, the Yamnaya began expanding westward into Europe and eastward into Central Asia. In Europe, they merged with existing Neolithic farming populations, giving rise to new archaeological cultures like the Corded Ware culture. Genetic studies show that modern Europeans, particularly in the north and centre, carry a significant proportion of Yamnaya ancestry. This migration also likely played a major role in spreading Proto-Indo-European languages, the ancestor of most modern European and many South and Central Asian languages.

    The Yamnaya legacy is deeply embedded in Europe’s genetic and cultural fabric, but it also offers a direct challenge to Bible-literalist creationism. Their existence, migrations, and influence are dated to thousands of years before the supposed Biblical Flood or the Tower of Babel. Their story is reconstructed using ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating, and comparative linguistics—scientific disciplines that directly contradict young-Earth timelines. Far from originating from a single post-Flood population a few thousand years ago, European ancestry is shown to be the result of complex, prehistoric population movements over tens of thousands of years.

    In short, the Yamnaya are a vivid example of how real human history, grounded in empirical evidence, diverges sharply from mythological accounts. Their migrations demonstrate the power of science to uncover the dynamic, interconnected, and ancient nature of human societies—undermining any literal reading of Genesis as a factual account of our origins.




    Advertisement

    What Makes You So Special? From The Big Bang To You
    How did you come to be here, now? This books takes you from the Big Bang to the evolution of modern humans and the history of human cultures, showing that science is an adventure of discovery and a source of limitless wonder, giving us richer and more rewarding appreciation of the phenomenal privilege of merely being alive and able to begin to understand it all.





    Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It
    This book explains why faith is a fallacy and serves no useful purpose other than providing an excuse for pretending to know things that are unknown. It also explains how losing faith liberates former sufferers from fear, delusion and the control of others, freeing them to see the world in a different light, to recognise the injustices that religions cause and to accept people for who they are, not which group they happened to be born in. A society based on atheist, Humanist principles would be a less divided, more inclusive, more peaceful society and one more appreciative of the one opportunity that life gives us to enjoy and wonder at the world we live in.




    Amazon
    Amazon
    Amazon
    Amazon


    Amazon
    Amazon
    Amazon
    Amazon

    All titles available in paperback, hardcover, ebook for Kindle and audio format.

    Prices correct at time of publication. for current prices.

    Advertisement


    Thank you for sharing!






    Web Analytics