The holotype skull (SMNS 10575) of H. cairensis n. gen. n. comb. (a) Photograph of SMNS 10575 in dorsal view, (b) interpretative drawing of SMNS 10575 in dorsal view, (c) photograph of SMNS 10575 in ventral view and (d) interpretative drawing of SMNS 10575 in ventral view. Abbreviations: f, frontal; ic, internal choana; j, jugal; m, maxilla; ma, maxillary alveoli; n, nasals; o, orbit; oc, occipital condyle; p, parietal; pa, palatines; pf, prefrontal; po, postorbital; pt, pterygoid; q, quadrate; sof, suborbital fenestra; sq, squamosal; sqp, squamosal prong; stf, supratemporal fenestra. Scale bar, 10 mm.
The Great Sphinx of Giza is an ancient monument carved into something vastly more ancient: rocks recording a world that existed long before humans, let alone Egyptian civilisation. A newly recognised crocodilian from the same geological formation lived about 45 million years ago. For anyone attempting to reconcile Earth's history with a literal reading of Genesis and its young-Earth chronology, the difficulty begins with the material from which the monument itself was carved.
As UCL News reports, researchers have identified Herugavialis cairensis, an extinct gavial, or long-snouted crocodilian, from Egypt's Mokattam Formation. Its nearly complete skull was discovered in the 1920s and had long been assigned to Tomistoma, the genus containing today's false gharial. CT scanning revealed distinguishing anatomical features, including a raised ridge around the eyes, supporting its recognition as a separate genus. The findings are published in Royal Society Open Science.
This is a useful example of how science corrects itself. A fossil does not cease to be informative because it has spent a century in a museum, and an identification does not become unchallengeable merely because generations of researchers have accepted it. Better tools and renewed scrutiny can expose distinctions that earlier investigators missed. Revising the classification strengthens our understanding of evolutionary history; it does not undermine the evidence that such a history occurred.
The animal also belonged to a very different Egypt. Shallow seas covered areas that are now land, and several gavial species inhabited its coastal waters. UCL describes a wider Mediterranean history in which crocodilian diversity fluctuated alongside changes in temperature and sea level, before the region lost its crocodilians around the Mediterranean drying crisis roughly six million years ago. Even that much later episode predates the conventional young-Earth creationist date for the entire Universe by orders of magnitude.
An elephant tooth recovered from Gesher Benot Ya'aqov (GBY-NBA) — a prehistoric site in northern Israel, where early humans made stone tools some 700,000 years ago — has enabled researchers to reconstruct a lush Pleistocene landscape of woodlands, wetlands, and waterways. The findings provide a rare glimpse into the environment shared by giant elephants and some of the region's earliest human populations.
Tel-Hai University of Kiryat Shmona in the Galilee and Hannah Farrell, University of Haifa.
The elephant remains were discovered alongside basalt handaxes and cleavers, hallmark tools of the Acheulian tradition, one of the earliest and most widespread stone-tool technologies in human history.
Credit: Tel-Hai University of Kiryat Shmona in the Galilee and Hannah Farrell, University of Haifa
Some 700,000 years ago, in what is now northern Israel, early humans were making stone tools in a landscape shared with giant elephants and exploiting their surroundings, hundreds of thousands of years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of young-Earth creationism.
That alone presents an insurmountable chronological problem for anyone who insists that Genesis is a literal account of history; a problem compounded by the fact that this history occurred close to where the origin myths in Genesis were written by people who were conspicuously ignorant of even their own local history.
Now, an elephant tooth has helped researchers reconstruct something of the world those people inhabited. A study published in Quaternary Science Reviews examines remains of the extinct straight-tusked elephant, Palaeoloxodon antiquus, found alongside Acheulean handaxes and cleavers at North Bridge Acheulian–Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov. By combining CT imaging, dental wear, isotope analysis and pollen evidence from the sediments, the researchers reconstructed a mosaic of woodland, grassland, wetlands and waterways.
The resulting picture is of a resource-rich environment that could support both large mammals and early human populations. Reliable water and varied vegetation apparently helped this part of the Hula Valley function as an ecological refuge along the Levantine corridor linking Africa and Eurasia. This was an inhabited landscape with an ecological history, rather than merely a collection of ancient bones and stones.
Stone tool-making on the banks of the Tennessee River, 13,000 years ago
AI-generated (ChatGPT-6 Astra)
Map showing the location of the Tennessee River Valley and the distribution of Clovis and Cumberland points with known provenience data. Hatching indicates geologic deposits containing chert-bearing deposits. Inset indicates the location of study area.
Some 13,000 years ago, people in what is now the Tennessee River Valley were making stone spear points, maintaining their equipment and adapting to the demands of their surroundings. For young-Earth creationism, this presents a rather fundamental difficulty: these human societies were living in North America thousands of years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’. They were getting on with the practical business of survival before a literal reading of Genesis permits either them or their continent to have existed.
These inconvenient people are the subject of a study published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory by Jesse W. Tune and D. Shane Miller. The researchers examined approximately 500 projectile points from the region, comparing the earlier Clovis tradition with the later Cumberland tradition. Their question was how the treatment of these tools might reveal changes in people’s knowledge of the landscape.
The contrast was revealing. Clovis toolmakers tended to resharpen their points more extensively, extracting more use from the stone before discarding it. Cumberland toolmakers more often discarded points with useful life remaining. The authors interpret this as evidence that growing familiarity with local stone sources changed the economics of keeping or replacing a tool. People uncertain where their next suitable supply would come from had stronger reasons to conserve what they already carried; later communities could draw on knowledge accumulated and transmitted across generations.
That explanation is an inference tested against patterns in the artefacts, not a direct observation of prehistoric intentions. The distinction matters: archaeology can compare explanations of ancient behaviour without pretending that discarded tools tell us everything about the people who made them. What is not dependent on accepting this particular explanation is the broader chronological problem for creationists. These toolmaking traditions belong to the closing stages of the last Ice Age, well before the 6,000–10,000-year timescale commonly assigned to the entire universe by young-Earth believers.
Nor does the wider evidence support a recent arrival from the Mesopotamian world of biblical mythology. This particular study does not investigate ancestry, but ancient DNA research places Indigenous American origins within a much older population history involving northeast Asia and Beringia, the region that once connected Siberia and Alaska. There is no evidential basis here for replacing that history with a recent dispersal from Babel or a repopulation of the Americas by Noah’s descendants. The biblical account supplies the assertion; the archaeological and genetic records supply a different history.
What emerges is a recognisably human story of ingenuity, experience and cultural inheritance. Long before the supposed beginning of the world, people were already making decisions about resources, refining their technologies and passing useful knowledge to the next generation. Science asks how those societies lived and learned. Young-Earth creationism must first explain how they managed to exist before its creation date.
Two million years ago, southern Africa was home to different human relatives sharing the same landscape and following different evolutionary trajectories. That is the picture strengthened by newly described fossils from Drimolen Main Quarry in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind. For creationists, the difficulties begin with the date: these hominins lived almost two million years before the supposed magical creation of the Universe out of nothing in a literal reading of Genesis. But the evidence also challenges the familiar caricature of human evolution as a single procession of increasingly human creatures, marching towards a predetermined destination.
In a paper published in Annals of Human Biology, Jesse M. Martin and colleagues describe 18 previously undescribed cranial and mandibular specimens from Drimolen. Among them is DNH 127, an adult skull fragment attributed to Homo erectus. This provides valuable support for the earlier identification of DNH 134, a young child’s partial skull from the same site. Identifying a species from an immature individual can be difficult because some diagnostic features develop during growth; an adult specimen provides an additional test of that interpretation.
The significance is therefore corroboration: DNH 127 strengthens the case that Homo erectus was present in South Africa approximately 2.04–1.95 million years ago. It does not, by itself, establish that the species originated there. The earliest fossil yet recognised is evidence of a species’ presence at a particular place and time, rather than a birth certificate identifying its evolutionary birthplace.
One recurring difficulty for young-Earth creationism is that people were apparently building communities before the Earth on which they built them had been created. At Opovo Ugar-Bajbuk, in present-day Serbia, archaeologists place the principal occupation of a substantial Neolithic settlement around 4850–4725 BCE. That is more than seven centuries before Archbishop Ussher’s famous creation date of 4004 BCE, and long before the supposed global Flood of conventional young-Earth chronologies. These people were inconveniently getting on with their lives before that particular biblical timetable allowed them to exist.
The settlement covered more than nine hectares, with up to 220 identified house structures across its development and an estimated peak population exceeding 700. This was a substantial community whose inhabitants could organise the labour needed to construct extensive enclosing ditches. The findings are reported by Fynn Wilkes and an international team in Archaeologia Austriaca.
There is another lesson here that creationist polemics routinely misrepresent: scientists revise their conclusions. Earlier investigations, based on a much more limited excavated area, had produced a picture of a smaller settlement, estimated at about five hectares. The new researchers returned with geomagnetic surveying, coring, systematic surface collection and targeted excavation, combining their findings with radiocarbon evidence. The resulting reconstruction changes our understanding of the settlement’s scale and development. Indeed, Ruth Tringham, who led the research project in the 1980s, is herself a co-author of the reassessment.
That is how scientific knowledge improves. Earlier interpretations remain open to testing, and better evidence produced by improved techniques and better technology, can require them to change. A revision does not make every alternative explanation equally credible, nor does it give an ancient religious narrative a free pass. In this case, the revised chronology still places the community centuries before Ussher’s proposed Creation Week. Changing the reconstructed size and history of a Neolithic settlement does nothing to rescue a timetable that places the creation of the entire planet after its inhabitants had already lived there.
The researchers also distinguish evidence from interpretation. House sizes suggest relatively limited differences in material wealth, while the enclosing ditches indicate an ability to coordinate substantial communal work. Those observations are consistent with a comparatively egalitarian community, but they cannot establish that everyone enjoyed equal status or that coercion was absent. Such qualifications express the limits of the evidence — precisely the limits that responsible scholarship should acknowledge.
Opovo therefore presents two related difficulties for biblical literalism: a human history that refuses to fit its preferred chronology, and a demonstration of how knowledge advances when conclusions remain accountable to evidence. Archaeologists can reconsider what they thought they knew about the settlement because their task is to discover what happened. The evidence is allowed to change the story. Creationism by contrast refuses to change the story and attempts to change the inconvenient evidence.
One of the recurring problems for Bible-literalist creationism is that people were living ordinary human lives long before its chronology permits them to have existed. They were finding food, acquiring knowledge of local plants and developing habits that left recognisable traces on their bodies. Two ancient individuals from Sulawesi, Indonesia, now provide a particularly revealing example: their teeth preserve evidence of betel-nut consumption thousands of years before the supposed biblical Flood—and, in the older individual’s case, long before “Creation Week” itself.
The research, published in Science Advances, concerns two hunter-gatherers, one dated to approximately 25,000–16,000 years ago and the other to 7,600–6,300 years ago. Even the youngest end of the older specimen’s age range places that person well before the entire universe supposedly appeared, according to young-Earth creationism. The younger individual also predates the legendary genocidal Flood in conventional biblical chronologies; indeed, both individuals predate creation itself under the familiar approximately 6,000-year scheme. These are awkward people to accommodate in a history constructed from Genesis.
As the Griffith University news report, researchers detected arecoline, a psychoactive compound found in betel nut, in the individuals’ dental tissues. Both also had unusual rounded grooves in their teeth, interpreted as evidence of habitually sucking whole nuts. Experiments showed that soaking intact nuts in artificial saliva released enough of the compound to produce effects in laboratory receptor tests. Together, the chemical evidence, tooth wear and experiments make a strong case for an ancient practice of consuming a neuroactive plant.
A newly described giant dinosaur from Brazil presents creationists with more than the familiar problem of a fossil vastly older than their supposed creation of the Universe. Its evolutionary relationships also preserve evidence of a world whose geography has changed profoundly: continents separating, ancestral populations dispersing, and related lineages following different evolutionary paths. This is precisely the sort of historical pattern we expect when common descent operates on a planet reshaped by plate tectonics.
The dinosaur, Dasosaurus tocantinensis, was approximately 20 metres long and lived around 120 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous. Its remains were discovered during construction of a road–rail terminal at Davinópolis, in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Maranhão. Described by Elver Luiz Mayer and colleagues in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, it has its closest known evolutionary relative in what is now Spain. The researchers interpret this affinity as evidence that its ancestors probably reached South America from Europe via North Africa between about 140 and 120 million years ago.
That proposed route needs to be understood against the geography of the time. Africa and South America had not yet completed their separation, and connections between landmasses offered opportunities for dispersal that the modern map conceals. The finding therefore concerns ancestral movements through an ancient landscape, rather than dinosaurs somehow crossing the present-day Atlantic.
The broader evolutionary principle is straightforward. Populations can spread when geographical connections permit; when barriers interrupt gene flow, their descendants can diverge. Consequently, relationships between species should reflect both their ancestry and the changing opportunities for movement and isolation. Evolutionary biology supplies the explanation for the branching relationships, while plate tectonics supplies the changing geographical setting. This particular fossil does not, by itself, prove that continental separation caused a specific speciation event, but its affinities fit the larger picture remarkably well.
For young-Earth creationism, the difficulty is therefore both chronological and explanatory. A dinosaur living 120 million years ago cannot be accommodated within a literal Genesis chronology. Nor does the assertion that a creator suddenly produced separate “kinds” explain why their anatomical relationships should correspond to ancient geographical connections. Common descent makes that correspondence intelligible; magical creation provides no comparable prediction.
What emerges is a history of life unfolding on a changing Earth, with neither continents nor their inhabitants fixed in their present arrangements. Understanding that history requires evidence, evolutionary relationships and deep time — all conspicuously absent from the biblical creation account.
A handful of tiny stone points from a rock shelter in Uzbekistan presents several difficulties for creationism. They come from deposits dated to around 80,000 years ago, placing their manufacture tens of thousands of years before the supposed creation of the Universe according to young-Earth biblical literalism. They belong to an archaeological record that demands an explanation grounded in prolonged human occupation and sediment accumulation. And their publication demonstrates something creationist propagandists routinely deny: scientists can publish evidence that challenges established interpretations of human history.
The research, by Hugues Plisson and an international team, appeared in PLOS One. Examining stone artefacts from the oldest occupation layers at Obi-Rakhmat, the researchers identified damage consistent with their use as projectile tips. Particularly intriguing are tiny triangular points whose dimensions suggest mounting on light, arrow-like shafts. The authors interpret these as possible evidence of archery approximately 80,000 years ago. Their further suggestion—that the technology indicates the presence of *Homo sapiens*—is an inference from archaeological comparisons, rather than a definitive identification of the toolmakers.
For young-Earth creationism, the chronological problem exists regardless of whether that interpretation ultimately prevails. Disagreement about which human population made an ancient weapon does nothing to bring its manufacture within a biblical timescale. Uncertainty about one aspect of the evidence is not uncertainty about everything, however useful that confusion might be to those trying to dismiss an inconvenient past.
The site also raises an awkward question for advocates of a recent, catastrophic global flood. Its archaeological sequence extends through more than ten metres of deposits representing tens of thousands of years. This is evidence of a lengthy local history that any alternative account must explain. It would be too sweeping to claim that no stone artefact could survive a flood; the stronger objection concerns the preservation and formation of the deposits in which those artefacts occur. Invoking a catastrophe that supposedly reshaped the entire Earth does not explain an ordered archaeological sequence merely by adding water to the story. The paper itself does not investigate Noah’s flood, but its findings add to the ancient history that biblical literalists must somehow compress into a few thousand years.
Sometimes, a small footprint exposes an enormous problem for creationism. In this case, it is a partial impression preserved in approximately 55.5-million-year-old volcanic sediment on what is now King George Island, Antarctica. Its age alone places it far outside the few thousand years allowed by a literal reading of Genesis. But its setting tells an equally significant story: an Antarctic landscape capable of supporting terrestrial mammals, profoundly different from the frozen continent we know today.
The discovery, described by Héctor Mansilla-Vera and colleagues in Polar Biology, comprises a partial forefoot-and-hindfoot impression. The researchers interpret its maker as a small carnivorous mammal, possibly a sparassodont—an extinct relative of marsupials otherwise known from South America. That identification remains tentative: the incomplete trace cannot establish a particular species or confidently identify the group. Nevertheless, it records a mammal walking across an Antarctic substrate, providing evidence of its presence where it lived, rather than bones or teeth transported after death. Javier Gelfo’s account of the research explains both the interpretation and its limitations.
This animal inhabited a warmer, forested Antarctica that retained land connections with South America. Antarctica was already at high southern latitudes; its subsequent transformation cannot simply be explained as a warm continent drifting towards the pole. The larger story involves the breakup of Gondwana, the loss of connections between continents, changing ocean circulation and a changing atmosphere.
As tectonic movements opened and deepened southern ocean gateways, they altered the movement of water and heat around Antarctica. Falling atmospheric carbon dioxide also played a major role in the cooling that culminated in extensive Antarctic glaciation around 34 million years ago. Geography and climate interacted over geological time to transform the conditions under which life could survive. Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.
The challenge to creationism is therefore more precise than simply showing that Earth has changed. Biblical literalists themselves invoke catastrophic change through their Flood narrative. What confronts them here is evidence belonging to a much longer, independently reconstructed history: continents separating, connections disappearing, climates shifting and ecosystems being transformed over tens of millions of years. An appeal to an originally “perfect” creation explains none of those details.
This tiny trace offers a glimpse of life on a planet whose geography and habitability have never been permanent fixtures. Understanding it requires geology, palaeontology and climate science working together—and the willingness to distinguish what the evidence demonstrates from what it merely suggests.
An account and discussion of this research by Antonio García was published in La Brújula Verde. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
Some 550 million years ago, long before the world existed according to a literal reading of Genesis, an early animal may already have been exploiting the biochemical abilities of bacteria. New research on the Ediacaran tubular fossil Conotubus suggests that animal–microbe partnerships have a history extending back towards the beginnings of animal life. For creationism, the inconvenience is twofold: the immense timescale, and a biological arrangement that makes excellent evolutionary sense but raises awkward questions about supposedly intelligent design.
The study, led by Zhenfei Wang and Yongbo Peng of Nanjing University and published in PNAS, examined sulphur and molybdenum isotope signatures in fossils from southern China. These suggest an association with sulphur-oxidising bacteria, potentially supplying nutrition and helping the animal tolerate toxic, sulphide-rich conditions. This is a geochemical inference, rather than the discovery of preserved bacterial partners. If the interpretation is correct, however, it extends the fossil evidence for animal–microbe symbiosis backwards by roughly 100 million years, as co-author Peter Crockford explains in his account of the research in an article in The Conversation.
Creationists often present such interdependence as evidence of design, as though two organisms benefiting from one another could only be the result of someone planning the arrangement. But this overlooks an obvious question: why would an omniscient designer make an animal dependent on another organism for a useful biochemical function? Why not equip the animal itself with the necessary machinery? A partnership introduces additional requirements: the organisms must encounter one another or maintain their association across generations, exchange useful substances, and sustain conditions in which both can function. Each dependency creates something else that can fail.
There is a qualification here. Giving an animal bacterial capabilities would not necessarily be as simple as inserting a few genes into its genome. Genes operate within cellular systems; useful metabolism also requires appropriate regulation, enzymes, transport mechanisms and chemical conditions. Division of labour between organisms can therefore be highly effective. Nevertheless, these are constraints facing organisms produced by evolution. An allegedly omnipotent designer, able to specify the entire system from the outset, cannot readily be excused by invoking the limitations of inherited cellular machinery. Complexity alone is no evidence of intelligent planning, especially when it includes dependence on a separate organism to supply an essential service.
As I argued in The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax complexity is not the evidence for intelligent design that creationists like to think since the hallmark of good, intelligent design is minimal complexity. Complexity is evidence of evolved systems where suboptimal solutions to problems often need additional layers of complexity to mitigate failures.
Finding marine fossils more than a kilometre above sea level might seem, at first sight, to be just the sort of discovery biblical literalists could seize upon as evidence of Noah’s flood. After all, if sediments containing the remains of marine organisms occur high in the mountains, surely the sea must once have covered those mountains—or so the familiar creationist argument runs.
The argument depends upon ignoring one of the most elementary facts of geology: continents are not stationary platforms. Their crust is folded, faulted, stretched, compressed, raised and lowered by tectonic processes operating over millions of years. Marine sediments found at high altitude do not necessarily show that the sea rose to that altitude; they may show that a former seabed was subsequently raised far above the sea.
A striking new example has now been documented by Selma Sarı and an international team of geologists in the Mut Basin on the southern margin of the Central Anatolian Plateau in Türkiye. Their study, published in the journal Geology, describes the world’s highest known late Middle Pleistocene marine deposits: sediments now preserved 1,177 metres above mean sea level but deposited beneath the sea during Marine Isotope Stage 7, approximately 230,000 years ago.
The researchers did not simply find shells on a hillside and invent a convenient explanation for them. They combined several independent lines of evidence, including calcareous nannofossils, foraminifera, ostracod communities, palaeomagnetism, stable-isotope measurements and reconstruction of the original water depth. The ostracods indicate that the sediments accumulated about 50 metres below the contemporary sea surface, while the fossil succession and magnetic record constrain when that deposition occurred.
Taking the original water depth and contemporary sea level into account, the researchers calculated that the deposits have been raised at an average rate of approximately 5.2 metres per thousand years. That is an exceptionally rapid geological uplift rate, probably produced by interacting processes deep beneath Anatolia, including break-off of part of the subducting Cyprus slab and mantle flow associated with the Arabian slab. The marine sediments have therefore become a precisely dated marker carried upwards by the movement of Earth’s crust.
This is exactly what creationist flood mythology cannot provide: a coherent explanation that agrees simultaneously with the fossils, sedimentary environment, magnetic record, isotope evidence, reconstructed water depth, regional tectonics and measured chronology. A single recent inundation would not explain why marine sediments occur at different elevations, belong to different geological periods and have subsequently undergone folding, faulting, uplift and erosion.
To anyone familiar with Africa today, its extensive grasslands and savannahs can seem almost timeless: landscapes of grasses, scattered trees, grazing herbivores, predators and recurrent fires. But, like every modern ecosystem, the African savannah has a history. It was not created fully formed, stocked with its present collection of plants and animals, during a mythical creation week a few thousand years ago. It developed through a succession of environmental and evolutionary changes extending over tens of millions of years.
Some of that history is preserved not on the African continent itself, where erosion and geological disturbance have left gaps in the terrestrial record, but beneath the neighbouring Atlantic Ocean. Plant waxes blown from the land settled on the sea surface and were incorporated into sediments accumulating slowly on the ocean floor. Layer upon layer, these sediments preserved a chemical record of the vegetation growing in north-west Africa at different times.
Now, Anna K. Schartman, Pratigya J. Polissar and Caroline A. E. Strömberg have used these molecular fossils and their carbon-isotope composition to reconstruct some 24 million years of ecological change. Their findings are reported in an open-access paper, “The origin and development of the Miocene northwest African savanna”, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers found that the region’s closed forests and woodlands began giving way to a much more open ecosystem about 15–14 million years ago—approximately five million years earlier than earlier regional reconstructions had suggested. This first open landscape was not equivalent to the modern African savannah. It was rich in C3 grasses and had no close modern counterpart. The familiar C4-grass savannah developed later and in stages, with its most rapid expansion occurring between about 7.4 and 6.4 million years ago.
This does not conflict with research publicised by UC Santa Cruz in 2023, which found locally abundant C4 grasses in parts of eastern Africa between about 21 and 16 million years ago. That earlier research examined terrestrial fossil sites in Kenya and Uganda; the new study reconstructs regional vegetation in north-west Africa from wind-blown plant waxes preserved in marine sediments. Together, the studies show that Africa did not undergo a single, continent-wide transformation. Different mixtures of forest, woodland and grassland appeared in different regions at different times.
One of creationism’s favourite tactics is to treat every apparent gap in the evidence as evidence of absence - although that never seems to apply to creationists' "God did it!" claims for which definitive evidence either for the god's existence or its actions are invariably absent. If archaeologists have not found something, creationists assume it never existed — or, more usually, that scientists cannot explain its absence without invoking the supernatural.
A study published in the Journal of Quaternary Science provides a neat illustration of what can really lie behind such gaps. In this case, the missing evidence was not missing at all. It consisted of thousands of small, unremarkable-looking fragments of animal bone that earlier archaeologists might easily have overlooked, discarded or left uncollected.
The study, led by Monica Mărgărit of Valahia University of Târgoviște, Romania, examined animal remains recovered from Abri 122/1200, a rock shelter in the Vârghiș Gorges of Romania’s Eastern Carpathians. The site contains an extensive Middle Palaeolithic stone-tool industry and abundant remains of animals, including bovids, goats, wolves and cave bears. Luminescence dating indicates that Middle Palaeolithic occupation extended across a long period, approximately from Marine Isotope Stage 7, about 230,000 years ago, into Marine Isotope Stage 3.
Among more than 10,000 bone fragments, the researchers identified 83 bearing combinations of impact damage, microscopic scratches, smoothing, polish and edge wear consistent with their having been used as tools. They distinguished these traces from damage caused by butchery, carnivore activity, sediment movement and other natural processes, using microscopic examination and comparisons with experimentally used bone fragments.
Some had apparently served as retouchers for shaping or sharpening stone tools. Others had been used to scrape or work softer substances such as hides or plant material, while still others had functioned as wedges, multipurpose implements or simple hammers. Most had not been laboriously carved into specialised shapes. A suitable fragment was selected, used for the task at hand and then discarded—an expedient but effective use of a readily available material.
That distinction is important. The discovery does not show that Neanderthals in Romania possessed an elaborate bone-working industry previously unknown to science. It shows something arguably more revealing about their everyday behaviour: they could recognise the useful properties of an ordinary fragment, adapt it to an immediate problem and employ materials other than stone as circumstances required. “Technologically flexible and resourceful” is therefore more accurate than the rather sensational claim that their technology was simply “more advanced”.
How Can Archaeologists Recognise an Expedient Bone Tool?
A broken animal bone is not automatically a tool. Bones can be fractured, scratched, polished or crushed by many processes, including butchery, marrow extraction, carnivore gnawing, trampling, movement through sediment and weathering. Archaeologists must therefore distinguish evidence of deliberate use from damage produced before or after burial.
This study belongs to the field of traceology, or use-wear analysis. Researchers examine the position, orientation and microscopic structure of marks on an object to reconstruct how it may have been used.
Evidence of use
No single scratch or polished patch is normally decisive. Identification depends on combinations of features occurring in places where they would be expected on a working tool:
Localised smoothing and rounding can develop where an edge or projection has repeatedly rubbed against another material.
Microscopic striations may reveal the direction in which a tool was moved. Repeated scraping tends to produce organised wear rather than randomly orientated scratches.
Polish can develop through prolonged contact with relatively soft materials, possibly including hides or plant fibres.
Pits, grooves and small impact scars can indicate that a bone was used as a retoucher to shape or resharpen the edge of a stone tool.
Crushing, flaking and battered ends may identify bones used as hammers, wedges or intermediate pieces through which force was transmitted.
These marks must be distinguished from other forms of damage. Carnivore teeth can leave pits, punctures, scores and ragged edges; trampling can produce irregular scratches; roots can etch branching patterns into a surface; and movement through sediment can abrade an entire bone. Butchery and marrow extraction also produce characteristic cut marks, impact notches and fracture patterns. Those marks demonstrate human activity, but do not necessarily show that the bone was subsequently used as a tool.
Researchers compare archaeological specimens with experimental reference collections. Modern fragments of similar bone are used for scraping, rubbing, hammering, wedging or working stone. The resulting wear is then examined microscopically and compared with that preserved on the ancient specimens. Archaeological context, fracture history and the distribution of wear across each fragment provide additional evidence.
Even then, conclusions are expressed cautiously. Use-wear may show that a bone contacted a hard or soft material and indicate the kind of movement involved, but it cannot always identify the precise task or material with certainty.
Expedient and formally manufactured tools
A formal bone tool is deliberately manufactured. Its maker selects a suitable bone, produces a blank and modifies it by cutting, scraping, grinding or polishing. The finished object may have a regular shape intended for repeated or specialised use.
An expedient bone tool requires much less preparation. Its user recognises that an existing fragment already has a suitable edge, point, weight or shape, perhaps makes a minor adjustment, uses it for an immediate task and then discards it.
This does not mean that an expedient tool was accidental or that its user lacked the ability to manufacture something more elaborate. It represents a practical decision: there is little benefit in spending time making a specialised implement when a conveniently shaped piece of bone can perform the required task immediately.
Most of the specimens from Abri 122/1200 appear to belong to this expedient category. They were not extensively shaped, but their wear indicates that Neanderthals selected and used them as retouchers, scrapers, wedges, multipurpose implements or percussive tools. Their significance lies in the flexibility with which available materials were exploited, not in elaborate craftsmanship.
How archaeological gaps are created
Expedient tools present a particular problem because they can look like ordinary fragments of food waste. Earlier excavations often concentrated on complete, identifiable or visually impressive bones. Small fragments might be placed in storage without detailed examination—or not collected at all.
Consequently, an apparent absence of bone technology can reflect collection practices, preservation and the questions earlier researchers were asking rather than the behaviour of the people who occupied a site.
The Romanian evidence illustrates why gaps in the archaeological record should not be treated as proof that something never existed. Sometimes the missing evidence is already present, awaiting the methods and research questions needed to recognise it.
No Neanderthal skeletal remains have yet been recovered from Abri 122/1200, so the attribution is indirect. It rests on the age of the deposits, their Middle Palaeolithic stone industry and their wider archaeological context. The researchers are now looking for more direct evidence, including ancient Neanderthal DNA preserved in the cave sediments. This qualification is acknowledged openly by the scientists, unlike creationism, in which uncertainty is habitually concealed beneath declarations of dogmatic certainty.
The Romanian report in Gândul therefore describes more than another addition to the Neanderthal toolkit. The research demonstrates how apparent gaps in the archaeological record can be created by preservation, sampling and the questions researchers previously thought to ask. When those methods and questions improve, the gaps become smaller—not because scientists have invented missing evidence, but because they have learnt how to recognise evidence that was hiding in plain sight.
Auto-translated from Romanian: Important discovery at a site in Romania. Neanderthals had more advanced technology than previously thoughtArchaeologists have made an extremely important discovery right on Romanian territory. Specifically, in the site called Abri 122/1200, a cave in the Vârghiș Gorges occupied in the Middle Paleolithic, approximately 230,000 to 60,000 years ago, specialists have identified things that change what was known so far about the Neanderthals who lived on Romanian territory.
Researchers have identified, in bone fragments, the first evidence that they used bone tools for activities such as scraping, sharpening, or splitting.
The new study, led by Monica Mărgărit from the University of Târgoviște, was published in the Journal of Quaternary Science and focused on animal remains intentionally modified by humans. The researchers tried to determine whether the animal bones were simply remains from food consumption or whether, given the observed modifications, they were also transformed into tools for various activities, such as leather processing.
The context is particularly interesting because the Abri 122/1200 site preserves an important lithic industry and a large amount of faunal remains. Previous research has already identified bones from large herbivores, such as representatives of the bovid family, from the genera Bos and Bison, goats, but also the cave bear (Ursus spelaeus).
The bones show a high degree of fragmentation, compatible with the activities of cutting and exploiting the carcasses. During previous archaeological campaigns, fragments of long bones were discovered that appear to have been obtained by striking, most likely in the process of extracting the marrow. Some of the fragments also showed features compatible with their use as tools, geopop.it shows.
Important discovery on Romanian territory
The new study focuses on this aspect: the animal bones were not necessarily just food scraps. Traceological analyses showed that they were intentionally exploited. Some fragments could be selected and modified for use as tools, which demonstrates that Neanderthal technology was not limited to stone.
Although these fragments were not frequently processed or adapted for a very precise purpose, their shapes and characteristics appear to have been considered useful for carrying out certain activities.
The significance of the discovery goes beyond a single artifact. The intentional use of bones demonstrates a wider range of raw materials exploited by Neanderthals and suggests that, in addition to producing stone tools, these communities may have systematically used materials obtained from animal carcasses.
Abri 122/1200 is also an important site for understanding the presence of Neanderthals in the Carpathian region. The most recent research on the chronology of the site indicates that the archaeological levels with Middle Paleolithic industry could be up to about 230,000 years old.
The discoveries at Abri 122/1200 thus contribute to shaping an increasingly complex picture of Neanderthal technology: a system in which stone represented a fundamental raw material, but in which the bones of hunted and consumed animals could also become useful materials for carrying out technological activities.
ABSTRACT
Archeological evidence has demonstrated that Neanderthals utilized mammal bone remains as tools. These findings are geographically widespread, stretching from the Altai Mountains in Central Asia to the Atlantic Ocean. Such an extensive distribution is indicative of a broad pattern of Neanderthal behavior concerning tool use and resource exploitation, although a notable lacuna exists in the archeological record within the Carpathian region that appears as a blank area on the existing map. The main purpose of our study is to address and fill this geographical gap. To this end, we focused on the site of Abri 122/1200 in Romania as a representative case study. The luminescence dating results indicate that the Middle Paleolithic occupation of the cave spans from the Middle Pleistocene (Chibanian) to the Late Pleistocene, approximately from Marine Isotope Stage 7 (MIS 7, around 230 000 years ago) to MIS 3. A crucial aspect of our investigation involved differentiating between taphonomic marks on faunal remains: those resulting from natural processes such as scavenging or environmental factors and those stemming from technological activities like tool production or usewear. Through meticulous analysis, we successfully identified and isolated a consistent set of faunal remains categorized into five distinct typological groups. Our observations reveal that technological interventions on these bones are infrequent; the majority of fragments appear to have been used in their natural state without extensive modification. Fragments show evidence of being used in activities such as the processing of lithic tools, hides, or plant materials, which indicates a more complex utilization pattern than previously assumed. The assemblage from Abri 122/1200 thus exemplifies the importance of re-evaluating other Middle Paleolithic contexts within the Carpathian region. It highlights the variability, origin, and technological significance of bone production and utilization by Neanderthals, challenging traditional perceptions of their technological capabilities and resourcefulness.
The significance of these finds does not lie in the discovery of some spectacularly sophisticated Neanderthal invention. It lies in the evidence of adaptability preserved on apparently insignificant fragments of bone. The occupants of Abri 122/1200 recognised useful shapes and properties in the remains of the animals they exploited, selected suitable pieces for particular jobs and discarded them when those jobs were finished. This was practical problem-solving—the ability to use different materials flexibly rather than depend upon a rigid repertoire of stone implements.
The study also illustrates why creationist arguments based upon gaps in the evidence are so fundamentally dishonest. The apparent absence of Neanderthal bone tools from the Carpathian region did not mean that no such tools had existed. Many were too small and insufficiently modified to attract the attention of earlier excavators. Once researchers asked a more precise question, examined every fragment microscopically and compared its wear with experimentally produced marks, some of the supposedly missing evidence emerged from material that had been present all along.
Nor can the wider archaeological context be reconciled with a young Earth or a recent global flood. Abri 122/1200 preserves Middle Palaeolithic occupations extending through a substantial portion of the Pleistocene, within an independently dated sequence spanning tens of thousands of years. Its stone artefacts, butchered animal remains and expedient bone tools record repeated human activity long before creationists believe their god created the Universe, let alone before their mythical Flood supposedly destroyed the archaeological landscape. The absence of evidence does nothing for creationism; the presence of evidence utterly refutes it.
The researchers are also explicit about the limits of their conclusions. No identifiable Neanderthal remains have yet been found at the site, so the attribution rests upon its chronology, Middle Palaeolithic stone industry and wider European context. Instead of concealing that uncertainty, the team is looking for additional evidence, including ancient DNA in the sediments. That is how science works: conclusions are proportioned to the available evidence and remain open to refinement when new evidence appears.
Creationism predicted none of these discoveries, supplied none of the methods used to recognise them and offers no coherent explanation for their age or archaeological setting. Its only contribution is to rename Neanderthals as descendants of Adam or Noah and dismiss the dating, stratigraphy, genetics and comparative anatomy that show otherwise. Far from exposing a weakness in evolutionary science, the former blank on the Carpathian map demonstrates how science closes gaps, while creationism survives by pretending that every gap must remain permanent.
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