Creationism is rooted in Bronze Age mythology and rests on a single source, the Bible, whose only claim to authority is its own demonstrably false assertion that it is the inerrant word of a creator god.
This is a claim anyone could make, and it collapses when its statements are compared with the observable world.
For example, biblical genealogies, beginning with a mythical first couple created from dust without ancestors, imply that Earth is only a few thousand years old. In reality, geological and astronomical evidence shows that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and the fossil record demonstrates that life was flourishing hundreds of millions of years before the Bible implies creation began.
One striking piece of evidence comes from an analysis of mastodon DNA, which shows that between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago mastodons in North America had already diversified into several genetically distinct populations.
The dating of a clutch of fossil dinosaur eggs will leave creationists scrambling for excuses to dismiss the evidence and cling to the childish notion that Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old, created ex nihilo by magic, with all extant and extinct species brought into existence without ancestors just a few days later. In other words, this discovery is yet another small addition to the mountain of evidence showing that the biblical creation story was the work of ignorant Bronze Age people trying to make sense of the world around them, not the word of an omniscient creator god who would have known better.
An added problem for creationists is that the research team used a new method of dating the eggs based on measuring when the eggshell itself formed, rather than relying solely on dating the rock in which the eggs were embedded. The difficulty with the latter approach is that, while it gives the age of the surrounding rock, the mineral grains in that rock may predate the eggs and could have been transported there by water or wind.
The new technique is conceptually similar to the uranium–lead (U–Pb) method used to date zircon crystals in volcanic tuff. Tiny amounts of uranium, which readily substitute into the crystal lattice, are incorporated when the zircon forms, but lead is excluded. Over time, uranium isotopes decay into stable isotopes of lead. Thus, any lead present within a zircon crystal must have come from radioactive decay, and by measuring the ratio of uranium to lead isotopes, scientists can calculate the crystal’s age with high precision.
A very similar process occurs in the carbonate of dinosaur eggshells: uranium is incorporated during formation, but lead is excluded. Measuring uranium–lead isotope ratios in the shell carbonate therefore provides a direct and highly accurate age for the eggs themselves, leaving little room for error.
Archaeologists led by Budianto Hakim of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) and Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution have uncovered evidence of tool-making on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi dating back 1.04 million years. The identity of the toolmakers remains unknown, as no hominin fossils have yet been found on the island. Their discovery has just been published open-access in Nature.
The most likely candidates are Homo erectus or a descendant population that adapted to Sulawesi’s distinctive environment. The island lies close to Flores, home of the diminutive ‘Hobbit’ (H. floresiensis), thought to have evolved from H. erectus through island dwarfism, a process that also produced the miniature elephants of Flores. A related discovery was made in 2019 on Luzon in the Philippines, where H. luzonensis—another likely offshoot of H. erectus—was identified. It is therefore entirely plausible that H. erectus, or one of its evolutionary branches, was present and making tools on Sulawesi more than a million years ago.
For creationists, such finds are troublesome because they align seamlessly with evolutionary theory, showing hominins branching, adapting, and diversifying in different environments, just as Darwin and Wallace first described in 1859. They also highlight the profound role of environment in shaping evolutionary outcomes.
For science, the discovery is particularly significant because it implies that an early hominin was capable of undertaking sea crossings across the formidable ‘Wallace Line’—a biogeographic boundary that long isolated the fauna of Australasia from mainland Asia by preventing the natural dispersal of terrestrial animals.
Archaeologists from Cardiff University have published the largest study of its kind into animal remains from Late Bronze Age Britain, and their findings reveal a surprisingly complex picture of feasting, farming, and far-reaching social networks. The research, published in iScience, reports on multi-isotope analysis of more than 3,500 bones from six prehistoric middens in Wiltshire and the Thames Valley. These vast heaps of discarded remains are the archaeological traces of large communal feasts held some 3,000 years ago.
The team found that the animals consumed—cattle, pigs, and sheep—were not all raised locally. Some were brought from considerable distances, suggesting both a sophisticated agricultural economy and a culture in which travel and exchange linked communities across southern Britain. Such large-scale gatherings, the researchers conclude, were central to forging alliances, maintaining social bonds, and reinforcing ritual practices in the closing centuries of the Bronze Age.
In other words, these middens are the material testimony of thriving societies in Britain whose development ran seamlessly from the Neolithic into the Bronze Age, without any trace of a catastrophic global flood. If Genesis were literal history, such sites could not exist. But they do. The Cardiff findings are therefore another piece of hard archaeological evidence that exposes the biblical flood as a myth, not a record of real events.
Far from being isolated farming villages, Late Bronze Age communities in Britain were enmeshed in a dynamic cultural landscape with trade and ritual at its heart. I have previously written about the political control and economic development in Britain being sufficient to command and supply the manpower needed to undertake massive civil engineering projects such as building Stonehenge and Silbury Hill. Silbury Hill alone took an estimates 18 million man-hours to build (i.e. 500 men working for 15 years) - a level of political and economic development which would have been impossible within the Bible's framework.
And here lies the striking problem for biblical literalism. If we take the chronology given in Genesis at face value, Noah’s Flood is supposed to have occurred around 2348 BCE. By that reckoning, all humans and animals on earth, save those aboard the Ark, were annihilated. The Late Bronze Age middens, however, date to between 1200 and 800 BCE—well after the supposed global deluge. The isotope evidence shows continuity of local herds, supplemented by long-distance transport of animals, not a sudden repopulation from a single Middle Eastern source.
Parasite–host relationships are a nightmare for creationists. Their usual escape hatch is “The Fall”, but that undermines the Discovery Institute’s claim that intelligent design is science rather than Bible-literalist dogma in a lab coat. It also raises the obvious question: if parasites only appeared 6,000–10,000 years ago, how did they spread so quickly—and why do we find fossil evidence of parasitism millions of years old?
Creationists cope by dismissing science as a conspiracy, waving away radiometric dating, or pushing myths such as dinosaur fossils being “carbon-dated” [sic] to a few thousand years old. So creationism persists, despite the vast amount of evidence against it, by a combination of wilful ignorance, disinformation and a lack of critical thinking skills.
Now creationists must also ignore new research from Stockholm University, where scientists isolated bacterial DNA from the teeth of woolly and steppe mammoths. They showed these bacteria evolved into the ancestors of those infecting modern elephants—evidence of parasites a million years before “Creation Week”, and of co-evolution continuing right up to today’s elephants, the descendants of those mammoths.
Incidentally, neither mammoths nor modern elephants are mentioned in the Bible, reflecting the parochial ignorance of its authors - a fact often overlooked in depictions of animals boarding Noah's Ark, which usually includes a pair of elephants!
This blog post is something of a departure from my usual refutations of creationism. At times, that exercise can feel like shooting fish in a barrel, since almost every scientific paper on palaeontology, cosmology, or evolutionary biology casually refutes creationism simply by presenting the facts and evidence—something creationism singularly lacks.
This, however, is only tangentially related to creationism, in that it concerns the diversification of humans into distinct regional cultural and genetic populations. That richness and complexity is utterly incompatible with the notion that all of humanity radiated out from a single founder population of eight related individuals in the Middle East.
Instead, it is about the genetic evidence for the origins of the Slavic peoples, for whom I feel a special affinity. My youngest son is married to a Slav woman from Czechia and now lives and works there. Former Czechoslovakia also played a formative role in my political development during the 1960s, when the Prague Spring gave those of us on the left hope for a form of socialism that was democratic, open, and inclusive — rather than the totalitarian system into which Soviet Communism had degenerated. The self-sacrifice of the young idealists Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc, in response to the Soviet-led invasion that suppressed the reforms, was a profound inspiration — about which I wrote after a visit to Prague in December 2011, when a visit to their memorial in Wenceslaus Square, on the site of their self-immolation, reduced me to tears.
Since then, we have returned to Czechia several times. On our most recent trip in the summer of 2024, we visited the museum in the Moravský Krumlov castle near Brno, which currently houses a series of immense art nouveau paintings by the Czech artist Alphons Maria Mucha—perhaps better known in the West for his commercial art nouveau designs for chocolate boxes, biscuit tins, and soap packages that epitomised the 1920s and 30s. The series — a Czech national treasure I described at length soon after our return — titled The Epic of the Slavs, was pained between 1912 and 1926. It depicts the story of the Slavic peoples’ development in Eastern Europe up to the mid-1920s: a people struggling to forge an identity under political pressure from surrounding religious powers, from Eastern Orthodoxy in the south and east, to Catholicism in the west, followed later by German Protestantism. Like the Irish, the Czech people’s identity was forged in this power struggle, eventually emerging as proud and independent. Today, Czechia is one of the most atheist countries in Europe.
This article, however, is about the deeper origins of the Slavic peoples, as described in a recent open-access paper in Nature by an international team of researchers led by Joscha Gretzinger of the Department of Archaeogenetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.
The bad day for those creationists who haven't yet closed their minds to contrary information continues. Close on the news of a 220-million-year-old fossil ichthyosaur from Japan comes the discovery of a 500-million-year-old fossil worm from Greenland.
The identification of this Cambrian fossil, Nectocaris, as an ancestor of arrow worms rather than an early squid, as once thought, is a fine example of something creationists pretend to find incomprehensible: scientists changing their minds when new evidence demands it. Wedded to simple certainties, right or wrong, creationists insist that science must be either wholly right or wholly wrong. If a conclusion is shown to be mistaken, they assume the entire scientific enterprise collapses into a cloud of vacuous uncertainty. In their black-and-white world of false dichotomies, that somehow means their evidence-free superstition wins by default.
About 15 years ago, a study of fossils from the Burgess Shale concluded that Nectocaris was a cephalopod mollusc. But that classification posed problems since what could be discerned of its anatomy did not match that of cephalopods. That difficulty has now been resolved by a detailed examination of the ventral ganglion – part of the nervous system – which is revealed to consist of paired structures consistent with being ancestral to arrow worms.
This breakthrough was made possible by the exceptional preservation of fossils at Sirius Passet in northern Greenland, a remarkable Cambrian fossil site.
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.
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.
Buried beneath a thick layer of silt containing a chaotic mixture of fossils from both nearby and distant land masses — the expected deposit of a supposed global genocidal flood — is... nothing. Such a layer should be observable worldwide, of course, but like at the archaeological sites in the Carpathians, it simply isn’t there.
Instead, what we find is an unbroken sequence of historical deposits stretching far beyond the time when creationists claim the Earth was magicked into existence. In other words, the evidence contradicts the Bible’s timeline and strongly refutes the notion of a global flood.
Importantly, this evidence isn’t the result of an attempt to disprove the Bible. Rather, archaeologists have simply uncovered facts that are starkly different from what one would expect if the Bible were the inerrant word of a creator god. A case in point: a team from Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (CAU) investigating changes in social hierarchy associated with the introduction of agriculture in the Carpathian Basin.
According to expectations, the adoption of agriculture should have led to increased social inequality, as control of land and trade would concentrate power in the hands of a privileged elite. However, the researchers found no such evidence. Using house size as a proxy for social inequality — assuming that a ruling class would have built significantly larger dwellings — the team discovered that house sizes remained relatively uniform over the period.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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 originsParent 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.
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.
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In that long stretch of Earth’s history before it was supposedly "created," according to creationist mythology—a span covering 99.9975% of the planet’s existence—a remarkable geophysical event occurred. Around 41,000 years ago, during a time when modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans coexisted in Eurasia, a major disturbance in Earth’s magnetic field likely influenced human behaviour and may have hastened the disappearance of the Neanderthals.
This event, known as the Laschamps Excursion, was not a typical magnetic pole reversal, which Earth undergoes roughly every 100,000 years. Instead, the planet's magnetic field entered a chaotic state, weakening dramatically to around 10% of its usual strength and breaking into multiple, unstable poles.
Earth’s magnetic field normally shields the surface from ionising radiation by deflecting much of it towards the poles. With that protective barrier severely weakened, the planet would have been exposed to much stronger levels of ultraviolet radiation. The usual deflection of charged particles also produces the auroras, which during this period would have appeared across much of the night sky, including at lower latitudes—perhaps even near the equator—due to the multiple and shifting magnetic poles.
Although the Laschamps Excursion lasted only a few years, the environmental changes it triggered may explain behavioural shifts visible in the archaeological record. This is discussed in an article in The Conversation by Raven Garvey, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan; Agnit Mukhopadhyay, Research Scholar at the University of Alberta and Research Affiliate at Michigan; and Sanja Panovska, a Research Scientist at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences. Together with their colleagues, they have published their findings—open access—in Science Advances.
Incidentally, the archaeological evidence discussed here should not exist at all if the biblical flood narrative were true. Such a flood would have obliterated or buried this material beneath a chaotic layer of silt, destroying the stratified layers of sediment by which these finds are reliably dated—dating that is wholly inconsistent with the timeline of human history as derived from biblical mythology. Moreover, the Laschamps Excursion undermines any creationist claim that the Earth was created and fine-tuned especially for human life. If something as fundamental as magnetic polarity—and the UV protection it affords—can fail naturally due to processes in Earth’s core, then the idea of a specially designed planet collapses under its own absurdity.
The article from The Conversation is reproduced below under a Creative Commons licence and has been reformatted for stylistic consistency.
