Creationism Refuted - Australian Crocodiles Are Fatal To Creationism

Saltwater crocodile, Crocodylus poros

By Molly Ebersold
St Augustine's Alligator Farm,
Public Domain, Link

Jorgo Ristevski, CC BY

129,000 years of crocodiles: what we know about Australasia’s ancient apex predators

According to Bronze Age Biblical mythology, existing species should have no ancestors because they were all supposedly magicked into existence fully formed during a few days of creation, just a few thousand years ago.

That childish belief has to be clung to by creationists despite the evidence of the real world, which tells a very different story: not of sudden manufacture, but of deep evolutionary history, extinction, replacement and survival. The iconic saltwater crocodiles of northern Australia provide a good example. They are not isolated products of a one-off act of creation, but living survivors of a much richer Australasian crocodylian history stretching back tens of millions of years, during which crocodile relatives occupied a variety of ecological niches, including those of formidable predators.

Modern Australia has only two native crocodile species: the freshwater crocodile, Crocodylus johnstoni, and the Indo-Pacific or saltwater crocodile, Crocodylus porosus. But the fossil and archaeological evidence shows that these are merely the remnant survivors of a once more diverse crocodylian fauna, including the now-extinct mekosuchines, a distinctive Australasian group whose members included species very unlike the crocodiles familiar today.

Now a group of researchers from the University of Queensland and Griffith University, together with colleagues from several other institutions, has pieced together the fragmentary evidence from 26 fossil and archaeological sites across Australasia to build a clearer picture of the crocodylians that once lived in the region, and of their interactions with humans. Their review of the evidence was recently published, open access, in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

The study shows that the late Pleistocene record of Australian crocodylians is still incomplete and often difficult to date securely, but it nevertheless reveals a lost diversity. The extinct mekosuchines appear to have declined and disappeared on mainland Australia around the same broad period as other Australian megafauna, while some survived much later on south-west Pacific islands such as New Caledonia, Vanuatu and Fiji. There, their remains occur in archaeological contexts, suggesting that they persisted until after human arrival and may have been affected by human activity.

Three of the authors have also written an article in The Conversation, explaining their research and its significance for understanding the evolutionary history of these reptiles. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Europe's Most Complete Stegosauria Skull - From 150 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Illustration of Dacentrurus armatus.

Adrián Blázquez / Fundación Dinópolis.

Europe’s most complete stegosaurian skull unearthed in Teruel, Spain | Pensoft.blog

Another day, another dinosaur. At least, that must be how it feels to creationists trying to cling to demonstrably false beliefs by ignoring the evidence and pretending each new discovery is either a mistake, a fraud, or a sinister attempt by scientists to undermine their faith.

This time the problem comes from Teruel, Spain, where palaeontologists from the Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinópolis have described an exceptionally well-preserved partial skull of a stegosaurian dinosaur from the Late Jurassic Villar del Arzobispo Formation, dating to about 150 million years ago. Their results, published in May 2025 in the Pensoft journal Vertebrate Zoology, identify the fossil as belonging to Dacentrurus armatus, and as the most complete stegosaurian skull yet found in Europe.

That matters because stegosaurian skulls are notoriously rare. Their bones were fragile, and the animals’ skulls were small compared with their heavily built bodies, so cranial material is much less commonly preserved than vertebrae, limb bones, plates or tail spikes. A skull as complete as this one is therefore not just another fossil for a museum drawer, but a valuable piece of anatomical evidence for understanding how these plated, quadrupedal herbivores evolved.

Using this specimen, the researchers were able to refine the known anatomy of Dacentrurus armatus and reassess the evolutionary relationships of stegosaurs more generally. Their analysis supports the division of Stegosauria into two major clades, Huayangosauridae and Stegosauridae, and they formalise a further grouping, Neostegosauria, to include later-diverging stegosaurids. In other words, one skull from Spain helps clarify not only a single European dinosaur species, but the wider evolutionary history and geographical spread of the iconic plated dinosaurs.

If nothing else, work such as this illustrates how science treats a new discovery: not as a threat to be denied, explained away or forced into conformity with dogma, but as additional evidence to be tested against existing knowledge. Where necessary, classifications are revised, hypotheses are adjusted, and understanding moves a little closer to reality.

Creationism, by contrast, starts with the conclusion and then tries to make the evidence fit. Science starts with the evidence and changes the conclusion when the evidence demands it. That is why a 150-million-year-old stegosaur skull from Spain is a contribution to human knowledge, not a theological inconvenience to be waved away.

Creationism Refuted - A Giant, Intelligent Predatory Octopus - 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A sketch of the giant octopus.

Image: Yohei Utsuki
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Hokkaido University.

Giant octopuses may have ruled the oceans 100 million years ago – Hokkaido University

To a conspiracy-theorist creationist who sees science as an organised plot to trick them into changing their mind, it must seem that the whole world and its dog are ganging up on them. The “conspiracy” has now spread to a team of researchers led by Shin Ikegami of Hokkaido University, Japan, who have announced the discovery of fossilised jaws of giant octopuses that may have been apex predators in Late Cretaceous seas, about 100 million years before creationism’s mythical “Creation Week”. Some of these animals may have reached nearly 20 metres in length, making them among the largest invertebrates yet described.

To a creationist, apparently, it is more plausible to believe that a god self-assembled out of nothing, then made an entire universe out of nothing by magic just a few thousand years ago, than to accept that Earth and life on it are the result of long, slow, scientifically demonstrable natural processes. So, when the evidence says otherwise, the evidence must somehow be forged, misrepresented or misunderstood. Besides, Bronze Age people who thought the world was flat, with a solid dome over it, said so — and what better evidence could there be than that?

What the team of researchers from several Japanese research institutions, together with Jörg Mutterlose of Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, discovered was recently published in Science. Using high-resolution grinding tomography and an artificial intelligence model, they identified fossil jaws hidden inside rock samples from the Late Cretaceous period. The fossils, from Japan and Vancouver Island, date from between about 100 and 72 million years ago. They had been preserved in calm seafloor sediments, retaining fine details, including wear marks that reveal how these animals fed.

Based on the size and shape of the jaws, the researchers estimate that some of these extinct finned octopuses, especially Nanaimoteuthis haggarti, may have reached nearly 20 metres in total length. Their jaws show heavy chipping, scratching, cracking and polishing, consistent with repeated forceful biting into hard prey such as shells, bones or other resistant material. These were not passive, soft-bodied animals drifting harmlessly through the Cretaceous seas; they appear to have been powerful, active predators, competing in ecosystems otherwise assumed to have been dominated by large marine reptiles and sharks.

One especially intriguing finding was asymmetrical wear on the jaws. In two species, one side of the biting surface was more heavily worn than the other, suggesting that these animals may have favoured one side when handling difficult prey. This sort of behavioural lateralisation is associated in modern animals with complex neural processing, raising the possibility that advanced predatory behaviour, and perhaps a degree of intelligence, had already evolved in these early octopus relatives. The discovery also pushes the fossil record of finned octopuses back by about 15 million years, and the broader octopus record by about 5 million years.

Refuting Creationism - A New Species of Dinosaur From Argentina - From 155 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Bicharracosaurus dionidei

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Landscape view from the excavation site.

Photo: Amalia Villafañe

SNSB – Staatliche Naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen Bayerns » Palaeontologists Discover New Long-Necked Dinosaur in Patagonia

A German-Argentine team of palaeontologists led by dinosaur expert Oliver Rauhut of the Staatliche Naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen Bayerns (SNSB — the Bavarian State Natural History Collections) has discovered a new long-necked dinosaur, Bicharracosaurus dionidei, from the Late Jurassic of Argentina, dating to about 155 million years before creationism's mythical 'Creation Week'. The team's findings have recently been published in PeerJ.

Dinosaurs are such a problem for creationists, and the evidence for their existence is so overwhelming, that they cannot get away with the usual denial of inconvenient facts. Besides, children find them fascinating and these are exactly the people creationists need to recruit into their cult before they acquire the knowledge and wisdom that are the effective antidotes to creationist brainwashing.

Their problem is simple. According to the childish mythology they are required to defend, nothing died until Eve's 'sin', when their supposedly omnipotent god somehow lost control of its creation and things began to go wrong. That means they must pretend that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, and that dinosaurs either survived the mythical global flood or were all exterminated in it. But that merely raises more questions. Why would a creator god go to the trouble of creating dinosaurs only to destroy them for something in which they played no part? And why are there no human fossils, artefacts or footprints in the same undisturbed geological strata as non-avian dinosaurs?

But creationism is not about following evidence or answering awkward questions of the kind, “if that is true, why do we find this?” It is about believing what one is told to believe, or being threatened with hellfire and eternal torture for asking the wrong questions.

The result of this hopeless muddle is that creationists are forced into ever more desperate claims. They must persuade their followers that dinosaurs were alive only a few thousand years ago, by presenting the Paluxy River “human footprints” as evidence, despite their having long since collapsed into misidentified dinosaur tracks, erosional marks and dubious carvings. They also repeat the claim that scientists found fresh blood and soft tissue in dinosaur fossils, or that dinosaur remains have been “carbon dated” to only a few thousand years old — claims that depend on misrepresentation, contamination, or the simple fact that radiocarbon dating is the wrong tool for fossils tens of millions of years old.

But the inconvenient facts remain.

And the facts are that all non-avian dinosaurs died out in the Cretaceous-Palaeogene mass extinction about 66 million years ago, tens of millions of years before humans existed. The avian dinosaurs survived as birds, but the great terrestrial dinosaur lineages disappeared. Meanwhile, palaeontologists continue to dig up new fossils which confirm that dinosaurs were a highly diverse group of reptiles and the dominant large land animals for vastly longer than humans, or even placental mammals, have existed.

Needless to say, there were no human footprints, stone tools, fresh blood, or conveniently misplaced creationist anachronisms associated with the remains of Bicharracosaurus dionidei. What the researchers found was something far more useful: the partial skeleton of an adult sauropod from the Late Jurassic Cañadón Calcáreo Formation in Patagonia, including more than 30 vertebrae from the neck, back and tail, together with ribs and part of the pelvis.

At an estimated length of about 20 metres, B. dionidei was smaller than the very largest sauropods, some of which reached around 40 metres. But its scientific importance lies not in record-breaking size, but in where it fits in the sauropod family tree. The animal appears to have combined features seen in both brachiosaurids and diplodocids, and phylogenetic analyses suggest it was a macronarian sauropod with possible brachiosaurid affinities. If that interpretation is confirmed, it would make B. dionidei the first known Jurassic brachiosaurid from South America.

It lived on the southern supercontinent Gondwana, before South America and Africa had fully separated, and it helps fill a significant gap in the fossil record of Late Jurassic sauropods from the Southern Hemisphere. Much of what palaeontologists know about these animals has come from North America, Europe and the famous Tendaguru beds of Tanzania, so a new Patagonian form provides important evidence for how these giant herbivores evolved and dispersed across the ancient southern continents.

Refuting Creationism - Multiple Origins Of The Japanese People

A mask depicting Aterui 'Lord of Tamo', a famous Emishi chief from the ancient Tohoku District in Japan. The Emishi people from north-east Asia have been identified as a possible third main ancestral group in Japan.

© Avalon.red / Alamy Stock Photo

Geographic regions in Japan from which the samples were recruited are described. These regions include the Japan archipelago, commonly known as Hondo, and the Ryukyu archipelago, which is termed as Okinawa in this study.

From: Xiaoxi Liu et al (2024).

DNA study challenges thinking on ancestry of people in Japan | RIKEN

In my previous post, I showed how scientists, unlike creationists, can and do change their minds when the facts change, using the example of revised dates for the repopulation of the post-glacial British Isles. In this post, I will use another example: a recent revision in our understanding of the origins of the population of the Japanese archipelago.

It had long been believed that a two-part model could largely explain modern Japanese people: indigenous Jomon hunter–gatherer–fishers and later migrants from continental East Asia, associated with rice farming and the cultural transformations that followed. However, whole-genome analysis of 3,256 people from across Japan has shown that the picture is more complex.

The new study identified three major ancestral components: Jomon, East Asian, and a north-east Asian component, most strongly represented in north-eastern Japan and possibly connected with the historical Emishi people. The study was conducted by researchers from RIKEN’s Center for Integrative Medical Sciences. RIKEN is Japan’s National Research and Development Agency and its leading national comprehensive research institute. The research was published, open access, in April 2024 in Science Advances.

The fact that the population history of the Japanese archipelago is best explained by multiple ancestral components, regional structure, migration and admixture is, of course, utterly incompatible with the childish creation and global flood genocide of Bible mythology. It is not a history of people magically created without ancestry, followed by a population reset from a single family of flood survivors. It is the history of an evolved species, carrying in its DNA the record of earlier populations, migrations, interbreeding and selection.

Nor was that the only embarrassing finding for creationists. The researchers also identified DNA inherited from archaic humans, including Neanderthals and Denisovans, in modern Japanese genomes. Some of these introgressed segments are medically relevant. For example, a Denisovan-derived region within the NKX6-1 gene is associated with type 2 diabetes and may influence sensitivity to semaglutide, a drug used to treat the condition. The researchers also identified 11 Neanderthal-derived segments associated with conditions including coronary artery disease, prostate cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and four other diseases. By way of comparison, the RIKEN article also notes earlier research showing that a Neanderthal-inherited cluster on chromosome 3, present in roughly half of all South Asians, is linked to a higher risk of respiratory failure and other severe effects of Covid-19.

In other words, the genomes of modern Japanese people, like the genomes of all modern human populations, contain the traces of real ancestry: migration, admixture, archaic introgression, natural selection and inherited vulnerabilities. This is exactly the sort of messy, contingent history that evolution predicts, and exactly the opposite of what creationists need if their mythology is to be treated as real history.

Refuting Creationism - Repopulation of Post-Glacial Britain - 5,200 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Hunter-gatherers in post-glacial Britain

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Llangorse Lake and key Late Palaeolithic sites and other palaeoenvironmental records referred to in the text within the British land mass (green) and the ice sheet extent (white) at 16 ka (ref. ²).

Matthews, I.P., Palmer, A.P., Candy, I. et al.(2025).

Humans returned to British Isles earlier than previously thought at the end of the last ice age

I've posted a few examples recently showing how scientists, unlike creationists, can and do change their minds when the evidence changes. Far from being a weakness, this is one of science’s great strengths. It is creationism, with its fixed conclusions and evidence-proof dogma, that has the fundamental problem.

This post, and my next one, will look at two more such examples. Neither will bring any comfort to creationists hoping to show that science is unreliable, or that scientists simply invent data to protect some preconceived orthodoxy.

The first concerns a revised estimate of when humans returned to what are now the British Isles after the Last Glacial Maximum. The next will look at how new evidence has required a revision of the accepted view of the origins of the population of the Japanese Archipelago. Both, of course, sit very awkwardly with the Bible-based narrative that requires belief in a magical creation without ancestry, followed by a population reset in which all modern humans supposedly descend from eight survivors of a genocidal flood, radiating out from the Middle East only a few thousand years ago.

Firstly, then, the repopulation of the British Isles. It had long been assumed that people moved back into Britain from north-western Europe around 14,700 years ago, as the climate warmed at the end of the last ice age. That estimate has now been pushed back by about 500 years, to around 15,200 years ago. In turn, this has forced scientists to reassess the timing and pattern of the climatic changes that made such a return possible.

The revision arose from improved geochronology and the recalibration of radiocarbon dates. Once the earliest known post-glacial human evidence in Britain was placed at about 15,200–15,000 years ago, there was an obvious problem: the existing climate models suggested that Britain should still have been too cold, not only for people, but also for the grazing animals they depended on, such as reindeer and horses.

Rather than ignore the discrepancy, or force the evidence to fit the old model, scientists did what scientists are supposed to do: they re-examined the data. A reassessment of lake-bed cores, especially from Llangorse Lake in South Wales, showed that parts of southern Britain had indeed experienced an earlier period of summer warming. This would have created the conditions for grassland expansion, the northward movement of prey species, and the return of human hunter-gatherers.

The study was conducted by a team led by Ian P. Matthews and Adrian P. Palmer of the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, who published their findings in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Adrian Palmer has also written an article in The Conversation, in which he explains their findings and why the discovery of earlier human remains made it necessary to reassess the timetable of climate change. His article is reproduced here, under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - The Giant 50 Foot Snake Deity, Vasuki, of Hindu Mythology - The Fossil Evidence?

Vasuki indicus,
Nāgarāja (Serpent King) of Hindu mythology

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

A colossal prehistoric snake, Vasuki indicus, may have rivaled the largest snakes in history, stretching up to 50 feet long. Fossils from India suggest it was a slow-moving ambush predator and part of a widespread ancient snake lineage.

Credit: AI/ScienceDaily.com.

50-foot ancient snake discovered in India may be one of the largest ever | ScienceDaily

An open access paper published in Scientific Reports in 2024 describes an astonishing giant snake from India which, in life, may have reached up to about 50 feet in length. Ignoring, for the moment, the inconvenient age of the fossils, its existence bears an eerie superficial resemblance to the mythical Hindu serpent king, Vasuki.

Imagine the unbounded joy and celebration there would be if creationists were finally presented with fossil evidence that appeared to confirm one of their favourite myths, giving them something more tangible than the written-down stories of Bronze Age pastoralists.

Strangely, though, there have been no such celebrations over evidence which, superficially at least, appears to echo Hindu mythology. It is almost as though creationists understand perfectly well that religious myths are just that — myths — and that any evidence which appears to support someone else’s mythology can be dismissed without a second thought. Unless, of course, it happens to be their own mythology, in which case coincidence, metaphor and wishful thinking are suddenly promoted to “evidence”.

Named by its discoverers Vasuki indicus, the snake is estimated to have been between about 11 and 15 metres long, making it one of the largest snakes ever known. The genus name comes from Vasuki, the great serpent king of Hindu mythology, often depicted coiled around the neck of Shiva. Vasuki is one of the mythological nāgas associated with serpent worship, including the Hindu festival of Naga Panchami.

However, as a supposed source of the Vasuki myth, there is one small snag: Vasuki indicus lived about 47 million years ago, in the early Middle Eocene, a mere 19 million years after the end-Cretaceous mass extinction that ended the reign of the non-avian dinosaurs. That is long before humans, long before language, long before writing, and long before any culture capable of inventing and transmitting religious mythology existed. Like all religious mythology, the stories of Vasuki arose much later in human history — not in the Eocene swamps of India, and certainly not as a folk memory of a snake that had vanished tens of millions of years before there were any people to remember it.

The fossil vertebrae of Vasuki indicus were discovered in the Panandhro Lignite Mine in Kutch, Gujarat State, western India, and described by Debajit Datta and Sunil Bajpai of the Department of Earth Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India. The remains consist of 27 mostly well-preserved vertebrae, some still articulated, from what appears to have been a fully grown animal. The authors identify it as a member of the extinct madtsoiid snake family and suggest that it represents a distinctive Indian lineage of large-bodied snakes. ([EurekAlert!][2])

The accompanying Springer Nature news release, reproduced by EurekAlert!, is available here. The original Springer Nature press release is accessible to accredited journalists only.

Refuting Creationism - Why Neanderthals Went Extinct - 30,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Neanderthal family

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

The study shows that regions favourable to Homo sapiens were found to be more highly connected than those of Neanderthals.

Why did the Neanderthals disappear? - UdeMnouvelles

A recent paper in Quaternary Science Reviews by a team led by Professor Arianne Burke of the Department of Anthropology at Université de Montréal, and head of the Quebec-based Hominin Dispersals Research Group, offers fresh insight into why Neanderthals disappeared from Europe around 40,000 years ago.

The timeframe alone should be enough to send any self-respecting creationist reaching deep into the catalogue of prepared excuses for dismissing inconvenient facts. What we will not see, of course, is any acknowledgement that science has once again produced evidence that flatly contradicts their beliefs, or even the faintest shadow of doubt about the Bible’s usefulness as a textbook of history or science.

Archaic hominins have always been a major problem for creationists, whose responses range from outright denial, through misrepresentation of the science, to the extraordinary mental gymnastics needed to shoehorn the evidence into a childish Bible narrative of a single ancestral human couple living some 6,000–10,000 years ago.

A recent example is Ken Ham’s assertion, through Answers in Genesis, that Adam and Eve were the ancestors not only of modern humans but also of Neanderthals and Denisovans. That would make Adam and Eve something like Homo heidelbergensis, H. antecessor, or whichever Middle Pleistocene hominin eventually proves to have been the last common ancestor of these lineages. It also neatly ignores the African fossil record and raises the obvious question — even if we ignored the evidence for the age of these archaic humans for the sake of argument — of how their descendants could have spread so widely, diversified so markedly, and then partly disappeared, all within a few thousand years.

Of course, it is nonsense, and is clearly aimed at people who are either unaware of the evidence but vaguely aware of these archaic hominins, or are so eager to clutch at straws that any apologetic will do, however absurd it becomes when placed beside the facts.

“Primitive” people were actually just humans like you and me. pic.twitter.com/NXGQm0sYCW

— Answers in Genesis (@AiG) April 13, 2026

Yes, there are still unanswered questions about the common ancestry of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans, but one thing we can be certain of is that their common ancestor did not live within the absurdly compressed timeframe allowed by the Bible narrative. That is just one of the many ways in which we know the Bible story is wrong — which is precisely why Ken Ham does not want his followers to think too carefully about it.

But if the question of origins is awkward for creationists, the question of extinction is no less so. Why did the Neanderthals disappear, and why did Homo sapiens survive and expand? There are several competing explanations, and, as so often in science, they are not mutually exclusive. Did Neanderthals succumb to climate instability? Were they weakened by inbreeding and low population density in small, scattered groups? Were they outcompeted by H. sapiens, with their wider social networks, more flexible technology and perhaps, eventually, dogs? Or were some Neanderthal populations simply absorbed into the larger and expanding population of H. sapiens through interbreeding?

Now, modelling by Professor Burke’s team suggests that the answer was not a single, simple cause. Climate change and interspecific interaction with H. sapiens were factors, but their importance varied across Europe. The study suggests that a significant difference may have been the resilience of social networks. In regions favourable to H. sapiens, populations appear to have been more strongly connected than Neanderthal populations, giving them a better safety net when climate, resources or local demography became unstable.

This does not mean Neanderthals were isolated, unintelligent or incapable of maintaining relationships between groups. Archaeological evidence shows that they had interregional connections too. But, according to the models, those networks appear to have been more fragile, especially in parts of Central and Eastern Europe. In a world of rapid climatic swings, that difference may have mattered. A better-connected population can share information, exchange partners, move temporarily into allied territories, and recover after local shocks. A more weakly connected population can be left isolated, vulnerable and demographically brittle.

Creationism Refuted - Amazingly Detailed Fossils From Australia - 11-16 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A large trapdoor spider preserved in McGraths Flat.

Michael Frese

Unusual red rocks in Australia are rewriting the rules on exceptional fossil sites

A research paper published online last year in Gondwana Research should have been giving creationists nightmares. It reports work by an Australian and American team of palaeontologists and geologists, led by Tara Djokic of the Australian Museum and UNSW Sydney, showing how iron-rich minerals can preserve fossils in such exquisite detail that individual pigment cells in fish eyes, internal organs of insects and fish, and even delicate spider hairs and nerve cells can be seen in deposits dated to between 11 million and 16 million years old.

The fossils come from McGraths Flat, a Miocene rainforest lake deposit in New South Wales, where organisms were entombed not in the usual shale, sandstone or limestone, but in iron-rich ferricrete composed largely of the iron-oxyhydroxide mineral goethite. Instead of destroying delicate biological structures, as might have been expected, the iron-rich sediment preserved them in astonishing microscopic detail.

This is not the first time iron has been shown to play an important role in preserving soft tissues rather than just the hard bones and teeth that normally fossilise. It was also implicated in Mary Schweitzer’s famous discovery of preserved collagen and soft-tissue-like structures in dinosaur fossils — a discovery that creationists frequently misrepresent today as “proof” that dinosaurs were alive only a few thousand years ago. Despite repeated corrections of these claims, creationist accounts of Schweitzer’s work have grown ever more fanciful with the passage of time, and now routinely include assertions that she found fresh blood and that the tissue was carbon-dated to just a few thousand years old.

In reality, the “fresh blood” claim is a distortion. Schweitzer described microscopic red structures that resembled blood cells, but their appearance was the starting point for a scientific investigation, not a claim that liquid blood had survived for millions of years. Nor was there any question of carbon dating, which is not used to date dinosaur fossils of this age. Schweitzer herself, writing in Scientific American, explained that the scientifically interesting question was not whether the fossil was young, but what chemical processes could allow traces of original biological material to persist for tens of millions of years.

The new paper extends that understanding by showing another way in which soft tissues can be preserved in remarkable detail over deep time. In favourable conditions, microscopic particles of iron-oxyhydroxide, each only about 0.005 millimetres across, can enter tissues and cells before decay destroys them, replicating delicate structures at cellular and even subcellular scales.

How this was discovered, and why it matters for palaeontology, is explained in an article in The Conversation by Tara Djokic. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - 'Doggerland' Was Lush Forest - Over 6,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Southern Doggerland, 16,000 years ago

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Southern 'Doggerland' 16,000 years ago.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking).

Warwick Study: Ancient Forests Under North Sea Lost World

More than 16,000 years ago, long before, according to their favourite Bronze Age mythology, creationists' little god created a small flat Earth under a dome centred on the Middle East, people and animals were able to walk from continental Europe into what are now the British Isles. They did so not by walking on water, but across dry land now submerged beneath the North Sea, of which Dogger Bank is one surviving remnant. From this lost landscape, Ice Age fossils such as mammoth teeth and tusks are still regularly dredged up in trawlers' nets.

Whatever hominins left the famous footprints at Happisburgh, Norfolk, almost certainly reached Britain on foot from western Europe, as did, much later, the hominins represented at Swanscombe in Kent and Pontnewydd Cave in Denbighshire, Wales.

Now, evidence presented in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by a team led by Professor Robin G. Allaby of Warwick University's School of Life Sciences shows that southern Doggerland was not a bleak, barren wasteland but supported temperate woodland more than 16,000 years ago. The team reached this conclusion from a detailed analysis of 252 sediment samples from 41 marine cores taken along the prehistoric Southern River in southern Doggerland, where exceptionally well-preserved deposits preserve an environmental record from the Late Pleistocene into the Holocene.

For creationists, the problem is not merely the age of this drowned landscape, awkward though that is for biblical chronology. It is the existence of the evidence itself: well-preserved, datable layers laid down over vast spans of time, preserving a coherent ecological history that can be tested, checked and verified. If biblical mythology were true, those layers should not exist in anything like this form. But they do, and they tell a story utterly at odds with Genesis.

In science, evidence that contradicts a hypothesis counts against it. A theory that repeatedly fails is supposed to be revised or abandoned. Creationism works the other way round. Evidence against it is treated not as a reason to change one's mind, but as a test of faith. By that twisted logic, the more decisively reality refutes it, the more convinced its followers become that they must be right. That is not intellectual strength. It is simply a refusal to let evidence matter.

An interesting aspect to this work, and one that may upset creationists, is the fact that the team used two different, unrelated methods for dating - carbon dating and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating which converged on the same dates.

Creationism Refuted - The Transition From Cold-Blooded to Warm-Blooded Mammal Ancestors

Tritylodon in its natural setting

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

Mystery solved: when mammals’ ancestors became warm-blooded

If the transition from cold-bloodedness to warm-bloodedness is not a change in “kind” in the creationist sense, it is hard to imagine what would qualify. Creationists often try to dismiss major evolutionary transitions as mere “variation within a 'Kind'”, but the shift from ectothermy to endothermy was not some trivial adjustment. It was a profound physiological transformation that allowed animals to maintain a high, stable internal temperature, remain active across a wider range of conditions, and exploit ecological niches closed to their cold-blooded ancestors. Yet, according to creationist mythology, no such transition ever occurred, and there was never a point in time when it began.

Unfortunately for creationists, the evidence says otherwise. An international team of palaeontologists led by Ricardo Araújo of the Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal, Romain David of the Natural History Museum, London, UK, and Kenneth D. Angielczyk of the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, USA, believe they have identified when endothermy arose in the mammalian lineage. Their findings were published in Nature in July 2022. The team concluded that mammalian ancestors became warm-blooded about 233 million years ago, roughly 33 million years before the first true mammals appeared, and at about the same time that other recognisably mammalian traits such as fur and whiskers were evolving. The timing is consistent with evolutionary expectations that major innovations can arise in response to changing environmental pressures. [1.1]

They also concluded that this transition was rapid in geological terms, taking less than a million years rather than unfolding gradually over tens of millions of years, as had often been assumed. [2.1]

The researchers reached these conclusions by examining 3D models of the inner ears of dozens of mammalian ancestors, many from South Africa’s fossil-rich Karoo region. Karoo fossils are especially valuable because they preserve an exceptionally detailed record of synapsid evolution across almost 100 million years, documenting the transition from reptile-like therapsids to mammals. What the team focused on was the shape of the semicircular canals of the inner ear, which form part of the balance system. These canals are filled with endolymph, a fluid whose viscosity changes with temperature. As body temperature rose during the evolution of endothermy, the geometry of the canals had to change to keep the balance organ functioning properly. That gave the researchers a way to infer when warm-bloodedness first evolved in the mammalian line. [2.1]

Four of the authors of the paper in Nature also published an article in The Conversation explaining their results and their significance for understanding mammalian evolution. Their article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

First, information about the Karoo fossils:

Creationism Refuted - Neanderthal Cannibals From 35,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

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Neanderthal at the Goyet Cave.

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Neandertal women and children were the victims of selective cannibalism at Goyet | CNRS

he evidence presented in my last blog post suggested that, at least in the earlier phases of contact between anatomically modern humans moving out of Africa and the indigenous Neanderthals, interactions could be relatively peaceful, involving exchanges not only of DNA but also of technology and culture.

That may not always have been the case, however, as new evidence from the Troisième caverne of Goyet in Belgium suggests. Research just published in Scientific Reports by an international team including researchers from CNRS, the University of Bordeaux, and Aix-Marseille University indicates that, between 41,000 and 45,000 years ago, when Neanderthals were close to disappearing from Western Europe, a group consisting largely of non-local females and juveniles was taken to the Goyet site, butchered, and consumed. The broader background to this violence may have included growing territorial pressures, dwindling populations, or the increasing presence of Homo sapiens in nearby regions, but the precise cause remains unknown.

So, while we cannot know exactly what triggered this episode, and while the coincidence with the arrival of Homo sapiens may or may not be significant, isotope analysis does show that those who were cannibalised were outsiders rather than members of the local population.

“Primitive” people were actually just humans like you and me. pic.twitter.com/NXGQm0sYCW

— Answers in Genesis (@AiG) April 13, 2026

For creationists, Neanderthals have always been a problem. It used to be common for them to claim that Neanderthals were known from just a single specimen later shown to be a pathological modern human suffering from arthritis. That falsehood has become harder and harder to sustain now that we have numerous specimens from across Eurasia, as well as sequenced Neanderthal genomes. The fallback position now seems to be to insist that Neanderthals fit neatly into Genesis because they were simply part of “human kind”.

Ken Ham, the creationist head of Answers in Genesis, with his characteristically casual regard for the truth and his obvious personal stake in presenting Bible-literalist mythology as history and science, has recently claimed that Neanderthals and Denisovans were descendants of Adam and Eve. What he does not explain, of course, is how he compresses the archaeological timescale of their existence, and their divergence into distinct lineages with markedly different genomes, into the 6,000 to 10,000 years allowed by creationist dogma. Like so many of Ham’s claims, it is aimed at an audience eager to have its prejudices confirmed and unlikely to fact-check anything for fear of discovering that it has been misled.

Like so much else in the history of life on Earth, and especially in the evolutionary history of our own species, all of this took place in that immense span of time before creationists imagine their small tribal god conjured up a small flat planet under a solid dome, conveniently centred on the Middle East.

The factual evidence, of course, tells a very different story: one based on testable, verifiable data, not on the campfire tales of Bronze Age herders who knew no better.

And in this case, that evidence shows that something, whether the increasing presence of modern Homo sapiens, the breakdown of Neanderthal society as their numbers declined, or some other factor entirely, led one Neanderthal group in what is now Belgium to capture outsiders, mainly women and children, bring them back to the Goyet site, and consume them.

Refuting Creationism - Neanderthals And Modern Humans Lived Together - 120,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals shared technology and behavior

Credit: Efrat Bakshitz

Archaeological examination of the Tinshemet Cave floor.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Neanderthal and Homo sapiens Interactions in the Mid-Middle Palaeolithic (130,000–80,000 years ago) | EUROPEAN FRIENDS OF THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY

Neanderthals are a persistent thorn in the side of creationism because they show that human origins are far older, messier and more interesting than the simplistic creation myths in the Bible. Genetic evidence shows that people outside Africa still carry a small but significant inheritance from Neanderthals, demonstrating that human ancestry was shaped not by descent from a single primordial couple, but by repeated episodes of migration, divergence and interbreeding between distinct human populations. There is even evidence that early Homo sapiens were interbreeding with Neanderthals as long as 100,000 years ago.

Now, new research by archaeologists and palaeoanthropologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University, excavating at Tinshemet Cave in central Israel, suggests that the relationship between Neanderthals and early modern humans in the Levant, between about 130,000 and 80,000 years ago, involved far more than occasional contact. Their evidence indicates sustained interaction, shared technologies, similar hunting strategies and parallel ritual behaviour, including formal burial practices. The team have just published their findings in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. What emerges is a picture of different human groups living in close contact, exchanging ideas and behaviours to such an extent that their cultural differences became increasingly blurred.

The researchers reached this conclusion by integrating evidence from four main areas: stone-tool production, hunting strategies, symbolic behaviour and social complexity. Particularly striking is the clustering of burials at Tinshemet Cave, which suggests that the cave may have served as a repeated burial site, perhaps even an early cemetery. The placement of objects such as stone tools, animal bones and pieces of ochre in graves points to shared ritual practices and symbolic behaviour, hinting at a level of social and cultural complexity that creationist caricatures of early humans simply cannot accommodate.

Refuting Creationism - More on the Domestication of Dogs - Long Before 'Creation Week'

Artist’s impression of a human and their canine companion near a settlement in Ice Age Switzerland.

Credit: Oliver Uberti, Nature.

Cover picture for The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic

Canine companions: revealing the genetic history of our first friends | Crick

This is the second of my posts on the domestication of dogs and on why the facts are so awkward for creationists. It concerns research by a team led by Anders Bergström and Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Crick Institute, London, working with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a large international network of collaborators.

The team have shown that the domestication of dogs had already begun well before the invention of farming, when humans in Europe still lived in nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers. At that stage, dogs would have been hunting companions, sentinel guards for encampments, and perhaps even family pets, long before they were adapted for the many tasks later associated with farming, such as herding livestock and guarding flocks. Their findings are published in Nature.

This establishes dogs as the first domestic animals and suggests that the human-dog relationship may have helped lay the groundwork for later animal husbandry and selective breeding.

The story of the domestication of dogs from wolves is something in which I have long taken a special interest, and it was that interest which led me to write two books with fictionalised accounts of how it may have happened - The Girl and the Wolf and its sequel, The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic.

Biologically, of course, this evolved symbiotic relationship between two species is exactly the sort of outcome the Theory of Evolution leads us to expect. But, embarrassingly for creationists, it also tells a story rooted in deep time, for which creationism has no credible explanation. Worse still for biblical literalists, it makes a mockery of the claim that God created all animals for the benefit of humankind, because that claim presupposes that animals created by an omniscient, omnipotent designer would already be fit for purpose and would not need extensive modification by human selective breeding.

The researchers reached their conclusions by analysing DNA from 216 canid skeletal remains, including 181 pre-Neolithic samples - that is, from before approximately 10,000 years ago. These remains came from sites across Europe and nearby regions, including Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland.

Creationists previously had a little wriggle room when the earliest indisputable domestic dog was thought to date to about 10,900 years ago. They could at least pretend that dogs appeared during their imaginary ‘Creation Week’ or shortly afterwards. That pretence is now no longer sustainable. This study shows that the ancestry of later dogs was already established before 14,200 years ago, and probably earlier still.

Creationism Refuted - Earliest Domestic Dogs - 6,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Cover picture for The Girl and the Wolf

Oldest genetic evidence for domestic dogs identified in Europe and Türkiye | University of Oxford

Artistic reconstruction of Pınarbaşı c. 15,800 years ago based on evidence from archaeological excavations by University of Liverpool.

(c) Kathryn Killackey

This is the first of two blog posts on a pair of recent papers published in Nature on the earliest known domestic dogs and what they tell us about when grey wolves first entered into a domestic relationship with humans. Together, these studies push the earliest firm genetic evidence for dogs back[1] about 10,900 years ago, showing that dog populations were already present in western Eurasia during the Late Upper Palaeolithic. For creationists committed to a young Earth and to the simplistic Bronze Age origin myths of the Bible, that is yet another awkward fact: dogs were already on their way to becoming humanity’s first domestic animal long before their preferred chronology even allows for the Earth to exist. [1.1]

Since then, of course, dogs have been systematically modified by selective breeding to suit the many roles humans have found for them. That alone sits uneasily with the claim that a perfect creator made all animals ready-made for human benefit. But what makes these papers especially interesting to me is not only that they create yet another problem for creationist superstition, but that they touch directly on the background to two novels I have recently published, in which the domestication of wolves forms part of the story.

The first of these books, The Girl and the Wolf, tells the story of Almora, a child of the Drognai clan, who is raised alongside a wolf cub, Sharma, who becomes her inseparable companion. When Almora meets one of the last Neanderthals, Tanu, and they fall in love, Sharma plays a crucial part in bringing them together. The kindness of Almora’s mother, Shana, in rescuing and raising the starving cub becomes the small act from which a much larger change in human history begins.

In the sequel, The Way of The Wolf: A Stone Age Epic, Almora and Sharma have become the stuff of legend, their story spreading far beyond the lands of the Drognai. When Almora’s daughter, Shana — herself of mixed Neanderthal and modern human ancestry — chooses to leave the clan because of the tensions her family’s presence has caused, Almora, Tanu and a small band of Drognai go with her to a distant land. There they discover a people who have taken the legend of Almora and Sharma to heart and formed a close relationship with a pack of tame wolves, a relationship that has helped carry them through hardship into a period of hunting success and prosperity.

These books are fiction, of course, because we cannot know exactly how wolves became domesticated. What we can say is that the current evidence points to a long and complex process rather than a single moment of “invention”. The broad consensus is that some wolves probably began by exploiting scraps around human camps, while humans gradually came to recognise their value as sentinels, scavengers and hunting partners. The rest, as they say, is history.

And according to the first of these two new papers, that history was already under way deep in the Late Ice Age. One study generated nuclear and mitochondrial genomes from canid remains from Pınarbaşı in Türkiye, dated to 15,800 years ago, and from Gough’s Cave in Somerset, dated to 14,300 years ago, and concluded that a genetically homogeneous dog population was already widely distributed across Europe and Anatolia by at least 14,300 years ago. The second study analysed 216 canid remains from Europe and found its oldest dog genome in a 14,200-year-old specimen from Kesslerloch in Switzerland, showing that European dogs were already genetically distinct by then. [1.1]

Refuting Creationism - Archaic Hominins In Spain - 390,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Homo antecessor working at the Gran Dolia butchery site

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The Gran Dolina site at Atapuerca reveals an almost exclusive use of local chert 400,000 years ago | CENIEH

In stark contrast to the simplistic Bronze Age mythology of the Bible, in which all humanity is supposedly descended from a single magically created couple with no ancestors just a few thousand years ago, followed by a biological reset in a global genocidal flood a mere 4,000 years ago, archaeology continues to reveal a far richer and more complex human story. Instead of a single recent origin, the evidence shows a deep evolutionary history stretching back hundreds of thousands of years, involving multiple related human species and regional populations, with occasional interbreeding. Part of that long history was played out in Eurasia.

A study led by scientists from the Spanish Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), just published in Quaternary International, has identified 400,000-year-old human artefacts at the Gran Dolina site in Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain, together with what may be the earliest evidence of communal hunting. The findings show the sophisticated manufacture of stone tools from locally available chert. The site is also associated with the remains of 60 bison, strongly suggesting a communal butchering site that implies strategic planning, cooperation, and large-scale social coordination.

What makes this especially striking is that these activities took place before the hominin lineage had diversified into Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans. Taken together with other evidence from Atapuerca, including discoveries from Sima de los Huesos (‘Cave of Bones’), the findings indicate that archaic hominins such as Homo antecessor had established themselves in Iberia long before Homo sapiens entered Eurasia.

Refuting Creationism - How We Know Evolution Is Not Goal-Centred - Winged Dinosaurs That Couldn't Fly

Anchiornis huxleyi

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.3)

Anchiornis huxleyi Beijing specimen BMNHC PH828.

By ★Kumiko★ from Tokyo, Japan - Dinosaur Feather, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

TAU research about dinosaurs sheds light on the evolution of flight - American Friends of Tel Aviv University American Friends of Tel Aviv University

Because many creationists never seem to have progressed beyond the teleological thinking typical of toddlers, they assume that everything must have agency and must be directed towards some intended end.

That habit of mind was highlighted a few years ago in a study showing that the persistence of teleological thinking into adulthood is associated with the cognitive style underlying both creationism and conspiracism.

This goes a long way towards explaining why creationists so often invoke conspiracies to explain away the evidence against their beliefs, and why debating them can resemble arguing with toddlers who know little, understand less, and yet imagine themselves in possession of profound truths.

Any serious study of evolution, however, quickly shows that there is no plan, no foresight, and no directing intelligence. Evolution has no destination in mind. The only “direction” it has is whatever changing environments impose on it, favouring traits that happen, at any given time, to work best and leave the most descendants.

A recent study by a team led by Dr Yosef Kiat of the School of Zoology at Tel Aviv University’s George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, working with colleagues in China and the United States, provides a striking illustration of that point. Their paper, published on 21 November 2025 in Communications Biology, suggests that some feathered dinosaurs in the anchiornithid lineage of pennaraptoran theropods may have evolved the ability to fly, only to lose it again when environmental change made flight no longer advantageous.

In other words, evolution did not move steadily towards some grand objective. It produced flight when flight was useful, and abandoned it when it was not. Feathers, which may briefly have served an aerodynamic role in these animals, appear then to have reverted primarily to their earlier functions of insulation and temperature regulation.

The key evidence comes from moulting patterns. In living flying birds, feathers are moulted symmetrically so that the bird can retain its ability to fly. In flightless birds, by contrast, moulting can be irregular and apparently disorganised. By examining fossils of these dinosaurs from Chinese deposits, the researchers identified this latter pattern in animals that otherwise appear to have possessed anatomical adaptations for flight.

Refuting Creationism - First Reconstruction of the Face of 'Little Foot' - From 3.6 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

"Little Foot" in an African woodland

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The original skull (left), digital copy (middle) and reconstructed face of « Little Foot ».

© Amélie Beaudet

The first digital reconstruction of the face of « Little Foot » | CNRS.

Creationists refuse to recognise early hominins such as the australopithecines because they stubbornly refuse to conform to the creationist dogma that says there are no fossils showing the transition from a common ancestor with chimpanzees. Therefore, in the arrogant way creationists often deal with reality, because their stated dogma says otherwise, these fossils can't exist, and ad hoc explanations for their existence have to be invented — the dates are wrong; the scientists lied; Satan planted them to mislead us, etc., etc.

However, they do exist, and now scientists at the Centre national de recherche scientifique (CNRS), France, have succeeded in reconstructing the face of the australopithecine known as 'Little Foot', which was badly crushed and fragmented by the pressure and movement of the sediment in which it was buried. 'Little Foot', discovered at Sterkfontein, South Africa, is the most intact skeleton of an Australopithecus so far found, and this reconstruction helps place it in the evolutionary tree of the hominins as they diverged from the other African great apes. Their findings are published, open access, in the journal Comptes Rendus Palevol.

This reconstruction reveals a number of transitional features, just as one would expect of an early hominin roughly halfway in time between the split from the common ancestor with chimpanzees some 6 million years ago and the emergence of anatomically modern humans. But it also raises an intriguing question, because it appears to be closer to the East African australopithecines than to the South African australopithecines, raising questions about the evolutionary relationship between these two groups and the chronology of the evolution of the modern human face.

'Little Foot' was originally assigned to the species Australopithecus prometheus and later to Au. africanus, but is a school of thought that argues it is sufficiently different to other Australopiths to justify assigning it to a new species altogether.

Creationism Refuted - How Neanderthals and Later Hunter-Gatherers Changed The European Landscape

Neanderthal hunting party

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A new study shows that Neanderthals did not shy away from hunting even very large animals, such as the prehistoric elephant, which could weigh up to 13 tons. The impact of Neanderthals and hunter-gatherer peoples on nature turns out to have had a far greater influence on shaping the landscape of what we now know as Europe.

Photo: Wikimedia, AI

Neanderthals and Mesolithic hunter-gatherers lit the fire: Humans shaped European landscapes long before agriculture

The past is a minefield for creationism because it becomes increasingly impossible to shoehorn reality into a 6,000–10,000-year timescale, or to maintain the fantasy of humans and animals appearing suddenly, without ancestry, only a few millennia ago. The more we learn about prehistory, the more creationists are forced either to dismiss the evidence or pretend it does not exist. Their difficulty is that their childish view of reality is rooted in the best guesses of ignorant Bronze Age pastoralists, who knew nothing of the world beyond their narrow horizons and understood nothing of the sciences that now inform our understanding of the universe around us.

In a paper published last October in PLOS ONE, an international team of researchers led by Anastasia Nikulina (Leiden University and Durham University), and including Professor Jens-Christian Svenning of Aarhus University, argue that Neanderthals — and later Homo sapiens — were already instrumental in shaping the European landscape long before agriculture transformed it. The most significant drivers of change were hunting of the megafauna and the widespread use of anthropogenic fire.

And of course, this explanation incorporates something creationism cannot successfully accommodate within its preferred mythology: the existence of an archaic human species that predated Homo sapiens in Eurasia by several hundred thousand years. It also rests upon a history of climatic change in Europe that makes sense only within the context of a world vastly older than creationist mythology can allow.

The team reached their conclusions after an extensive analysis of pollen records from two warm periods in European history: one between 125,000 and 116,000 years ago, and the other between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago. By comparing these results with computer simulations modelling the effects of climate change, large herbivores, and natural fires alone — and then adding the impacts of human hunting and deliberate burning — they found that the human-influenced models provided the best fit to the pollen data.

Creationism Refuted - Poisoned Arrows 50,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Preparing poison arrowheads, 60,000 years ago at the Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Both sides of one of the arrowheads analysed. The left-hand image shows the organic remains in which the arrowhead residues were identified.

Photo: Marlize Lombard.

World’s oldest arrow poison – 60,000-year-old traces reveal early advanced hunting techniques - Stockholms universitet

Creationism’s Biblical narrative has just become even harder to defend, with news that researchers from South Africa and Sweden, led by Professor Sven Isaksson of the Archaeological Research Laboratory at Stockholm University, have identified the oldest traces of arrow poison yet discovered. These were found on 60,000-year-old quartz arrowheads from Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

That is a full 50,000 years before creationist mythology claims the world was created, but entirely consistent with the palaeontological and archaeological evidence that fully modern humans had already evolved in Africa and were developing increasingly sophisticated technologies.

The discovery is reported open access in Science Advances.

The significance of this find is two-fold. Firstly, it shows that early humans had invented the bow and arrow as a hunting weapon much earlier than previously thought. Secondly, it demonstrates that they also understood how to exploit natural toxins — specifically the alkaloids buphanidrine and epibuphanisine — found in the plant Boophone disticha, commonly known as gifbol or “poison onion”. Traces of these compounds had previously been identified on arrowheads only around 250 years old, so this remarkable discovery reveals that the knowledge and use of such poison technology persisted among hunter-gatherer groups for tens of millennia.