Fig. 1: Map of Turkana Basin with the Namorotukunan Archeological Site and timeline of currently known events in the Plio-Pleistocene.
a Geographical context of the Koobi Fora Formation (red stripes), the paleontological collection area 40 (green square), and the location of the site of Namorotukunan (black dot); [map produced Natural Earth and NOAAA ETOPO 202295]; b Stratigraphic context of the Koobi Fora Formation highlighting members and key volcanic ash marker levels, yellow bars refer to the age of archeological horizons (tephrostratigraphy after McDougall et al.96); c A chronology of key Plio-Pleistocene hominins from the East African Rift System (EARS)11,74,97,98d A chronology and key localities associated with hominin lithic technology3,6,12 (images of Nyayanga provided by E. Finestone; images of Lomekwi and BD1 based on 3D models; artifact images are for representation and not to scale) and the investigations at Namorotukunan: red arrows represent the artifact levels in the archeological excavations (photos DRB), and colored circles (lettered A-G) represent geologic sections investigated to develop a synthetic stratigraphic column (presented in Figs. 2 and 3).
The story of our origins is written in the ground of Africa. It is real, tangible, and objective — a record that doesn’t rely on belief or interpretation, but on physical evidence left behind by our ancient ancestors. A fresh chapter of that record has just been described in a new open-access paper in Nature Communications, authored by an international team of palaeoanthropologists led by Professor David R. Braun of the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology at George Washington University, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
By comparison, the origins narrative found in Genesis reflects the worldview and assumptions of people who believed the Earth was small, flat, and covered by a solid dome. It is astonishing that, even today, some treat that ancient cosmology as a more reliable account of human history than the rich and expanding fossil and archaeological record in Africa. Yet such individuals continue to seek influence over policy, law, morality, and social institutions, grounding their authority not in evidence, but in pre-scientific tradition — a worldview formed long before the wheel, let alone modern science.
Human evolution isn’t a tidy staircase; it’s a branching, tangled tree full of transitional forms. And now, cutting-edge protein analysis from two-million-year-old teeth has revealed that Paranthropus robustus — one of our distant cousins — carried mixed ancestry, adding powerful new evidence to the evolutionary story creationists work so hard to deny.
If there is anything guaranteed to send a creationist into a fit of denial — desperately trying to redefine basic terms such as “transitional”, “species”, and “evolution”, and, as a last resort, claiming palaeontologists must have faked the evidence — it is the discovery of a transitional species in human evolutionary history.
But the hominin fossil record, like the evolutionary record for most living species, is absolutely packed with transitional forms. In fact, there are so many in human palaeontology that it can be difficult to single out one that is clearly more ‘transitional’ than the rest, because they form a fairly smooth continuum from the australopiths through to the genus Homo, just as we would expect of a slow process unfolding over tens of thousands or millions of years.
However, one species, Paranthropus robustus, stands out for its mosaic of features consistent with a lineage intermediate between the common ancestor of chimpanzees and hominins and the australopiths that followed.
And this mosaic has now been expanded to include genetic-level evidence, thanks to advances in palaeoproteomics. Proteins can persist far longer than DNA, yet they retain a direct correspondence to DNA via RNA, which encodes their amino-acid sequences. Once ancient proteins have been recovered and analysed, researchers can work backwards to reconstruct the RNA, and therefore the DNA, that produced them.
Using proteins extracted from the tooth enamel of four P. robustus fossils, researchers led by the University of Copenhagen have shown that these individuals themselves had mixed ancestry — indicating interbreeding with contemporaneous relatives, just as we now know happened among later hominin species, and almost certainly among the australopiths too.
For nearly a century, scientists have been puzzling over fossils from a strange and robust-looking distant relative of early humans: Paranthropus robustus. It walked upright, and was built for heavy chewing with relatively massive jaws, and huge teeth with thick dental enamel. It’s thought to have lived between 2.25 million and 1.7 million years ago.
Fossils show how these early relatives evolved from as far back as A. africanus, 3.67 million years ago. They also document milestones in evolution, including the transition to walking on two legs, tool making and increased brain development. Ultimately, our species – Homo sapiens – appeared in South Africa 153,000 years ago.
Fossils of P. robustus were first discovered in South Africa in 1938. But crucial questions remained. How much variation was there within the species? Were the size differences related to sex, or did they reflect the presence of multiple species? How was P. robustus related to the other hominins and early Homo? And what, genetically, made it distinct?
Until now, answers to these questions have been elusive. As a team of African and European molecular science, chemistry and palaeoanthropology researchers, we wanted to find answers but we couldn’t use ancient DNA to help us. Ancient DNA has been a game-changer in studying later hominins like Neanderthals and Denisovans but it doesn’t survive well in Africa’s climate because of its simple structure.
We experienced a breakthrough when we decided to use palaeoproteomics – the analysis of ancient proteins. We extracted these from the enamel of the 2-million-year-old teeth of four P. robustus fossils from Swartkrans Cave in South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind.
Luckily, proteins that are millions of years old preserve well because they stick to teeth and bones and are not affected by the warm weather. One of these proteins tells us the biological sex of the fossils. This is how we found that two of the individuals were male and two were female.
These findings open a new window into human evolution – one that could reshape how we interpret diversity in our early ancestors by providing some of the oldest human genetic data from Africa. From there, we can understand more about the relationships between the individuals and potentially even whether the fossils come from different species.
More than one kind of Paranthropus?
The protein sequences also revealed other subtle but potentially significant genetic differences. One standout difference was found in a gene which makes enamelin, a critical enamel-forming protein. We found that two of the individuals shared an amino acid with modern and early humans, chimpanzees and gorillas. The other two had an amino acid that among African great apes is, so far, unique to Paranthropus.
What’s even more interesting is that one of the individuals had both the distinct amino acids. This is the first documented time we can show heterozygosity (a state of having two different versions of a gene) in proteins that are 2 million years old.
When studying proteins, specific mutations are thought to indicate different species. We were quite surprised to discover that what we initially thought was a mutation unique to Paranthropus robustus was actually variable within that group – some individuals had it while others did not. Again, this was the first time anyone had observed a protein mutation in ancient proteins (these mutations are usually observed in ancient DNA).
We realised that instead of seeing a single, variable species, we might be looking at a complex evolutionary puzzle of individuals with different ancestries. This shows that combining analyses of morphology (the study of the form and structure of organisms) and the study of ancient proteins, we can create a clearer evolutionary picture of the relationships among these early hominin individuals.
However, to confirm that P. robustus fossils have different ancestry, we will need to take samples of tooth enamel protein from more of their teeth. To do this, we plan to sustainably sample more P. robustus from other sites in South Africa where they’ve been found.
Preserving Africa’s fossil heritage
Our team was careful to balance scientific innovation with the need to protect irreplaceable heritage. Fossils were sampled minimally, and all work followed South African regulations. We also involved local laboratories in the analysis. Many of the authors were from the African continent. They were instrumental in guiding the research agenda and approach from the early stages of the project.
Doing this kind of high-end science on African fossils in Africa is an important step towards transformation and decolonisation of palaeontology. It builds local capacity and ensures that discoveries benefit the regions from which the fossils come.
By combining data on molecules and morphology, our study offers a blueprint for future research – one that could clarify whether early hominins were more or less diverse than we’ve known.
For now, the Paranthropus puzzle just got a little more complex – and a lot more exciting. As palaeoproteomic techniques improve and more fossils are analysed, we can expect more surprises from our ancient relatives.
(Jesper V. Olsen, Rebecca R. Ackermann and Enrico Cappellini were also the principal investigators on this project.)
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
Abstract
Paranthropus robustus is a morphologically well-documented Early Pleistocene hominin species from southern Africa with no genetic evidence reported so far. In this work, we describe the mass spectrometric sequencing of enamel peptides from four ~2 million–year-old dental specimens attributed morphologically to P. robustus from the site of Swartkrans in South Africa. The identification of AMELY-specific peptides enabled us to assign two specimens to male individuals, whereas semiquantitative mass spectrometric data analysis attributed the other two to females. A single amino acid polymorphism and the enamel-dentine junction shape variation indicated potential subgroups present within southern African Paranthropus. This study demonstrates how palaeoproteomics can help distinguish sexual dimorphism from other sources of variation in African Early Pleistocene hominins.
Once again, the evidence aligns from every direction: anatomy, geology, developmental biology, genetics, and now ancient proteins all tell the same story. Human evolution is a messy, branching, experimentally rich process — and *Paranthropus robustus* sits right where we would expect a transitional form to sit, complete with the genetic fingerprints of interbreeding and divergence.
Creationists often demand “transitional forms” as though evolution should be obliged to produce museum-ready half-and-half creatures on command. Yet when the fossil record delivers precisely what any honest inquirer would recognise as transitional, the response is denial, distortion, and conspiracy theories about forged fossils. It is not evidence they lack; it is the willingness to accept it.
Science advances not by clinging to comforting myths, but by following data wherever it leads. And as our tools improve — from classical morphology to whole-genome sequencing and now ancient protein reconstruction — the picture of human origins becomes richer, more detailed, and entirely consistent with evolution by natural processes. The real story of our species is far more fascinating than any manufactured pseudoscience: we are the product of deep time, branching ancestries, and countless experiments in survival — a lineage written in bone and now, quite literally, in protein.
In Ice Age Europe, when modern humans were spreading across the continent and the last Neanderthals were fading from our story, something remarkable happened deep beneath the limestone hills of southern France. In the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, in the Ardèche valley, a young human child walked through a dark passage and left her footprints in the soft clay floor.
Beside her walked a wolf.
That much we know. Frozen in time for over 30,000 years, those parallel tracks hint at a moment of curiosity, courage, and perhaps companionship long before the first domesticated dogs trotted at our heels. They offer a tantalising glimpse into a forgotten world — the world that inspired my new novel.
The Girl and the Wolf is a story that imagines how such a bond might have begun. It follows Almora, an inquisitive, strong-willed child of the Drognai clan, raised alongside a rescued wolf cub named Sharma. As Almora grows into a capable young woman, her life takes an extraordinary turn when she meets Tanu — one of the last Neanderthals in Europe. Their unlikely love, and Tanu’s struggle to be accepted by Almora’s people, explores themes of kinship, belonging, and the courage to overcome fear of the Other.
The Real Chauvet Child and Wolf Tracks.
In 1994, archaeologists exploring the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in the Ardèche region of France made an astonishing discovery: some of the oldest known human art on Earth — and something even more unexpected was to come.
In 2022, on the soft clay floor of a deep passageway, they discovered the footprints of a child, estimated to be around eight years old. Alongside them were the impressions of a large canid, likely a wolf. The tracks run side by side for several metres before disappearing into darkness, untouched for more than 30,000 years.
There is no evidence the animal was tamed, and it may simply have been following the child’s scent or path. But the fossil record occasionally offers us moments like this — fleeting hints of ancient encounters between humans and wolves before the process of domestication began.
The footprints raise intriguing possibilities:
Were early humans already forming tentative bonds with wild wolves?
Did shared hunting grounds foster familiarity and cautious tolerance?
Could small acts of curiosity and courage have eventually led to true companionship?
We cannot know with certainty what happened that day in Chauvet Cave. But those footprints remind us that the story of humans and wolves began long before the first village dogs lay beside our hearths — deep in the Ice Age, when the world was young and full of wonder.
A male satin bowerbird by his highly decorated avenue bower.
Photo by Daniel J. Field
Tiny fossil bone helps unlock history of the bowerbird | University of Otago
Apart from the fact that this fossil is a million years old, there is nothing in this discovery that creationists will struggle to dismiss with one of their well-worn stock phrases — “It was just a bird ‘kind’,” “It wasn’t transitional,” and so on. This is despite the fact that their Bible is remarkably vague about how many bird ‘kinds’ there were, includes bats as birds, and says absolutely nothing about anything outside a few square miles of the Middle East.
And of course, the date — like the entire fossil record — will be casually brushed aside as forged, fabricated, or “wrongly dated using proven false carbon dating” [sic].
But to anyone who actually values evidence and truth, and is not intent on proving their strength by clinging to demonstrably false beliefs in defiance of all contrary evidence, this find is genuinely fascinating. It provides strong evidence that the bowerbirds, today confined to Australia and New Guinea, were once far more widespread. This conclusion is based on the fact that the fossil was discovered in New Zealand. It is also suggested that climate change may have brought about its extinction in New Zealand and driven the bowerbirds' range back to its present distribution.
The discovery is reported in the journal Historical Biology by researchers from University of Cambridge, University of Otago, and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. A [news release from the University of Otago]() explains the significance of the find and four of the authors have also written an article about the find in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
One of the most telling weaknesses of creationism is how heavily it depends on piling assumption upon assumption to sustain its narrative. As Stephen Hawking observed in The Grand Design, the more assumptions a theory requires, the less likely it is to be true. This is simply the reverse of Occam's razor, the principle that the simplest explanation consistent with the evidence is usually the most plausible.
Creationists take the simplistic story of human origins from the Bible and build layers of speculation upon it — not derived from scripture or evidence, but from the circular reasoning of “this must have been true, or my beliefs are wrong.”
A classic example is their claim that there could have been no death before Eve’s supposed sin, because death is ‘evil’ and evil only entered the world after the Fall. From this, they conclude that Adam and Eve — and indeed all animals — must have been vegetarian. To prop up this contrivance, they add yet another assumption: that plants aren’t really ‘alive’ in the same way as animals, so eating them doesn’t count as causing death.
This is a textbook case of a weak theory being shored up by multiplying entities and assumptions — the very opposite of sound scientific reasoning. It also collapses under biological scrutiny. There is no evidence in the Bible to support it, and human anatomy and physiology clearly reveal that we are omnivores with a long evolutionary history of meat consumption.
And now, a team of evolutionary anthropologists led by Ana Mateos of Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH) has published a research paper in the Journal of Human Evolution, in which they argue that before early hominins developed the technology to hunt large game for themselves, they were probably dependent on scavenging carrion—often from the kills of apex predators.
An important advantage of scavenging is that it provides a reliable source of high-protein food with relatively low energy expenditure. Carcasses can also sustain a population through periods of drought, when prey is scarce and some animals die from natural causes. Early hominins could have used sticks and stones to drive off predators, while their highly acidic stomachs minimised the risk of disease from decaying meat. Later, cooking provided additional protection against pathogens.
After what was likely a brief evolutionary phase as scavengers, humans developed the tools and cooperative strategies to become apex predators themselves. This reliance on carrion may even have been one of the critical factors that set our lineage on a different path from the other African apes, driving both physical and physiological changes.
News that an international research team led by University of Potsdam and Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen Mannheim, working with Curt-Engelhorn-Zentrum Archäometrie, has produced evidence that hippos lived along the Rhine in what is now Germany some 21,000 years before creationists believe Earth was created out of nothing, will probably come as no surprise to creationists.
They are well-practised at living in a world where verifiable evidence repeatedly refutes their beliefs. Over time, they have developed all manner of convoluted mental gymnastics to cope with the resultant cognitive dissonance—secure in the arrogant conviction that their beliefs trump evidence simply because they label them “faith”.
Normal people, of course, tend to have the humility to accept that evidence is the only valid basis for an informed opinion, and that it must therefore take precedence over myths and fairy tales told to them by parents and authority figures with vested cultural interests. The real test of whether a belief is right or wrong is how well it is supported by evidence—not how cleverly the evidence can be ignored.
This discovery extends our knowledge of the extinction timeline of European hippos, previously believed to have disappeared around 115,000 years ago. The new evidence pushes that date forward dramatically, showing that they survived until about 31,000 years ago, at least in that part of Europe. It also clarifies how these European populations were related to the African hippos.
That timeline is not only inconvenient for creationists; it also highlights the parochial nature of the Bible’s authors, who clearly had no knowledge of flora and fauna beyond their narrow Middle Eastern world. Notably, the Bible makes no mention of the African megafauna—hippos, elephants, giraffes, or ostriches, for example. In fact, the latter would have posed a serious problem for their primitive taxonomy, which classified bats as “birds” simply because they could fly. One can only wonder where they might have placed the flightless ostrich.
A phrase much loved by journalists (and creationists) is “the history/science books will need to be re-written”. It’s a convenient bit of lazy journalistic rhetoric — but in this case, the book that actually needs to be re-written is the Bible.
The discovery in question concerns the migration of early Homo sapiens, who may have spread from the Levant across Asia Minor (modern-day Türkiye) and then into Greece via a northern Aegean land bridge, exposed when sea levels were much lower during the last Ice Age — between 115,000 and 11,700 years ago.
This new evidence challenges some existing models of early human migration routes. However, it represents only a refinement of the broader, well-established story of humanity’s dispersal out of Africa, not a challenge to it. What it does completely undermine, however, is the Biblical narrative claiming that all humans descended from a single, ahistorical couple created without ancestors some 6,000 to 10,000 years ago — followed by a supposed global “reset” just 4,000 years ago when a genocidal flood left only eight related survivors.
The evidence for this Ice Age land bridge comes from the recovery of 138 stone tools at ten sites within a 200 km² area around Ayvalık in north-west Türkiye, opposite the Greek island of Lesbos.
Thousands of years before creationism’s god supposedly decided to create a small, flat planet with a dome over it, centred on a tiny patch of the Middle East, humans were already leaving road signs and directions to water sources carved into rocks in what is now the Arabian desert. These carvings offer a fascinating insight into the region’s prehistoric megafauna—and, of course, all such evidence of early human activity would have been completely obliterated by the biblical genocidal flood, had such an event really occurred as described.
The rock carvings were discovered by an international team of archaeologists, led by the Heritage Commission of the Saudi Ministry of Culture, and including scholars from the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), University College London, Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE), and others. Their findings were published open access in Nature Communications a few days ago.
At the time, the region that is now arid desert was made habitable by a humid period following the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), when surface water was abundant. Stone tool manufacture from the site shows clear cultural links with Neolithic societies in the Levant—ironically, the very region where the authors of Genesis set most of their imaginative origin myths, apparently oblivious to the deeper history of the area or the existence of earlier human populations beyond their narrow horizons.
A recent archaeological finding, by Beniamino Mecozzi of Sapienza University of Rome, Italy and colleagues, at the site of Casal Lumbroso in northwest Rome, has once again refuted the Bible narrative by extending the known depth of human prehistory far beyond the limits imposed by biblical literalism.
In sediments dated to some 400,000 years before creationism’s mythical 'Creation Week', the research team has uncovered evidence that early humans were butchering elephants with small stone tools and then fashioning large implements from the animals’ bones. These traces of planning, adaptation, and technological innovation demonstrate that human ingenuity was already well advanced hundreds of millennia before the supposed creation of Adam.
More interestingly from a scientific perspective is not the incidental refutation of ancient creation myths, which happens with almost every archaeological and palaeontological discovery, but the fact that these hominins predate the successful Homo sapiens migration out of African and into Eurasia by tens of thousands of years and pre-date even the earliest evidence of Neanderthals in western Eurasia.
Such discoveries highlight the sheer scale of time over which our lineage evolved—an evolutionary saga measured not in millennia but in hundreds of thousands of years. The people who left these marks were not modern humans, but archaic members of the genus Homo, close relatives or ancestors of the Neanderthals. Their world was already ancient when the earliest chapters of Genesis were imagined.
The bad news for creationists continues unabated - because science continues unabated to reveal the truth.
Creationists like to insist that the Bible’s tales of creation and Noah’s flood are real history, not myth. But once again, science has delivered a devastating blow to that fantasy. A new open access paper in Nature Communications reports the DNA of 58 individuals from the Baligang archaeological site in central China, spanning from the Middle Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age (6,500 BP - 2,500 BP). Far from supporting the idea of a world repopulated just a few thousand years ago by Noah’s family, the evidence shows continuous human settlement, migration, and cultural development stretching back thousands of years before, during and after the supposed date of the Biblical flood - about 4,000 years BP.
The genetics reveal a population that was anything but “reset.” Northern and southern East Asian groups repeatedly mixed at Baligang, leaving detectable signatures of long-term population movement and exchange. Around 4,200 years ago, southern ancestry became especially prominent, signalling migration into the region. Burial evidence adds further depth: the males were closely related along the paternal line, while the females carried diverse maternal lineages—clear evidence of patrilineal clans drawing in women from outside communities. This is a picture of a complex, interconnected society developing steadily over time.
Cross-section of an egg-shaped iron oxide stone: It holds information about the amount of organic carbon in the sea millions of years ago, much like a time capsule.
Scientists at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich have discovered evidence that may force us to rethink how Ice Ages and complex life began. By studying tiny iron oxide grains called ooides, they found that dissolved carbon dioxide in the oceans between 1000 and 541 million years ago was 90–99 percent lower than today — far too low to have triggered an Ice Age or the rise of multicellular organisms.
For creationists, this creates a dilemma. Whatever did cause these events, it happened hundreds of millions of years earlier than their literal reading of the Bible allows. Science may revise its conclusions when new evidence emerges, but it is nowhere near as wrong as the Bible’s authors—who missed the truth by billions of years.
This difference highlights the contrast between science and religion. Science asks, “What does the evidence show?” and adapts accordingly. Religion demands blind faith, treating doubt as a weakness.
Creationists boast that their “truth” never changes, but the reality is that what doesn't change is the mind of a creationist who is immune to evidence, deductive logic and analytical reasoning. Refusing to change your mind in the light of evidence is intellectual bankruptcy - the hallmark of dogma, not wisdom.
The creationism cult took another blow yesterday with the publication of details of the oldest jewellery workshop yet found in Western Europe—dating to at least 32,000 years before the mythical six-day creation of everything from nothing. The site appears to have been used for the organised manufacture of shell ornaments, suggesting a society in which the production and trade of personal adornment already played an important role.
The discovery, made by a team of scientists from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Université de Bordeaux, the ministère de la Culture, and Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). It records the excavation of a Palaeolithic site in southwest France, dating from a period when Homo sapiens were spreading into the region and Neanderthals were in decline.
However, the evidence points to a more complex story — one of coexistence and cultural exchange, or even the absorption of Neanderthals into the expanding H. sapiens populations, with traditions and technologies merging. It also raises the possibility that H. sapiens had been established in the area far earlier, perhaps through an earlier migration wave.
Examples of Early and Middle Holocene human burials from southern China. This figure shows six human burials from Huiyaotian (A: M14, B: M19, C: M20) in Nanning and Liyupo (D: M23, E: M24, F: M28) in Long’an, both shell-midden sites located in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. All individuals are in flexed positions, with several exhibiting hyper-flexed postures (A and E: male, B–D and F: female).
They say that when you dig deep enough, the earth always tells a story—one that often clashes with stories written by humans. A recent archaeological discovery in southern China and Southeast Asia is one of those earth’s stories, and it’s a loud one. Scientists have found human remains, deliberately smoke-dried and ritually treated, dating back between 12,000 and 4,000 years ago. These mummified remains, buried in tight, crouched postures, were mummified by being exposed near low-oxygen smoky fires — not cremated, but preserved by ritual smoke-drying techniques.
A point I've made several times in these blog posts, but one which is worth repeating, is that any archaeology which predates the supposed date of the Biblical genocidal flood is irrefutable evidence that no such flood ever happened, because it simply wouldn’t be there—or at best would be buried under a thick, global layer of silt. Similarly, any archaeological evidence that predates the supposed 6-day creation of the universe is irrefutable evidence that no such creation event happened according to the Bible’s timeline.
Lastly, anything which refutes the Bible’s timeline, or contradicts the occurrence of events described in it, is irrefutable evidence that the Bible could not have been written by the omniscient, omnipotent creator god it claims to describe.
So, this recent discovery, reported by a team of archaeologists from Australian, Chinese, and Japanese universities, in reported open access in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) is about as conclusive evidence as you could wish for that the Bible was not written by the god described in it. Any claim that it is an inerrant textbook of science and history is undoubtedly false.
The lead author of the paper, Hsiao-chun Hung, Senior Research Fellow, School of Culture, History & Language, Australian National University, has explained the research and its significance in an article in The Conversation. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
Here we have another of those regular discoveries which, according to the press, supposedly means history will need to be “re-written” — something creationists, always looking for a stick to beat science with, will assume means the whole of history, because science has got everything wrong yet again. Unlike their religion, of course, which — so they claim — has never got anything wrong and is therefore eternally true, including the parts about a six-day creation 6,000–10,000 years ago, a global flood which left no evidence, and a universe consisting of a small, flat planet with a dome over it.
In reality, this is merely journalistic hyperbole designed to draw the reader in — or, in the case of creationists, to be seized upon as ‘scientific’ evidence that science is fatally flawed.
The “re-written” part of history is simply the bit about which we previously had no information. The process is not one of tearing up the past but of filling a gap in our knowledge and thereby arriving at an account closer to reality. In this case, “re-writing the history books” will mean telling a more complete history of a group of dinosaurs. The discovery in question is a 108-million-year-old adolescent pachycephalosaur fossil found in the Gobi Desert, Central Asia. Being both the oldest (by about 15 million years) and the most complete skeleton of this group of dinosaurs yet discovered, it provides crucial information about their origins.
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.
