Rosa Rubicondior: Archaeology

Showing posts with label Archaeology. Show all posts

Sunday, 15 February 2026

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

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.

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.

Creationism Refuted - The Oldest Known Human Remains in Northern Britain Are From 1,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'!

Figure 3. View facing west over the surface of the deposits in the main chamber at the start of the current fieldwork, showing the paint markings made by Mr Redshaw.

Photo by Martin Stables.

DNA analysis reveals Northern Britain’s oldest human remains are of a young female child

A good thousand years before creationism’s god allegedly created the first two humans, the body of a young girl was being buried in a cave in Cumbria, northern England.

This unwelcome news for creationists comes from an international team led by archaeologists at the University of Lancashire, who have just published their findings in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society.

The girl’s remains were discovered about three years ago in Heaning Wood Bone Cave by local archaeologist Martin Stables, from the nearby village of Great Urswick. The University of Lancashire team have now succeeded in extracting enough DNA to determine that she was between about 2.5 and 3.5 years old when she died.

Jewellery in the form of a deer tooth pendant and pierced beads has been radiocarbon dated to around 11,000 years ago, strongly suggesting this was a deliberate burial. This raises the question of why the cave held such significance as a burial site. Modern hunter-gatherer groups often regard caves as gateways to a spirit world, so it is possible that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in northern Europe held similar beliefs.

The team also showed that at least eight other individuals were buried in the cave over a period spanning roughly 4,000–11,000 years ago, from the Early Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age — ironically, the latter being the period when the creation myths of the Bible were being invented. The authors of those Bronze Age stories, of course, would have known nothing whatever of hunter-gatherer societies in northern Europe, their cultural history, or their spiritual traditions.

No doubt we will see the traditional creationist misrepresentation of this evidence, with unfounded assertions that radiocarbon dating “doesn’t work” and that scientists simply make things up to conform to some notional Darwinian narrative. Making things up to fit a pre-existing story is something creationists themselves routinely do. It seems to be characteristic of those who set out to deceive that they accuse others of doing exactly what they themselves practise.

Refuting Creationism - Life In A New Zealand Cave - 1 million Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI generated image of the NZ cave

P Scofield, Canterbury Museum.

1m-year-old 'lost world' discovered – News

About a million years before creationism’s putative designer supposedly fashioned a small flat world beneath a solid dome — the imagined cosmos of Bronze Age pastoralists in the Middle East who authored the Bible’s creation myths — ancient frogs and birds, the ancestors of today’s New Zealand species, lived and died and became fossilised deep in a cave near Waitomo on Aotearoa’s North Island.

Of course, confined as they were to within a few days’ walk of the Canaanite hills, the authors of those myths could have had no inkling of people and places in far-flung regions of a spherical planet. Their tales were based entirely on what they imagined to be the whole universe, and contain nothing that existed beyond their narrow horizons.

How these New Zealand fossils were unearthed, and what they can tell us about Aotearoa’s deep past, is the subject of a paper just published in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology, by a research group led by Associate Professor Trevor Worthy of the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University.

It is, of course, a story vastly different from Biblical mythology — the evidence for which stubbornly refuses to manifest itself, and instead consistently refutes it, revealing it to be the product of parochial ignorance and an attempt to force-fit what little was known into prevailing cultural assumptions: what Christopher Hitchens aptly called “the fearful infancy of our species”.

The findings show that around 33–50% of species went extinct about one million years before humans first arrived on Aotearoa (New Zealand). The cause appears to have been a combination of rapid climate change and catastrophic volcanic activity. The discovery helps fill a fifteen-million-year gap in our knowledge of Aotearoa’s history.

Excavations at St Bathans in Central Otago have allowed palaeontologists and geologists to reconstruct the period between 20 and 16 million years ago, but until now there has been very little information about the long stretch between then and one million years ago.

Among the discoveries was a new species of parrot, Strigops insulaborealis, an ancient relative of the flightless kākāpō, but one that could probably fly; an extinct ancestor of the modern takahē; and an extinct species of pigeon closely related to Australian bronzewing pigeons.

To forestall the traditional creationist attempt to discredit both the discovery and the scientists who made it — by claiming the dating methods are flawed or even fraudulent — the fossils can be dated accurately because they lie between two layers of volcanic ash: one deposited around 1.55 million years ago, and another about one million years ago. Volcanic ash can be dated with a high degree of confidence using Uranium–Lead (U–Pb) dating of zircon crystals.

Refuting Creationism - Conflict and Ritual Killings In Europe - Evidence That Wouldn't Be There If The Bible Tales Were True

Locations of the massacres.

From: Teresa Fernández-Crespo et al. (2025).

New research reconstructs the identity of victims from one of the earliest victory celebrations in Europe. | School of Archaeology

Of course — and this is a really strong draft already: clear, punchy, and very much in your usual style. I’ve just smoothed the grammar, corrected spelling, tightened a few phrases, and made the flow a little more polished while keeping your voice intact. Evidence revealed in a paper just published in Science Advances tells a grim story of ritualised killings in Europe about 6,000 years ago. The paper is the work of a team led by Dr Teresa Fernández-Crespo of the University of Valladolid, a Research Associate at Oxford’s School of Archaeology, together with Professor Rick J. Schulting of Oxford University. The killings appear to have been carried out as a victory celebration or demonstration of power, and they speak of conflict and struggles for regional dominance between rival Neolithic groups.

Two things about this research should trouble creationists who cling to patently absurd beliefs despite the vast array of evidence showing them to be wrong.

Firstly, this ritual slaughter took place at a time when, according to the biblical narrative, there would supposedly have been too few people on the planet to form rival groups competing for power and territory in Europe.

Secondly, none of this evidence ought to exist at all if the genocidal Flood described in Genesis had really occurred just a few thousand years ago, because it would either have been swept away entirely or, at best, buried beneath a thick layer of flood-deposited silt containing the fossils of all the dead animals and plants such a catastrophe would have produced.

The isotopic analysis of the remains tells a story of conflict on two levels: rivalry between local groups, in which severed left arms were collected as war trophies, and conflict with outsiders, prisoners from whom were ritually slaughtered in grim victory celebrations.

AI Is Good But Far From Perfect - Learning From Neanderthals

This is an AI generated image created with DALL-E 3 that was included in this research study. Its prompt described typical activities, setting, attire and tools but did not request scientific accuracy.

New study uses Neanderthals to demonstrate gap in generative AI, scholarly knowledge - UMaine News - The University of Maine

I have been using AI now for a couple of years to do research quickly to summarise scientific papers and press releases and to edit drafts to correct typos, spelling and grammatical errors and especially to generate images and illustrations. And I have to say, I think it's worth every penny of the subscription fee. However, it does get things wrong sometimes and I've frequently corrected some information or asked it to look again at an image.

Now researchers, Assistant Professor Matthew Magnani of the University of Maine, USA and Professor Jon Clindaniel of the University of Chicago, USA, have used what we know of Neanderthals to demonstrate the gap between AI-generated images and scholarly knowledge of them. The gap can widen or narrow depending on the prompt AI is given. For example, requesting scientific accuracy will produce better results than not asking for it. One of the problems the study highlights is that a great deal of scientific research is inaccessible due to copyright restrictions, before open access began to be widely used in about 2000.

Generative artificial intelligence is often marketed as a kind of universal expert — a machine that can instantly reconstruct the past, summarise scholarship, and conjure convincing images of worlds long gone. But a new study from the University of Maine demonstrates that, when it comes to archaeology and human evolution, the reality is rather less impressive. Far from reflecting the current scientific understanding of our extinct relatives, today’s most popular AI systems often reproduce something closer to the stereotypes and misconceptions of decades ago.

The researchers tested widely used generative tools, including ChatGPT and the image generator DALL-E, by asking them to describe and depict Neanderthals. What they found was striking: even when explicitly prompted for scientifically accurate, expert-level reconstructions, the outputs frequently resembled outdated mid-twentieth-century portrayals — apelike brutes, crude caricatures, and simplistic narratives that modern archaeology has long since abandoned. In effect, the AI was not drawing on the cutting edge of scholarship, but on the cultural sediment of older popular ideas.

The accompanying paper, published in Advances in Archaeological Practice, makes the deeper point that generative AI does not “know” the past in any meaningful sense. It assembles plausible-sounding and plausible-looking content from patterns in its training data — and much of that data reflects what is easily available online, not what is most accurate in the academic literature. The result is a sobering reminder that AI can be a powerful tool, but without careful expert guidance it is just as capable of reinforcing obsolete narratives as it is of illuminating the truth.

Refuting Creationism - How U-Pb Dating Proves Humans Not Glaciers Transported the Stonehenge Stones

Grains of sand prove people – not glaciers – transported Stonehenge rocks

Stonehenge in Wiltshire, southern England, is a mysterious place that speaks of a culture and political–religious authority of which we know almost nothing, probably motivated by belief in long-dead gods whose supposed presence was, at the time, undoubtedly considered to be “all around”. This is much as theists of all religions assert of their god or gods today. Who these people were, remains one of the great mysteries, as does how they moved such massive stones into place to build a stone circle with extraordinary precision, and how they transported them over long distances long before the domestication of the horse.

We know they were not the later Welsh-speaking Celts, who did not arrive in Britain until around 1,000 BCE — some two millennia after construction of Stonehenge began. Those Celts replaced the Beaker culture, which itself had replaced the Neolithic farming communities who first built the monument. Construction began around 3,000 BCE, initially as a bank-and-ditch enclosure with a circle of wooden posts. This was later replaced, around 2,500 BCE, by a circle of massive sarsen stones sourced locally from the nearby Salisbury Plain, with the smaller bluestones brought from the Preseli Hills in south-west Wales. The so-called “altar stone” was added last. Its precise origin remains unresolved, with conflicting evidence suggesting either north-west Scotland or west Wales as its source.

While the question of where most of the stones came from has largely been resolved, what remains is the long-standing puzzle of how they were transported using only human labour. The motivation was clearly strong enough to justify the immense effort and manpower involved, and the fact that it was human effort that moved them has now been established beyond reasonable doubt by the falsification of an alternative hypothesis — namely, that the stones were carried to Salisbury Plain by a passing glacier during the last Ice Age.

The refutation of this idea provides a neat example of how science tests and falsifies hypotheses, though it will no doubt unsettle creationists who cling to the absurd belief that the entire history of the Earth can be compressed into a timescale of just 6,000–10,000 years. The work was carried out by two researchers from Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, and relied on dating zircon crystals — a highly accurate method for determining the age of rock formations, as regular readers of this blog will know — along with apatite grains, which similarly exploit the radioactive decay of uranium isotopes into stable lead isotopes.

Creationism Refuted - Messages From Nearly 70,000 Years Ago.

A rocky surface with hand stencils surrounded by red pigment, fingers narrow.

A man in a dark cave using a special flashlight to reveal finger marks on a rocky wall.

Adhi Agus Oktaviana illuminating a hand stencil.

Max Aubert

Humanity’s oldest known cave art has been discovered in Sulawesi.

There's nothing quite like leaving a message behind to tell future generations that you were here.

Creationists, of course, have a message from about 5,000 years ago telling them that there were ignorant Bronze Age storytellers living in the Middle East — but sadly the only truth in their stories was the one they didn’t explicitly state: that they were making things up to explain what they didn’t know, which meant a great many stories to invent. They couldn’t have guessed, of course, that their tales would later be written down, bound up in a book, and then proclaimed to be the inerrant word of a creator god; otherwise they might have made more of an effort to get it right, or at least admitted they didn’t know. As it is, all we really learn from them is just how ignorant they were, and how vivid their imaginations must have been.

To be fair, it may not have been their intention to mislead and misinform, but that has been the result — mostly, it has to be said, through the fault of those who later declared their tales to be the authentic word of a god, because that conveniently suited their political agenda.

People living much earlier, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, left a much clearer and more honest message in the form of cave art, and particularly hand stencils. All they really say is, “Hi there! I was here!” — with no attempt to elevate themselves to a special status or claim to know things they didn’t know. Where they depicted the animals around them, they showed them just as they saw them: wild and free.

This cave art, which precedes the celebrated art of the French and Spanish caves by tens of thousands of years, has now been identified as the oldest known cave art, telling an unambiguous story of people living there around 70,000 years ago — long before anatomically modern humans made their presence felt in Western Eurasia. The discovery and the methods used to date the art were published in Nature, in a paper that marks a defining moment in our understanding of early symbolic behaviour.

Four of the researchers — Maxime Aubert, Professor of Archaeological Science, Griffith University; Adam Brumm, Professor of Archaeology, Griffith University; Adhi Oktaviana, Research Centre of Archeometry, Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional (BRIN), Jakarta, Indonesia; and Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Professor of Geochronology and Geochemistry, Southern Cross University, New South Wales, Australia — have also written an article in The Conversation that explains the significance of the find in accessible terms. Their piece is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Two fragments of the newly discovered mandible specimen in the location they were originally found.

Alemseged Research Group.

New 2.6-million-year-old Paranthropus fossil reshapes understanding of early hominins | Biological Sciences Division | The University of Chicago

Research published two days ago in Nature by a team led by University of Chicago paleoanthropologist Professor Zeresenay Alemseged will dismay and delight creationists in about equal measure — especially those who manage to rationalise a fossil dating from about 2.6 million years before they believe Earth and everything on it was created — because it shows that scientists were wrong about something.

It is the news that the jawbone of an archaic hominin, Paranthropus, has been found in Ethiopia some 200 miles further north than the previously believed northern limit of these hominins.

Normally, to a binary-thinking creationist, science being wrong about even the most minor and unimportant detail is “proof” that science is wrong about everything. This childish belief probably stems from them having a single source-book which has been deemed to be inerrant, so even the slightest falsehood in it renders that claim untenable. They assume it is the same with science: that what scientists believe comes from supposedly inerrant textbooks written by “prophets” such as Charles Darwin, serving as the source-books from which all scientists get their information. So, if scientists are ever wrong, all the books from the science libraries of the world can be thrown in the waste bin, leaving creationism’s book of “inerrant” origin myths as the winner.

What they find hard to comprehend, apparently, is that scientific knowledge is cumulative, with current thinking always provisional, pending further confirmation or in need of revision in the light of new information, and that facts are neutral in any dispute, so can be objective referees. They fail to realise that because science works this way, scientists from all over the world will eventually converge on a single answer. Religions, by contrast, because they are not based on evidence but on the tenuous thread of interpretation of an ancient book which itself presents no evidence for its claims, continue to diversify into ever smaller sects, each claiming to have the one true answer but having no evidence to referee the dispute.

But of course, in the best scientific tradition, this jawbone simply adds richness to the hominin evolutionary story and raises the possibility that Paranthropus, like Australopithecus and Homo, was present in the Afar region of Ethiopia. And that opens up the intriguing possibility — given the propensity of hominins to diverge and then hybridise — that modern Homo sapiens could have some Paranthropus ancestry.

Creationism Refuted - An Elephant Bone Tool from 470,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Map of Lower Paleolithic sites with published elephant-bone tools.

Simon A. Parfitt, Silvia M. Bello (2026).

Ancient humans made elephant bone tools in Europe half a million years ago | Natural History Museum

The problems for creationists deepened today with news that two scientists, Simon Parfitt of the UCL Institute of Archaeology and a Scientific Associate at the Natural History Museum, London, and Silvia M. Bello of the Natural History Museum, have discovered an elephant bone tool dating from roughly half a million years ago — the oldest such tool discovered in Europe, from a time before anatomically modern hominins had left Africa. They published their findings in Science Advances.

Of course, most creationists will be blissfully unaware of this discovery, as with all such archaeology, because there is no point in being a creationist if you are going to read the latest scientific discoveries. How is that going to help you cling to patently absurd beliefs despite all the evidence against you? Best just ignore it and dismiss it all as some sort of Satanic conspiracy aimed at making you show weakness and change your mind.

Nevertheless, the fact is that this elephant bone tool exists and has been dated to about 490,000 years before creationism’s favourite book of Bronze Age superstitions says Earth existed. It was used by archaic hominins, probably to sharpen dulled flint tools by gently knapping the cutting edges. It was discovered at Boxgrove, Kent, England, in the early 1990s but was not recognised as a tool until recently, when finds from the Boxgrove site were studied in detail using new technology such as 3D scans and scanning electron microscopy, which revealed impact notches with embedded flint fragments.

Bone, being softer than flint, would have been the material of choice for work where precision was important, and elephant bone, with its hard outer layer of compact bone making it more durable, would have been the bone of choice. However, elephants and mammoths were rare in what is now southern England 500,000 years ago, so these tools would have been valuable objects.

It is not clear which archaic hominins used these tools in southern England, but at 500,000 years ago it was probably one of the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans, which form the “muddle in the middle” of the human evolutionary story. Here the problem is not a lack of fossils but an abundance of them, showing varying mixtures of primitive and derived features typical of transitional species, coming somewhere between Homo erectus and Neanderthals. Candidates are H. heidelbergensis and H. antecessor.

The stone tools from Boxgrove are part of the widespread Acheulean technology, which originated in East Africa about 1.95 million years ago and spread across Africa and into western Eurasia after about 1.5 million years ago, persisting until between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago.

Creationism Refuted - Why Cosmic Ray Storms Make C14 Dating So Accurate - Running Rings Around Creationists

A cosmic carbon spike
Cosmic rays from solar flares or other extraterrestrial sources collide with gas molecules in our atmosphere, spawning neutrons. When a free neutron knocks a proton out of a nitrogen atom, it forms the radioisotope carbon-14 (¹⁴C). The more energetic the event, the higher the ratio of ¹⁴C to stable carbon isotopes. Trees breathe in these isotopes as carbon dioxide (CO₂)

Marking time: Cosmic ray storms can pin precise dates on history from ancient Egypt to the Vikings | Science | AAAS

As though 2026 hadn't started badly enough for creationism, it just got a whole lot worse, with news that geochronologists have a method with which they can pinpoint carbon-14 dates to exact years, removing virtually all sources of error and, devastatingly for creationists, one of their traditional ways to dismiss evidence they don't like has evaporated. But this isn't new information; it's something creationists have either been kept ignorant of, have been pretending not to know about it, or, more likely, did not understand the subject well enough to realise it refuted their claims. It was actually published in Science in April 2023

One of the most persistent fall-back positions in creationist rhetoric is not to deny individual discoveries outright, but to retreat into claims that scientific dating methods are too uncertain to be trusted. Radiocarbon dating, in particular, is routinely portrayed as vague, circular, or endlessly “adjusted” to fit preconceived evolutionary timelines. This claim relies heavily on the idea that dates come with wide error bars that can supposedly be stretched, compressed, or reinterpreted to accommodate a much younger history.

Creationists also rely on the unsupported assertion that radioactive decay rates were much higher once upon a time - a process that coincidentally stopped as soon as we developed the technology to measure it accurately. This claim also sits uncomfortably with another creationist claim - that the Universe is so fine-tuned that altering any of its parameters by even the smallest an=mount would make life impossible. The inconsistency of these two claims is lost on those who have no understanding of how radioactive decay depends on nuclear forces and altering those would make the formation of atoms impossible, so high decay rates when they believe life was created would mean not even Earth could exist, let alone organic molecules.

But perhaps the most amusing accusations against science is that carbon-14 dating assumes a constant ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere, but in fact it is variable, depending on solar activity. Not only is this known and is routinely compensated for using dendrochronology because tree rings contain an accurate record of these changes, but it forms the very basis of this devastating rebuttal of creationist claims - we can accurately pinpoint spikes in carbon-14 production and correlate them with known events in history, thus removing any reasonable margin of error.

Creationism Refuted - Domestic Dogs Began to Diversify At Least 1,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Variations in skulls of modern dogs.

Extensive dog diversity millennia before modern breeding practices - University of Exeter News

There is, of course, no let-up in the steady stream of bad news for creationists to ignore in 2026, and today is no exception. This time the problem comes from archaeology and concerns events taking place toward the end of the very long span of Earth’s history that preceded creationism’s so-called *Creation Week*. The news is that the diversification of domestic dogs, descended from domesticated wolves, had already begun at least 11,000 years ago — long before anything resembling the modern concept of dog “breeds”.

The evidence is presented in a paper published in Science by a team led by palaeontologists from the University of Exeter and France’s Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). The researchers analysed 643 modern and archaeological canid skulls—including recognised breeds, village dogs, and wolves—spanning the last 50,000 years. In both geographical scope and time depth, it is the largest and most comprehensive study of its kind to date.

Using a technique known as geometric morphometrics, the team demonstrated that by the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods dogs already displayed a striking range of shapes and sizes. This diversity almost certainly reflects their varied roles in early human societies, from hunting and herding to guarding and companionship, rather than anything resembling systematic modern breeding.

All of this directly contradicts the claim in Genesis that animals were created fully formed for mankind’s exclusive use by an omnipotent and omniscient creator. Had that been the case, dogs would not require modification to make them fit for different purposes, nor would the archaeological record preserve clear evidence of their gradual evolutionary divergence from an ancestral wolf population. Instead, the evidence shows — unambiguously — that modern dogs are the product of an evolutionary process in which human-mediated selection played a central role, carried out by people who themselves existed long before the biblical timeline allows.

Extracting drilled sediments.

Origins of Ancient Egypt’s Karnak Temple revealed – Uppsala University

An international team of archaeologists led by Dr Angus Graham of Uppsala University has shown that the temple to Amun-Ra at Karnak Temple Complex was originally built more than 3,000 years ago on an island formed when the Nile split into eastern and western channels. Their findings were published last October in the journal Antiquity.

One can easily imagine the jubilation with which Christian circles would greet the discovery of any credible archaeological evidence for Adam and Eve or Noah’s Ark. In practice, judging by the regular declarations of “proof” that appear on social media, almost any claim — no matter how tenuous or poorly authenticated — that can be retro-fitted to a biblical story is enthusiastically celebrated. It is hard to avoid the impression that this eagerness betrays a certain underlying insecurity.

Yet when archaeological discoveries appear to lend support to the origin myths of other cultures, the reaction is very different. The usual response is indifference, outright dismissal, or an appeal to the tentative nature of the evidence and the dangers of confirmation bias—precisely the same grounds on which much supposedly “biblical” evidence can be rejected, of course.

It will therefore be interesting to observe the reaction in Christian circles to this research from Karnak and its relevance to ancient Egyptian creation mythology, in which the land is caused to rise from the primordial waters by the creator. This bears an obvious resemblance to the later biblical motif of land being divided from the waters. The relatively high ground at Luxor is the only plausible candidate in the region for such a formation, and during periods of high Nile flood it would indeed have appeared as an island within a lake—an environment readily imbued with sacred significance by the temple builders.

Such parallels are not especially surprising. The ancient Near East was a densely interconnected cultural landscape in which ideas, myths, and cosmological frameworks circulated freely over centuries. Egyptian conceptions of creation—particularly the emergence of land from primeval waters—pre-date the composition of the Hebrew Bible by many centuries and would have been well known, directly or indirectly, throughout the eastern Mediterranean. When the authors of Book of Genesis framed their own creation narrative, they were not writing in a cultural vacuum, but drawing upon a shared mythological vocabulary that had long been established in the region.

The team also uncovered evidence that the eastern Nile channel was deliberately infilled with sand, accelerating a silting process that was already under way. These conclusions are based on detailed analysis of 61 sediment cores taken from in and around the temple complex, along with thousands of ceramic fragments recovered from the site.

Creationism Refuted - A Terrible End to a Bad Year for Creationism - a 37-Million-Year-Old Transitional Fossil Snake

The most commonly found bones of fossil snakes are their vertebrae, which contain traits that scientists can use to identify the species.

“Weird” new species of ancient fossil snake discovered in southern England | Natural History Museum

2026 is shaping up to be yet another dreadful year for the creationist cult, as palaeontology, archaeology, geochronology, and genetics continue to uncover facts that do not merely show creationism to be a divinely inspired allegory or metaphor, but demonstrate that it is simply and unequivocally wrong at every level.

At times it seems like an unfair contest between myths invented by Bronze Age pastoralists—without the slightest benefit of scientific understanding—and the cumulative output of modern science. It is rather like a chess match between a pigeon and a powerful computer, in which the pigeon’s concept of chess is to knock the pieces over, then strut about on the board declaring victory. This tactic is known in creationist circles as “debate”, and everywhere else as “pigeon chess”.

As usual, the closing months of the year have brought yet more palaeontological evidence that creationism cannot accommodate. This latest find dates to around 37 million years before creationists believe Earth was magicked into existence, bears the unmistakable fingerprints of one of those supposedly “non-existent” transitional forms, and displays the familiar mosaic of archaic and modern features that are commonplace in the fossil record. It also fits precisely into the established timeline of reptilian evolution and was discovered in southern England, in deposits that align exactly with the known geological and climatological history of the region.

The fossil was discovered in 1981 at Hordle Cliff, England, and donated to the Natural History Museum in London, where it has now been identified as a new species. The identification was made by Professor Georgios L. Georgalis of the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków, currently a visiting researcher at the Natural History Museum. His paper, co-authored with Dr Marc E. H. Jones, curator of fossil reptiles and amphibians, has recently been published open access in Comptes Rendus Palevol.

Hordle Cliff, Geology. Hordle Cliff is one of the most important and intensively studied fossil-bearing coastal exposures in southern England. Its significance lies in the exceptional sequence of Eocene marine sediments exposed by continual coastal erosion along the western Solent.

Geological setting

Hordle Cliff lies on the coast of Hampshire, west of Milford-on-Sea, forming part of the Hampshire Basin, a large sedimentary basin that accumulated marine and marginal-marine deposits during the early Cenozoic. The strata exposed here date mainly to the Late Eocene, approximately 41–34 million years ago, a time when southern England lay beneath a warm, shallow sea.

Stratigraphy

The cliff exposes a classic succession of Eocene formations, including:

Barton Group (upper Eocene)

Dominated by clays, silts, and fine sands
Deposited in shallow marine conditions
Exceptionally fossil-rich

Barton Clay Formation

The most famous unit at Hordle Cliff
Known for abundant molluscs, sharks’ teeth, rays, fish remains, turtles, crocodilians, birds, and reptiles (including snakes)
Indicates warm, subtropical seas with nearby coastal and estuarine environments

These sediments accumulated gradually, layer upon layer, in calm marine settings—exactly the opposite of the chaotic, high-energy deposition required by flood-geology models.

Depositional environment

During the Late Eocene, this region experienced:

**Warm greenhouse climates
High sea levels
Low-energy marine sedimentation

Fine-grained clays settled slowly out of suspension, allowing delicate fossils to be preserved intact. Many beds show bioturbation, shell beds, and orderly fossil assemblages—clear evidence of stable ecosystems persisting over long periods.

Fossil significance

Hordle Cliff is internationally important because it preserves:

Highly diverse faunas spanning multiple ecological niches
Mosaic evolutionary forms, including transitional reptiles
Fossils preserved in situ, not reworked or mixed from different ages

This makes the site particularly valuable for reconstructing Eocene ecosystems and tracing evolutionary change through time.

Structural and erosional features

The cliffs themselves are relatively soft and unstable:

Frequent slumping and landslips continually expose fresh material
Ongoing erosion has made Hordle Cliff productive for over two centuries
The geology is simple and undisturbed, with gently dipping strata—no folding, overturning, or tectonic chaos

Why this matters for creationist claims

The geology of Hordle Cliff presents multiple, independent problems for young-Earth creationism:

The sediments record millions of years of gradual deposition
Fossils are ordered, local, and ecological, not globally mixed
Climatic signals match global Eocene warming trends
The strata fit seamlessly into the wider regional and global geological record

There is no evidence whatsoever of rapid, catastrophic deposition, let alone a single global flood. Instead, Hordle Cliff is a textbook example of slow geological processes operating exactly as modern geology predicts.

The discovery and its broader significance were explained in a recent Natural History Museum news item by James Ashworth.

“Weird” new species of ancient fossil snake discovered in southern England
An extinct snake has slithered its way out of obscurity over four decades after its discovery.

The newly described species of reptile, Paradoxophidion richardoweni, is offering new clues in the search for the origin of ‘advanced’ snakes.
In 1981, the backbones of an ancient snake were uncovered at Hordle Cliff on England’s south coast. They’ve now been revealed as the remnants of a previously unknown species.

Research published in the journal Comptes Rendus Palevol has identified that the vertebrae belong to a new species named Paradoxophidion richardoweni. This animal would have lived around 37 million years ago, when England was home to a much wider range of snakes than it is now.

While little is known about this animal’s life, it could shed light on the early evolution of biggest group of modern snakes. This is because Paradoxophidion represents an early-branching member of the caenophidians, the group containing the vast majority of living snakes.

The new species is so early in the evolution of the caenophidians that it has a peculiar mix of characteristics now found in different snakes throughout this group. This mosaic of features is summed up in its genus name, with Paradoxophidion meaning ‘paradox snake’ in Greek.

Its species name, meanwhile, honours Sir Richard Owen. Not only did he name the first fossil snakes found at Hordle Cliff, but this scientist was also instrumental in establishing what’s now the Natural History Museum where the fossils are cared for, giving the name multiple layers of meaning.

Lead author Dr Georgios Georgalis, from the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow, says that being able to describe a new species from our collections was ‘a dream come true’.

It was my childhood dream to be able to visit the Natural History Museum, let alone do research there, so, when I saw these very weird vertebrae in the collection and knew that they were something new, it was a fantastic feeling. It’s especially exciting to have described an early diverging caenophidian snake, as there’s not that much evidence about how they emerged. Paradoxophidion brings us closer to understanding how this happened.

Dr Georgios Georgalis, lead author
Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals
Polish Academy of Sciences
Krakow, Poland.

The most commonly found bones of fossil snakes are their vertebrae, which contain traits that scientists can use to identify the species.

© Georgalis and Jones.

What’s been discovered at Hordle Cliff?

Hordle Cliff, near Christchurch on England’s south coast, provides a window into a period of Earth’s history known as the Eocene that lasted from around 56 to 34 million years ago.

Dr Marc Jones, our curator of fossil reptiles and amphibians who co-authored the research, says that this epoch saw dramatic climatic changes around the world.

Around 37 million years ago, England was much warmer than it is now, though the Sun was very slightly dimmer, levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were much higher. England was also slightly closer to the equator, meaning that it received more heat from the Sun year round.

Dr Marc E.H. Jones, co-author
Curator of fossil reptiles and amphibians.
Natural History Museum
London, UK.

Fossils were first uncovered at Hordle Cliff around 200 years ago. In the early 1800s Barbara Rawdon-Hastings, the fossil-hunting Marchioness of Hastings, collected the skulls of crocodile relatives from the site, one of which Richard Owen would later name after her.

Since then, a variety of fossil turtles, lizards and mammals have also been uncovered at Hordle Cliff. There are also abundant snake fossils, including some particularly important species.

The fossil snakes found at Hordle Cliff were some of the first to be recognised when Richard Owen studied them in the mid-nineteenth century. They include Paleryx, the first named constrictor snake in the fossil record. Smaller snakes from this site, however, haven’t been as well investigated. Paradoxophidion’s vertebrae are just a few millimetres long, so historically they’ve not had a lot of attention.

Dr Georgios Georgalis.

To get a better look at these fossils, Marc and Georgios took CT scans of the bones. In total, they identified 31 vertebrae from different parts of the spine of Paradoxophidion.

We used these CT scans to make three dimensional models of the fossils. These provide a digital record of the specimen which we’ve shared online so that they can be studied by anyone, not just people who can come to the museum and use our microscopes.

Dr Marc E.H. Jones.

The scans show that the fossils are all slightly different shapes and sizes, as the snake’s spine bones gradually taper from head to tail. However, they share some features that show they all belong to one species.

Georgios estimates that Paradoxophidion would have been less than a metre long, but other details about this animal’s life are hard to say. The lack of a skull makes it difficult to know what it ate, while the vertebrae don’t have any sign of being adapted for a specialised lifestyle, such as burrowing.

The backbones of Paradoxophidion are surprisingly similar to those of Acrochordus snakes.

© Smacdonald via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

A living link to the past?

Though the vertebrae don’t give much away about Paradoxophidion’s lifestyle, they are strikingly similar to a group of snakes known as the Acrochordids. These reptiles are known as elephant trunk snakes due to their unusually baggy skin.

Today, only a few species of these snakes can be found living in southeast Asia and northern Australia. But they’re among the earliest branches of the caenophidian family tree, with a fossil record extending back over 20 million years.

As Paradoxophidion is really similar to the acrochordids, it’s possible that this snake could be the oldest known member of this family. If it was, then it could mean that it was an aquatic species, as all Acrochordids are aquatic. On the other hand, it might belong to a completely different group of caenophidians. There’s just not enough evidence at the moment to prove how this snake might have lived, or which family it belongs to.

Dr Georgios Georgalis.

Finding out more about Paradoxophidion and the early evolution of the caenophidians means that more fossils will need to be studied. Georgios hopes to continue his work in our fossil reptile collections in the near future, where he believes more new species might be waiting.
I’m planning to study a variety of snake fossils in the collection, including those originally studied by Richard Owen. These include the remains of the giant aquatic snake Palaeophis, which were first found in England in the nineteenth century. There are also several bones with differing morphology that haven’t been investigated before that I’m interested in looking at. These might represent new taxa and offer additional clues about snake evolution.

Dr Georgios Georgalis.

Publication:
Georgalis G.L. & Jines M.E.H. (2025).
A new peculiar early diverging caenophidian snake (Serpentes) from the late Eocene of Hordle Cliff, England, in Georgalis G.L., Zaher H. & Laurin M. (eds), Snakes from the Cenozoic of Europe – towards a macroevolutionary and palaeobiogeographic synthesis.
Comptes Rendus Palevol 24 (25): 505-530. https://doi.org/10.5852/cr-palevol2025v24a25

A novel caenophidian serpent (Serpentes) peculiar to early divergence from the late Eocene of Hordle Cliff, England

We describe here a new genus and species of snake, based on several trunk and caudal vertebrae, from the late Eocene (MP 17a) of Hordle Cliff, England. We studied the fossil material using both visual microscopy and computed tomography (μCT), focusing on its intracolumnar variation and comparing it extensively with other Paleogene snake taxa from England and continental Europe. The new small taxon is characterized by a set of bizarre and distinctive vertebral features that may differentiate it from all other snakes. Its morphology is somewhat similar to that of russellophiids; however, some of its anatomical features are radically different from those seen in the latter group and thus defy such placement at the family level. Furthermore, the new English taxon bears a striking resemblance to extant acrochordids, particularly the species Acrochordus granulatus (Schneider, 1799). Consequently, we consider the new taxon to most likely represent an early divergent caenophid, possibly even a member of the Acrochordidae Bonaparte, 1831, well outside the stratigraphic and geographic distribution known to date for the latter group. It further adds to the astonishing diversity of vertebral morphologies in European Paleogene snakes.

Appendix 1. — Flythrough video of the μCT of the holotype trunk vertebra NHMUK PV R 10795.

Appendix 2. — Flythrough video of the μCT of the caudal vertebra NHMUK PV R 10796.

Georgalis G.L. & Jines M.E.H. (2025).
A new peculiar early diverging caenophidian snake (Serpentes) from the late Eocene of Hordle Cliff, England, in Georgalis G.L., Zaher H. & Laurin M. (eds) Snakes from the Cenozoic of Europe – towards a macroevolutionary and palaeobiogeographic synthesis.
Comptes Rendus Palevol 24 (25): 505-530. https://doi.org/10.5852/cr-palevol2025v24a25

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by [publisher]. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Taken together, the geology of Hordle Cliff leaves no room for creationist evasions. The sediments accumulated slowly in warm, shallow Eocene seas, preserving stable marine ecosystems over millions of years. The fossils are local, ordered, and ecologically coherent, embedded within undisturbed strata that fit seamlessly into the wider geological history of southern England and the global Eocene record. None of this resembles the chaotic aftermath of a recent global catastrophe; all of it is exactly what conventional geology predicts.

The newly identified fossil from this site simply adds to the embarrassment. It is neither out of place nor out of time, but sits precisely where evolutionary theory says it should—both stratigraphically and anatomically—displaying the familiar mosaic of ancestral and derived features that creationists insist do not exist. Hordle Cliff has been yielding such transitional forms for over two centuries, and every one of them tells the same story.

For creationism, this presents a recurring and insoluble problem. Each new discovery must be dismissed, distorted, or ignored, not because it is anomalous, but because it fits too well. Hordle Cliff is not an exception to the rule; it is the rule itself—one more quietly devastating reminder that the natural world records its own history with remarkable consistency, and that history bears no resemblance whatsoever to a Bronze Age flood myth.

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