Creationism Refuted - The History Of Viticulture - Uninterrupted By A Global Genocide

AI-Generated image of wine-making in Iberia, 3000 Years ago

ChatGPT-6 Astra

Grape seeds from Huelva, Vitis vinifera L.

Image: Guillem Pérez Jordà.

Ancient DNA reveals that the first grapevines cultivated in the Iberian Peninsula arrived from the eastern Mediterranean 3,000 years ago

If fruit-bearing plants were created for human use by an omnipotent, omniscient god, why have humans spent thousands of years modifying them to suit our needs? Genesis 1:29 presents seed-bearing plants and fruit trees as divine provisions for humanity, yet agriculture tells a rather different story: people taking what nature supplied and, through cultivation and selection, producing crops better suited to their purposes. Grapevines provide another example of this gap between the claim of providential design and the biological history of our food.

Research published in Current Biology, traces part of that history through ancient DNA. An international team analysed 28 archaeological grape seeds from Iberia and Sardinia. Their findings indicate that cultivated vines of eastern Mediterranean ancestry reached Iberia approximately 3,000 years ago, associated with Phoenician settlement and trade. These were already domesticated plants, arriving in a landscape where wild grapevines also grew.

The imported vines subsequently crossed with local wild populations. This mixing contributed to the ancestry of traditional Iberian varieties, with characteristic lineages already identifiable in seeds from the fourth century BCE. Ancient DNA also revealed connections between medieval seeds and varieties preserved today. The record therefore contains both change and continuity: new combinations of ancestry alongside lineages maintained across centuries.

More worryingly for Bible-literalist creationist, the genetic evidence shows that viticulture (the cultivation and growing of grapes) has a continuous history from before 'Creation Week' through the mythical global flood and biological reset of Earth, right up to the present, with no evidence of interruption of either the culturally-inherited methods or of the grape varieties used.

This is a useful illustration of how evolution works. Populations do not have to acquire all their useful variation through new mutations arising on the spot. Reproduction can reshuffle existing variation, while interbreeding brings together genetic variants from previously separated populations. Cultivation then provides opportunities for people to retain and propagate plants with desirable characteristics. Human preferences influence which vines reproduce or are multiplied, but the inheritance and variation on which that selection acts are ordinary biological processes.

Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Syphilis - How Did It Survive On The Ark?

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The archeological site of Tequendama 1 at the border of the Sabana de Bogotá, Cundinamarca, Colombia.

© Angélica Triana.

Ancient DNA pushes back record of treponemal disease-causing bacteria by 3,000 years

Creationists who take the biblical Flood story literally have a problem that rarely features in illustrations of Noah’s floating menagerie: what happened to the infectious diseases? Saving their animal hosts would also have provided opportunities to save their pathogens. Conversely, exterminating the hosts would have threatened the survival of the very organisms that depended on them. A supposedly fresh start for life on Earth would therefore require an explanation for why so many ancient infections apparently came along for the ride.

Many pathogens, including those that infect humans are also host-specific, so that begs the question of which of the human passengers were host to the sexually-transmitted diseases, and how, if they were 'righteous' people, did they acquire them? The authors of the tale knew nothing of microorganisms or the germ theory of disease, of course, so saw no reason to explain all that stuff.

A discovery reported in Science on 22 January 2026 gives that question another uncomfortable historical dimension. An international research team has reconstructed a roughly 5,500-year-old genome of Treponema pallidum from human remains at the Tequendama I rock shelter in Colombia. This is the bacterial species whose recognised subspecies cause syphilis, yaws and bejel. The findings are described in a research paper in Science by Davide Bozzi and colleagues.

The ancient bacterium belonged to a previously unknown branch of the family tree, a sister lineage to all the genetically characterised subspecies of T. pallidum. It should therefore not be described simply as a case of modern syphilis in a prehistoric person. Nevertheless, its presence establishes that this group of pathogens was infecting people in South America long before European contact—and before the date commonly assigned to Noah’s genocidal flood.

The evolutionary history reaches further back still. The researchers’ molecular-clock analysis estimates that the ancient lineage and the other known lineages shared a common ancestor approximately 13,700 years ago. That estimate carries substantial uncertainty, with a range of roughly 6,800–20,600 years, but its central value places this ancestral population well before even the more generous versions of the usual young-Earth creationist chronology. These are estimates reconstructed from genetic evidence, not dates obtained by adding together the supposed lifespans of biblical patriarchs.

The Flood problem deserves careful examination. Genesis is ambiguous on the point. On the one hand it describes the destruction of terrestrial, air-breathing life; on the other hand it specifically refers to all living substance being destroyed. Although the authors were unaware of microorganisms so were not writing a microbiology textbook, a supposedly omniscient, creator god would not have been constrained by the ignorance of primitive pastoralists. But then these obligate parasites would not have survived the destruction of their hosts outside the ark, so the question of what 'life' the Bible is referring to become moot. If you subscribe to the Ark myth, you have to accept that any survivors must have been carried in the Ark.

The discovery of an ancient relative of syphilis does not establish that the particular Colombian lineage survived to the present. But neither qualification explains how the surviving branches of an ancient, host-associated pathogen could have persisted through the alleged destruction of their hosts outside the Ark. Within that narrative, infected passengers or another explicitly justified means of survival would be needed. Simply overlooking the pathogens does not solve the problem.

There appears to be no way to avoid the conclusion that, if the Ark myth were true, Noah and his family must have been carrying the obligate, species-specific sexually-transmitted diseases, syphilis, gonorrhoea and chlamydia as well as pubic lice and an assortment of intestinal worms.

Evolution, meanwhile, supplies the framework that makes the discovery intelligible: common ancestry, branching descent and genetic change over time. The scientists can place an unfamiliar ancient genome within a family tree and investigate when its lineage diverged from its relatives. There is no need to invent a separate creation event for each disease, or a miraculous rescue operation to carry ancient infections across an otherwise universal catastrophe. There is a history to reconstruct—and the evidence is preserved in the DNA.

How We Know The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People - More Evidence From The James Webb Space Telescope.

IC 348, a star-forming region. It is blanketed in thick clouds of gas and dust, millions of kilometres across, that form swirling patterns. Bright stars are scattered throughout the clouds, with the densest cluster situated in the centre of the scene. Each is crowned with six long points created by the optics of the telescope’s mirrors. In the upper right, a couple of hidden stars blast out long, glowing jets of material.

ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, K. Luhman, C. Alves De Oliveira, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)

Webb reveals stunning panorama of star formation | ESA/Webb

No sooner do I show the comparison between the Bible's author's description of the universe with the reality science is revealing, than ESA/Webb produce another batch of images as though to reinforce the conclusion that the authors of the Bible were writing from a position of primitive ignorance.

So, I'm pleased to be able to share those images here so that fair-minded, objective people can decide whether the rest of the Bible should be read in the light of that understanding, and treated accordingly:

Creationism Refuted - The People Of Gansu, China Did Not Have Ancestors In The Middle East - Another Bible Blunder

Depiction of Bronze Age Life in Gansu, China

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Astra)

Geographic locations of the studied sites in Gansu and nearby regions (color-filled circles) and published ancient sites in East Asia co-analyzed in this study (white-filled circles).

From: Shi H, Bennett E, Chen G, et al (2026)

Multidisciplinary Study Sheds Light on Agricultural Diffusion, Population Movement, and Funeral Practices in Ancient Gansu----Chinese Academy of Sciences

Archaeologists have long warned that “pots are not people”. The distribution of a particular style of pottery does not necessarily trace the movement of the people who first made it, because pots can be traded, copied or carried through a succession of neighbouring communities. Much the same principle applies to crops, livestock and agricultural techniques: wheat can travel without wheat farmers, sheep without shepherds, and an effective method can spread simply because other people adopt it.

Distinguishing between the movement of people and the movement of their culture is therefore essential when reconstructing prehistory. Agriculture sometimes spread by demic diffusion, in which expanding farming populations moved into new territory and brought their domesticates with them. In other cases, it spread principally by cultural diffusion, as existing populations acquired crops, animals or knowledge through trade, imitation and intermediate exchange networks. Archaeological remains alone do not always reveal which process occurred, but ancient DNA can now test the alternatives directly.

Gansu, in north-western China, provides an especially important case. Situated between the Yellow River basin, the Tibetan Plateau, the Mongolian Steppe and the routes leading towards Central Asia, the region became a major corridor of prehistoric trans-Eurasian exchange. Crops and livestock domesticated much farther west eventually appeared there, raising the obvious question of whether they arrived with migrating western farmers or passed between the established populations of Inner and East Asia.

A multidisciplinary study published in Cell has now examined genomic data from 149 people who lived at eleven Gansu sites between approximately 4,700 and 3,000 years ago. Western-derived crops or livestock were present at nine of those sites, yet the researchers found no corresponding influx of western Eurasian or Central Asian ancestry. The principal genetic components instead derived from populations associated with the Yellow River basin, the south-eastern Mongolian Plateau and the Tibetan Plateau. A few genetic outliers testify to regional mobility and contact, but not to wholesale population replacement.

The evidence therefore indicates that the western domesticates reached Gansu largely through cultural transmission—possibly along the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor or through chains of intermediary communities across the Mongolian Steppe. Crops, animals and ideas crossed Eurasia farther and more readily than the people among whom they had originated. The finding also shows why neither pottery, farming nor any other cultural innovation can safely be treated as a proxy for mass migration.

This carefully reconstructed picture bears little resemblance to the simplistic human history imagined by biblical literalists. It contains no recently dispersed descendants of a single family spreading from Babel with fixed cultures and divinely assigned identities. Instead, it reveals long-established, genetically differentiated populations connected by shifting networks of exchange, occasional mobility and selective cultural borrowing. People did not need to migrate en masse for useful innovations to spread across a continent.

Refuting Creationism - The Pages Of Gospels Record Evolution Over 3,500 Years

Created in Northumbria in the eighth century, this copy of the Epistles of St Paul is among the oldest books held in the Trinity College Cambridge Library.

Credit: the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge

DNA of the ancient virus was extracted from millennium old sheepskin Bible parchment, now in the collections of the University of Cambridge.

Credit: the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge.

Hidden DNA in medieval gospels reveal history of deadly livestock virus - University College Dublin

Sometimes history leaves two very different records on the same page. One was deliberately written in ink by medieval scribes, copying stories that religious authorities declared to be sacred truth. The other was written unintentionally in molecules: fragments of viral DNA preserved in the animal skin on which those stories were written.

Unlike the supernatural claims in the text, this second record does not depend on faith, revelation or ecclesiastical authority. It can be extracted, sequenced and compared with DNA recovered from other archaeological specimens and from viruses circulating today. Ironically, manuscripts intended to preserve the Christian message have also preserved independently verifiable evidence of evolution.

As reported in Science Advances, an international research team led by scientists at University College Dublin has now recovered DNA from sheeppox virus (Capripoxvirus sheeppox) in medieval parchment manuscripts, including the approximately 1,000-year-old York Gospels, the earlier Corpus Glossary and other codices from Britain and continental Europe. Because parchment was manufactured from the skins of sheep, goats and cattle, each sheet can retain a molecular record of the animal from which it came—including traces of pathogens infecting it when it died. In several manuscripts, viral DNA occurred on several pages, suggesting that the skins of infected animals had been used in their manufacture.

Refuting Creationism - How We Know The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People - Sex Determination In Geckos

Various Geckos

Source: Wikipedia

XY or ZW? Geckos Reveal Evolution's Hidden Playbook

The simplest way to test the claim that the Bible is the inerrant work of an omniscient creator is to compare its account with observable reality. When that is done, its creation stories reflect the limited biological knowledge of their human authors, not omniscience. Genesis 1:27 presents “male and female” as divinely ordained categories for humans, while the wider biblical narrative assumes the familiar arrangement of sexually reproducing males and females among animals; indeed in Genesis 6:19 the Bible unambiguously states all the animals on the Ark were male and female.

Real biology is much less tidy. Many animal species are simultaneous or sequential hermaphrodites; some lineages consist entirely of females and reproduce by parthenogenesis; and many organisms reproduce without sex at all. The biblical authors displayed only the knowledge expected of people living in an ancient pastoral society. An omniscient creator would have known better.

Nor are the mechanisms that determine sex fixed systems established in a single act of creation, with organisms thereafter reproducing only “after their kind”. They are themselves products of evolution. The new gecko study indicates that different lineages have switched repeatedly between genetic sex determination and environmental sex determination, in which conditions such as egg-incubation temperature influence the offspring’s sex. Even genetic sex determination has repeatedly been reinvented, with different ordinary chromosomes recruited independently to become X and Y or Z and W chromosomes. Instead of one immutable system imposed by a designer, geckos exhibit an evolutionary patchwork assembled and repeatedly modified over millions of years.

The familiar mammalian arrangement in which females are XX and males XY is sometimes treated as though it were the inevitable—and therefore designed—way of determining sex. But nature displays no such uniformity. Birds generally use a ZW system, in which females are ZW and males ZZ, while many reptiles dispense with specialised sex chromosomes altogether and allow environmental conditions, particularly incubation temperature, to influence whether an embryo develops as male or female.

Geckos exhibit all three arrangements, sometimes among relatively closely related species. This extraordinary diversity makes them a natural experiment in how sex-determination mechanisms originate, change and disappear during evolution.

In a new study published in *Science*, Yang Zhou and colleagues compared chromosome-level genomes from geckos representing all seven living families. Their reconstruction indicates that gecko lineages have switched between environmental and genetic sex determination at least 23 times. The researchers identified 22 distinct sex-chromosome systems and traced them to 17 different chromosomes in the ancestral gecko genome. Some of those ancestral chromosomes were recruited independently on several separate occasions.

Refuting Creationism - How Death Stalked South America In The Form Of Giant Crocodylians - Over 10 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

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Reconstruction of Purussarus neivensis attacking Pericotoxodon platignathus.

Image: Miguel Hernandez.

Giant crocodylians dominated the food chain in Miocene South America | University of Helsinki.

If the Young-Earth creationist claim that there was no death, suffering or predation before Eve’s supposed ‘sin’ were true, four fossil specimens preserved in museum collections in Colombia should not exist. They are the remains of large herbivorous mammals bearing punctures and other damage attributed to the teeth of a giant crocodylian—and they are between approximately 10.5 and 16 million years old.

In other words, these fossils are not merely the remains of animals that lived and died millions of years before there were humans to commit any biblical ‘sin’. They preserve physical evidence of animals attacking—or, at the very least, feeding upon—other animals in a functioning predator–prey ecosystem more than a thousand times older than the entire universe imagined by Young-Earth creationists.

The evidence is described by Oscar E. Wilson of the University of Helsinki and Jorge W. Moreno-Bernal in a paper recently published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. The researchers examined four specimens belonging to three species of large, now-extinct South American ungulates from the celebrated La Venta fossil assemblage of Colombia: the toxodontid Pericotoxodon platignathus and the astrapotheres Xenastrapotherium kraglievichi and Granastrapotherium snorki.

The skulls and jaws bear puncture marks and, in some cases, substantial deformation caused by a powerful bite. From the size and shape of the marks, together with the force apparently needed to produce the damage, Wilson and Moreno-Bernal identify the most likely culprit as Purussaurus neivensis, an enormous relative of modern caimans that may have reached about seven metres in length and weighed approximately 1,800 kilograms.

Middle Miocene South America contained an ecosystem unlike anything living today. The continent’s long geographical isolation had allowed native mammals—including toxodontids, astrapotheres, ground sloths and glyptodonts—to diversify independently. Around the immense tropical wetlands lived giant snakes, flightless predatory ‘terror birds’, terrestrial crocodyliforms and several kinds of aquatic crocodylian. Because large mammalian carnivores were comparatively scarce, reptiles such as Purussaurus occupied the major apex-predator niches.

Earlier studies had inferred this ecological role from the animals’ size, anatomy and the composition of the La Venta fauna. The newly reported bite marks provide direct physical evidence that giant crocodylians interacted with—and probably preyed upon—some of the ecosystem’s largest herbivorous mammals. Purussaurus may therefore have helped to regulate herbivore populations, much as large predators influence prey populations in modern ecosystems.

For creationists, the problem could hardly be clearer. These animals lived, competed, killed, fed, reproduced and became extinct millions of years before any known hominin existed, let alone the mythical couple blamed in Genesis for introducing death into the world. Even if an individual bite mark resulted from scavenging rather than an actual attack, that alternative still requires a dead animal, a flesh-eating crocodylian and an established ecological system based partly upon the consumption of carcasses. It offers no refuge for the claim that the pre-Fall world was free from death and carnivory.

How Do We Know The Bible Was Made Up By Ignorant People? Just Compare Its Claims to Reality!

Planetary nebula NGC 2392, also called the Lion Nebula, against the black background of space.(NIRCam + MIRI image)

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI.
Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI).

Lion Nebula (MIRI image)

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI.
Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI)

Lion Nebula roars to life for Webb | ESA/Webb

A point made many times but worth repeating so long as there re sill people who insist the Bible is the inerrant word of an omniscient god - and then demand the right to special privileges including the right to mandate us to comply with their Bronze Age morality, is that a simple comparison of the Bible's description of reality with the actual reality it purports to describe.

This should quickly reveal that what the Bible describes is not reality but the satisfying guesses of ignorant people who lacked the science and technology to discover the truth.

And there are few better examples of that than the childishly ridiculous description of the universe as the Bible claims it was created with what science is discovering. The Bible very clearly and unambiguously describes the universe as a small flat planet at the centre, over which there is a solid dome to keep the surrounding water out. The celestial bodies are described as lamps and small lights fixed to the dome so that we can tell day from night. Outside this construction there is nothing but water, apparently extending to infinity in all directions, but above which there is another realm reached by travelling upwards from the surface of the planet – centred then on the Middle East.

Of course, this bears no more relationship to reality than the sort of description a five-year-old might produce when asked to describe his or her world, and yet there are grown adults who believe it is the best available description of the real universe! And these people demand to be taken seriously because they believe that on 'faith', not on an examination of reality.

I'll again remind readers of what the Bible says because so few people who claim to be Bible-literalists actually ever seem to read the Bible, but instead rely on what preachers and creationist sources tell them to believe.

Creationism Refuted - The Neanderthal Genes We Inherited Are Still Making A Difference.

We carry the legacy of our ancestors interbreeding with Neanderthals

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)

Shana - the daughter of a Neanderthal father and a Homo sapiens mother
Cover illustration for my book The Way of the Wolf

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Neandertal growth hormone receptor increases muscle mass in people today | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Evolutionary history is often represented as a neatly branching tree: an ancestral population divides, its descendants diverge, and each resulting lineage continues along its own independent path. Real evolution, however, is frequently much less tidy.

As I explained in my previous post on the Hawaiian honeycreepers, lineages that have begun to diverge can subsequently meet again and exchange genes through hybridisation. The result is reticulated evolution: an evolutionary history that is partly tree-like but also contains connecting branches where genes have passed between related populations.

The same principle applies to our own ancestry.

Modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans were not separately created, genetically sealed “kinds”. They were closely related human lineages produced by population separation and divergence, but that separation was never absolute. When populations encountered one another again, they sometimes interbred, allowing genes from one evolutionary branch to enter another—a process known as introgression.

Much of the resulting Neanderthal-derived DNA carried by people today may have little or no detectable effect. Some introgressed variants, however, continue to influence human biology. An international team led by Philipp Kanis of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Hugo Zeberg of Karolinska Institutet has now investigated one particularly interesting example: the Neanderthal version of the growth-hormone receptor.

Their peer-reviewed paper in Current Biology examines two amino-acid substitutions in the receptor that were characteristic of Neanderthals. The growth-hormone receptor sits on the surface of cells and transmits the signal produced when growth hormone binds to it, helping to regulate the growth of bone, muscle and other tissues.

In laboratory-grown cells, the Neanderthal form of the receptor produced a stronger response to growth hormone than the common modern-human version. Under the experimental conditions used, cells carrying it grew by about 40 per cent more, with most of the increase attributable to one of the two Neanderthal-derived substitutions.

Refuting Creationism - The Complex Origins of Modern Humans - No Just A Single Couple - Not Even A Single Species

Interwoven Human ancestry

AI-Generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

New technique pinpoints human DNA inherited from ‘ghost’ ancestors - Berkeley News

Using genealogical relationships in DNA, UC Berkeley researchers have uncovered hidden contributions from extinct human populations that left no sequenced genomes.

Meaghan Marohn

The evolutionary ancestry of modern Homo sapiens is far more complex than anything the authors of the Bible’s absurdly simplistic origin myths could have imagined. We already know that populations of our species migrating out of Africa interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans, and that these two archaic lineages also exchanged genes with one another. Consequently, most people with ancestry outside Africa carry some Neanderthal DNA, while many Asian and especially Oceanian populations also carry Denisovan DNA.

Now, according to a paper just published in Science, our ancestry is even more complicated. A team led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and 54Gene, has identified genetic material inherited from two previously unknown archaic hominin lineages. These are described as “ghost” lineages because no sequenced genome from either population is available: their existence must be inferred from the traces they left in the genomes of living people.

The researchers developed a computational method called TRACE — TRacking Archaic Contributions via ARG Estimation — which reconstructs genealogical relationships among segments of DNA. By identifying regions whose ancestry extends unusually far back in time, TRACE can detect contributions from extinct populations without requiring DNA recovered from their bones.

Refuting Creationism - No 'Waters Of The Deep'!

Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscopy (STXM) with nanometer resolution of the selected inclusion.

Camarda, C., Gervasoni, F., Jalowitzki, T. et al (2026).

Schematic cross-section showing a cold subducted slab descending through the mantle transition zone into the deep mantle. The cold, very cold slab and hot geotherms are represented by dashed lines.

Camarda, C., Gervasoni, F., Jalowitzki, T. et al (2026).

Analysis of a super-deep diamond reveals how water travels to the Earth’s interior

Creationists have long been fond of two superficially impressive but scientifically worthless arguments. The first is that tiny amounts of carbon-14 detected when diamonds are placed in an accelerator mass spectrometer somehow show that diamonds—and therefore Earth—are only a few thousand years old. The second is that the discovery of “water” deep inside Earth confirms the biblical “fountains of the great deep” and, when convenient, explains where all the water from Noah’s supposed global flood subsequently disappeared.

A paper recently published in Scientific Reports brings these two favourite misconceptions together in a combination that may prove irresistible to professional misrepresenters of science. It therefore seems prudent to explain what the researchers actually found before the inevitable claims begin circulating.

Carolina Camarda and colleagues examined an irregular diamond, just 3 millimetres long, recovered from the Juína region of Brazil. Super-deep diamonds form at depths greater than about 300 kilometres, rather than at the approximately 150-kilometre depths typical of most diamonds, and can preserve microscopic inclusions of minerals that record conditions far below the surface.

Using synchrotron X-ray tomography, diffraction and spectroscopy, the team mapped more than 100 inclusions inside the diamond. One completely sealed inclusion, only about 35 micrometres across, contained a complex mixture of goethite—an iron oxyhydroxide with the formula FeOOH—together with hematite and magnetite. Another inclusion contained ferropericlase, a mineral characteristic of the deep mantle, supporting the conclusion that the diamond originated far below the crust.

The researchers propose that the goethite originally formed within hydrated oceanic crust or lithosphere. As that crust was carried downwards at a subduction zone, the goethite changed into a high-pressure form capable of surviving within a relatively cold descending slab. At still greater pressures and temperatures it began to decompose into iron oxides, releasing H₂O and oxygen into the surrounding mantle. The diamond then encapsulated part of this mineral assemblage, preserving evidence of the process.

In other words, the discovery concerns the slow transport of surface-derived water downwards through plate subduction. It is not evidence of a primordial subterranean ocean bursting upwards to flood Earth. Nor does it show where the water from an imaginary global flood went afterwards. The “water” carried by goethite is chemically incorporated into its crystal structure, principally as hydroxyl groups; it is not a liquid ocean occupying enormous caverns beneath the crust. It can be liberated as molecular water only when the mineral undergoes chemical reactions under extreme mantle conditions.

The study examined one microscopic inclusion and made no estimate of a hidden ocean, no calculation of the volume of floodwater that could be accommodated, and no suggestion that surface water could disappear hundreds of kilometres into the mantle within a few months. What it describes is part of Earth’s deep-water cycle, driven by plate tectonics and operating over geological time. Indeed, the direction of transport in the authors’ model is exactly the reverse of the “fountains of the great deep”: hydrated rocks are carried from the ocean floor into the mantle, where some of their bound water is eventually released.

Nor did the researchers carbon-date the diamond. The paper contains no radiocarbon measurement at all. Carbon-14 has a half-life of about 5,730 years, making radiocarbon dating useful for formerly living material up to roughly 50,000–55,000 years old under ordinary conditions. It cannot determine whether a diamond formed hundreds of millions or billions of years ago, and mantle carbon does not necessarily begin with the atmospheric carbon-14 ratio required for conventional radiocarbon dating.

How Snakes Lost Their Legs - 80 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

fossil of Tametara mirim

Agustin Martinelli

80-million-year-old snake fossil sheds light on why lizards lost their limbs and started slithering

Of all the primitive ‘just-so’ stories in Genesis, the tale of how the serpent was condemned to crawl on its belly must rank among the most transparently mythological. Having supposedly tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, God curses the serpent to go on its belly and ‘eat dust’ for the rest of its life. Although the story never explicitly says that the serpent previously had legs, the curse plainly implies a change and has traditionally been understood as an explanation for why snakes slither instead of walking.

Like so much of Genesis, it begins with an observation familiar to its authors—snakes have no legs—and invents a magical tale to explain it. It is an ancient example of an etiological myth: folklore devised to explain why something in the natural world appears as it does, long before anyone had the evidence or intellectual framework needed to understand its real history.

Even as mythology, however, the story is strangely incoherent. Genesis itself does not identify the serpent as Satan but introduces it as the most cunning of the wild animals God had made. Nevertheless, this supposedly ordinary animal can speak, reason and somehow knows about a prohibition that God had given to Adam before Eve had even been created. The text makes no attempt to explain how it acquired either this knowledge or the power of speech.

More awkward still for anyone insisting that the story is literally true, the serpent’s predictions prove substantially more accurate than God’s warning. God tells Adam that he will die on the day he eats the fruit. The serpent tells Eve that they will not die, that their eyes will be opened and that they will become like God, knowing good and evil. They eat the fruit, their eyes are opened and they do not die that day. God then confirms that the humans have indeed become ‘like one of us’ in knowing good and evil. According to Genesis itself, Adam goes on to live for another 930 years.

On the most straightforward reading of the story, therefore, the serpent tells Eve the truth while God’s threat to Adam proves false. Later theologians have attempted to rescue the tale by inventing a ‘spiritual death’, or by claiming that Adam merely began to die that day, but neither qualification appears in the text. These are apologetic repairs added by people who can see the problem but cannot admit that the story’s authors created it.

Science, meanwhile, has uncovered a very different account of how snakes acquired their extraordinary bodies—one involving neither talking reptiles nor fruit, curses or human disobedience, but descent with modification over immense periods of geological time. Snakes are highly modified members of the squamate reptile radiation. Their ancestors progressively elongated their bodies, increased the number of vertebrae and reduced their limbs as different lineages adapted to particular ways of life. Their evolutionary history extends back at least to the Middle Jurassic, about 160 million years ago.

Now, a paper published in Nature by an international team led by Tiago R. Simões describes an exceptionally well-preserved early snake from the Late Cretaceous of Brazil. Named Tametara mirim, the animal lived approximately 85–75 million years ago, when non-avian dinosaurs still dominated terrestrial ecosystems. It is the first articulated snake fossil known from Brazil and preserves a three-dimensional skull together with more than 100 connected vertebrae.

The preserved portion of its skeleton appears to have lacked forelimbs. Because the region around the pelvis is missing, the researchers cannot determine whether it retained vestigial hindlimbs, as some other early snakes did. Its skull also combines recognisably snake-like specialisations with ancestral features resembling those of other squamate reptiles—precisely the sort of mosaic of old and new characteristics expected in an evolving lineage, but not from the instantaneous transformation of an animal by a divine curse.

Refuting Creationism - The Unbroken History of China

Carving stone at Shimao city.

Image by IVPP.

The landscape of Shimao city.

Image by IVPP.

New DNA Study Unlocks Origins, Social Structure of Neolithic Shimao Civilization----Chinese Academy of Sciences

In my last blog post, I pointed out that ancient Egypt’s archaeological and written record extends continuously from long before the date young-Earth creationists assign to Noah’s Flood, through that supposed catastrophe and into biblical times. Nowhere is there any sign that Egypt was destroyed by a global flood and subsequently repopulated by migrants from Mesopotamia. I also showed that the biblical writers who set stories in Egypt possessed only a tenuous understanding of its real history and culture.

Ancient China presents creationists with much the same problem. Its archaeological record contains long regional sequences extending across the supposed date of the Flood, with local populations, cultures and economies continuing to develop. If every human outside Noah’s immediate family had been exterminated, the existing peoples of East Asia should disappear from the record and be replaced by a rapidly expanding population of recent Mesopotamian origin. That is not what archaeology shows—and ancient DNA now provides an especially clear test of the claim.

The evidence comes from a paper published in Nature in November 2025 by an international team led by Professor Qiaomei Fu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with researchers from several other Chinese institutions.

The team analysed genome-wide data from 169 ancient individuals recovered from Shimao and surrounding settlements in northern China. Population analyses were conducted using 144 unrelated individuals, while the remaining close relatives enabled the researchers to reconstruct pedigrees extending across as many as four generations.

Shimao, in northern Shaanxi Province, was one of the largest fortified settlements in Late Neolithic China. Occupied from approximately 2300 to 1800 BCE, it covered about four square kilometres and contained massive stone walls, separate inner and outer enclosures, specialised craft production, elite cemeteries and unmistakable evidence of a highly stratified society. Its occupation therefore began at about the very time when, according to the conventional young-Earth creationist chronology, the world should have been struggling to recover from a global extermination and repopulation by Noah’s immediate descendants.

Instead, the genomes showed that the people associated with Shimao were predominantly descended from populations already living in northern Shaanxi at least 1,000 years earlier. Those earlier inhabitants were associated with the Yangshao cultural tradition of the Yellow River’s Loess Plateau. The researchers found regional genetic continuity from the Middle to the Late Neolithic—continuity extending from before the supposed Flood into the centuries following it.

This was not a completely isolated or genetically static population. The researchers detected continuing contact with Yumin-related people from Inner Mongolia, close connections with the contemporary Taosi population farther south, and some ancestry from southern East Asian populations, possibly associated with the northward spread of rice cultivation. These were the ordinary movements, exchanges and intermarriages expected among neighbouring prehistoric farming and pastoral communities. They did not interrupt the dominant local ancestry, and there was no sign of wholesale population replacement by descendants of a family recently arrived from Mesopotamia.

The genetic evidence also revealed much about the organisation of Shimao society. Pedigrees reconstructed from elite burials indicated a predominantly patrilineal system in which status and wealth commonly passed from high-ranking men to their sons. Male members of these lineages showed relatively little diversity in their Y-chromosome ancestry, whereas the women displayed much greater mitochondrial diversity. This is consistent with women frequently marrying into communities dominated by established male lineages, although the evidence for strictly patrilocal residence remains suggestive rather than conclusive.

The study also uncovered a possible sex-related pattern in Shimao’s practice of human sacrifice. Nine of the ten sampled victims buried beneath the East Gate were male, contradicting earlier identifications based on skeletal anatomy. In contrast, most sampled sacrificial victims accompanying elite burials were female: six of seven at Hanjiagedan and fourteen of nineteen at Huangchengtai. This suggests that male and female victims may have been selected for different rituals conducted in different places, although the researchers caution that the number of genetically sexed victims remains too small to establish the pattern conclusively.

Creationism Refuted - The Unbroken History Of Egypt

Egyptian Middle Kingdom princesses at archery practice

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Warrior princesses of ancient Egypt? Skeletons show women used the weapons buried with them

The writers and editors who composed the Pentateuch clearly possessed some knowledge of Egypt. It was, after all, a powerful neighbouring civilisation with which the peoples of the Levant had interacted for centuries. But a sprinkling of Egyptian names, loanwords and geographical details does not turn a theological story into an accurate historical account. When the biblical narratives are compared with Egyptian records, chronology and archaeology, Egypt often appears less as a real country than as an exotic stage on which the authors could set their morality tales.

The biblical use of the word ‘Pharaoh’ illustrates the problem, although not for the reason sometimes claimed. ‘Pharaoh’ is not a Hebrew expression meaning ‘owner of an estate’. The Hebrew par‘ō was borrowed from the ancient Egyptian pr-ꜥꜣ, meaning ‘Great House’. It originally referred to the royal palace and only during the New Kingdom came to be used for the king himself. Its use as the personal designation of a ruler in Genesis, whose supposed events are conventionally placed centuries earlier, is therefore probably anachronistic.

More revealingly, the biblical authors never identify the rulers in the Joseph or Exodus stories by any of their regnal names. Egyptian kings possessed elaborate formal titles and names, yet the Bible gives us only an anonymous ‘Pharaoh’. This makes it impossible to place either story securely within Egyptian chronology and contrasts sharply with the detailed records left by the Egyptians themselves.

There is likewise no independent evidence for an Exodus on anything resembling the scale described in the Bible. No Egyptian record mentions ten devastating plagues, the death of the firstborn, the destruction of a substantial chariot force or the sudden flight of an enormous enslaved population. Egyptian royal inscriptions were selective and rarely advertised defeats, so their silence alone would not be conclusive. However, there is also no corresponding demographic, economic or archaeological disruption in Egypt, and no material trace in Sinai of the immense population demanded by a strictly literal reading of the story.

The narrative also contains striking internal difficulties. Exodus 9 describes a pestilence affecting the Egyptian livestock in the fields—including horses—and then declares that ‘all the livestock of the Egyptians died’. Yet the same chapter subsequently refers to more Egyptian livestock, while Exodus 14 has Pharaoh assembling 600 chosen chariots, together with his other chariots, all of which would have required teams of surviving horses. Apologists can invent unmentioned groups of sheltered or unaffected animals, but that is an attempt to repair the story, not a literal reading of what it says.

Nor is the geography as straightforward as the familiar Sunday-school version suggests. The Hebrew Yam Suph, traditionally translated as the Red Sea, more probably means the ‘Sea of Reeds’, and its intended location remains uncertain. Moreover, at the dates commonly proposed for an Exodus, Egypt maintained forts, roads and mining operations in Sinai and exercised imperial control over much of Canaan. Even after leaving Egypt proper, the Israelites would not necessarily have escaped Egyptian power.

Exodus 12:37 gives a figure of about 600,000 adult men, besides women and children. Read literally, that implies a total population of perhaps two or three million people, together with their animals. It is absurd to imagine such a population living and travelling in Sinai for 40 years without leaving campsites, hearths, tools, pottery, animal bones, human burials or any other archaeological footprint remotely commensurate with its supposed size.

An even greater problem for biblical literalists is the continuous archaeological record of Egypt itself. Young-Earth creationist chronologies commonly place their global Flood somewhere around the middle of the third millennium BCE, by which time Egypt had already been a unified state for centuries and the great pyramids of the Old Kingdom had been built. Egyptian society certainly underwent political and economic changes, but there is no point at which its entire population disappears and is replaced by descendants of eight survivors from Mesopotamia.

Nor is there a synchronous horizon of catastrophic erosion, inundation, mass death and repopulation throughout Egypt—or anywhere else—that could represent a global Flood. Instead, archaeologists find settlements, tombs, temples, administrative records and evolving cultural traditions extending through and beyond the period in which the Flood supposedly occurred. It is a vast body of mutually consistent evidence that simply could not exist in its present form if the biblical story were literal history.

Refuting Creationism - Death More Than 66 Million Years Before Mythical 'Sin'

A Tyrannosaur stalking an edmontosaurus

AI-Generated Image (ChatGPT 5.5 Thinking)

"The Bite"

Paleoartist Jenn Hall.

Rare fossil at Montana State’s Museum of the Rockies records Tyrannosaurus attack

A paper published on 17 February 2026 in PeerJ by Taia C.A. Wyenberg-Henzler of la of Montana State University, USA, reports on a remarkable fossil from the Hell Creek Formation of eastern Montana: a nearly complete, articulated skull of an adult Edmontosaurus annectens with the broken tip of a tyrannosaur tooth still embedded in its left nasal bone.

The fossil dates from the closing stages of the Late Cretaceous, roughly 66 million years ago, shortly before Edmontosaurus, Tyrannosaurus and all other non-avian dinosaurs disappeared during the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction. The bone surrounding the embedded tooth shows no evidence of healing or remodelling, indicating that the bite occurred at, very near or shortly after the death of the Edmontosaurus.

In other words, this is physical evidence of a violent interaction between predator and prey tens of millions of years before humans existed—precisely the sort of evidence that creationists are conditioned to reject because it cannot be accommodated within their mythology. According to young-Earth creationism, there was supposedly no death, predation or suffering before human ‘sin’ allowed evil to enter the world and ruin their omnipotent creator’s previously perfect creation—apparently without that omnipotent creator either foreseeing or preventing it. And all this supposedly happened only 6,000–10,000 years ago, shortly after ‘Creation Week’.

The doctrine that no animal died before ‘the Fall’ is not stated explicitly anywhere in the Bible. It is a theological inference imposed upon the text because young-Earth creationism requires it. It belongs to the category of reasoning that says: ‘This must be true for the rest of my beliefs to be true; my beliefs cannot be wrong; therefore, this must also be true.’

Having granted themselves this assumption of infallibility, creationists must then protect it from every fact that contradicts it. The belief cannot be mistaken, so the evidence must somehow be misunderstood, fraudulent, planted by Satan, created with the appearance of age or otherwise unworthy of consideration. Anything, in fact, is preferable to the intellectually honest admission that the belief itself has been falsified.

In almost every other field of human endeavour, such a supremely arrogant claim to personal infallibility would be laughed at and its proponent told to grow up. Yet, when packaged as religious faith, it is not merely tolerated but frequently treated with respect. Its advocates demand—and often receive—special privileges and social status: ‘You must listen to me, allow me to make laws governing your life and let me shape society according to my beliefs because I have an invisible friend and wear special robes.’

And so creationism staggers on, obliged to deny a veritable deluge of scientific evidence rather than concede that its mythology bears no resemblance to the history of life on Earth.

We Can Tell The Bible Was Written By Ignorant People - Not Just By What's In It, But By What Isn't

Araucaria forest at sunrise.

Photo by Douglas Scortegagna (CC BY-SA 3.0, from Wikimedia Commons)

Araucaria augustifolia (Brazilian pine)

Brazil’s highland forest has been shaped by climate change and Indigenous people for 6,000 years

One of the clearest indications that the Bible was written by people with a severely limited knowledge of the world is, in addition to the factual errors in it, such as Earth being flat with a dome over it, there is the evidence of what is not in it. Its authors wrote as though the small part of the ancient Near East familiar to them was effectively the whole inhabited Earth, so there is nothing in the Bible from outside a small area around the Middle East. They had no conception of a southern hemisphere, knew nothing of continents such as South America, and had no awareness of the peoples, cultures and complex histories that had existed there for thousands of years.

That parochial view of the world is exposed every time archaeologists and palaeoecologists reconstruct the history of regions the Bible’s authors did not even know existed. Far from being a divinely inspired account of the whole planet, the Bible reflects the geographical horizons and cultural assumptions of the scientifically illiterate people who composed it.

The latest example comes from the cold highlands of southern Brazil, where an international team of researchers has reconstructed how climate, fire and Indigenous land management shaped the distinctive mosaic of Araucaria forest and campos grassland during the past 6,000 years. The research is described by Oliver J. Wilson, a lecturer in the School of Natural Sciences at the University of Lincoln, in an article in The Conversation and was published in Scientific Reports.

The researchers combined several independent sources of evidence: pollen and microscopic charcoal preserved in continuously accumulating bog sediments, radiocarbon-dated archaeological evidence, a rainfall record preserved in a cave speleothem, and ecological models showing how the forest should have responded to climatic change. Together, these sources reveal a detailed history of gradual climatic shifts, changing fire regimes, forest expansion and human modification of the landscape.

Refuting Creationism - Humans And Wolves Share A Long Evolutionary History

View from the Stora Förvar cave on Stora Karlsö. The cave was explored between 1888 and 1893. The limestone-rich bedrock has contributed to the skeletal material found there being very well preserved.

Photo: Jan Storå

Ancient wolves on remote Baltic Sea island reveal link to prehistoric humans - Stockholms universitet

A point I have made several times in these blog posts, and one that creationists typically prefer not to address, is that the Bible presents living things as part of a world made for human use and dominion. Yet the history of animal and plant domestication tells a very different story. The domesticated forms often bear little resemblance to their wild ancestors, not because they were created perfectly fitted for human needs, but because humans altered them by selective breeding over many generations.

For an honest creationist, the question should be obvious: why did an allegedly omniscient creator god fail to anticipate human needs and create animals and plants already ideally suited to them? Why did humans need to do the improving? But, as so often, creationists appear to prefer belief in an incompetent designer to the simpler conclusion that their creation myth is wrong.

No domestic animal illustrates this better than the dog. Domestic dogs are descended from wolves, yet the vast range of dog forms, behaviours and abilities shows what prolonged selection, human preference and cultural need can do. Herding dogs, guard dogs, hunting dogs, sled dogs, lapdogs and companion animals are not the result of a single act of perfect creation; they are the result of human-managed evolution.

Now, new research by scientists from the Francis Crick Institute, Stockholm University, the University of Aberdeen and the University of East Anglia, published online in November 2025 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), shows that human relationships with wolves were more varied and complex than a simple tale of fear, hunting or eventual dog domestication. The researchers report wolf remains from the isolated Baltic island of Stora Karlsö, in a context strongly suggesting that prehistoric people were managing, feeding or otherwise controlling wolves thousands of years ago.

This research resonates with me because two of my books, The Girl and the Wolf and The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic, are fictional accounts of how wolf domestication might have begun. In those stories, the process is initiated by a single act of compassion: a woman raises an abandoned wolf cub alongside her own child. That act becomes a legend, and the legend later inspires another tribe to form a relationship with wolves, helping them to survive hardship and setting humanity on a path that would eventually produce the many varieties of domestic dog, each shaped for different human purposes.

The stories are also framed to illustrate the hardships of Ice Age life for our ancestors, and the same social forces that still shape human societies: conservatism versus progress, suspicion of novelty, and the struggle to be different in a culture that demands conformity. In both stories, teenage girls must negotiate those pressures and, in doing so, help change the future.

How We Know The Bible Was Made Up By Ignorant People - Just Look At The Facts

Potm2605a (NGC 4501)

ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker and the MAUVE-HST Team

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.(Gen 1: 6-10)

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth. (Gen 1: 16-17)

Journey to the centre of a galaxy cluster | ESA/Hubble

This analogy needs careful handling because creationists are adept at ignoring the point of an argument and attacking a caricature of it instead. So, to be clear from the outset, this is not a claim about what the Bible says. It is a simple thought experiment about how we test claims against reality.

Suppose someone wrote a book in which he claimed to give an accurate description of the Bible. In it, he said the Bible consisted of only four books, two in the Old Testament and two in the New Testament; that it had only 120 pages; and that the entire story was about Adam and Eve and their sons, Noah and Moses.

How would we test those claims?

The answer is hardly complicated. We would get a Bible and compare the claims with the book itself. In other words, we would test the description against the reality it claimed to describe. And once we had done so, only two serious conclusions would be available: either the author was deliberately lying in order to deceive his readers, or he was so ignorant of the facts that he simply invented them. What we could not sensibly conclude is that the Bible was wrong for failing to match his description of it.

That, in its simplest form, is how science works. A claim is tested against reality. We begin with the assumption — the null hypothesis — that there is no meaningful difference between the claim and the facts. We then look. If the evidence shows a real difference between the claim and the observable facts, the claim has failed the test. It is not reality that must be adjusted to rescue the claim; it is the claim that must be rejected or revised.

This may sound like a “Janet and John” explanation of basic science, but it is remarkable how consistently creationists get even this wrong. They have a book which, when read literally, makes claims about the age, origin and structure of the universe. With modern science, it is a straightforward matter to compare those claims with the real universe. When we do that, we find that the description and the reality are not merely different, but radically, irreconcilably different.

Yet instead of concluding that the ancient description is wrong, creationists conclude that the evidence must be wrong. The facts are not judged against reality; reality is judged against the prior demand that the Bible must be right. This is not science. It is wishful thinking dressed up as certainty.

In effect, creationists believe their beliefs trump the evidence.

So what claims does the Bible make about the age and structure of the universe, and how do those claims compare with observable reality?

To be fair, the Bible gives no explicit numerical age for the universe. The familiar young-Earth figure of about 6,000 years comes from calculations based on biblical genealogies, most famously by the 17th-century Archbishop James Ussher, who placed creation in 4004 BCE. Modern young-Earth creationists often stretch this to somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 years, not because evidence requires it, but because the older figure is now too obviously absurd to defend with a straight face.

The Bible is more explicit, however, about the structure of the universe as understood by its ancient authors. It describes a world in which the Earth lies beneath a firmament, or dome, which separates the waters below from the waters above. The sun, moon and stars are described as lights set in this firmament to illuminate the Earth. Elsewhere, the stars are treated not as distant suns and galaxies, but as objects that can fall from heaven and be trampled underfoot. This is the cosmology of a small, human-centred world, not the universe revealed by astronomy. (Genesis 1:6-10; Genesis 1:16-17; Daniel 8:10)

So how does that ancient description compare with what we find when we actually look? Take, for example, this tiny fragment of the sky visible to the Hubble Space Telescope:

How we Know The Bible Is Wrong - Evidence That wouldn't Be there if The Bible Myths Were True

Examples of different treatments and states of preservation of human remains at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby.

Furholt M, et al (2026).

Drone footage of the excavation site.

© Nils Müller-Scheeßel

Headless skeletons offer new insights into farming societies 7,000 years ago

A problem for biblical literalist creationists is that they are wedded to the absurd and demonstrably false notion that the Bible is a literal account of real history, including a catastrophic, genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago. Such a flood would have left a tell-tale, globally recognisable layer of flood sediment containing the jumbled remains of the animals and plants it had killed. It would also have destroyed, displaced or buried earlier human settlements beneath one unmistakable flood horizon.

This, of course, flies in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary. The predicted global layer of flood silt is not there, and the archaeological record continues, uninterrupted, through the very period in which creationists need their flood to have occurred. Practically every archaeological find older than the various creationist dates for Noah's Flood — from the pyramids at Giza to the less spectacular but more numerous Neolithic and Bronze Age burial grounds, field systems, settlements, tools and artefacts that litter the African and Eurasian landscape — should not be where it is, least of all in the Middle East, the supposed epicentre of the alleged catastrophe.

And yet archaeologists are regularly digging up evidence of human activity that long predates the creationist timescale. A recent example is the grim, 7,000-year-old evidence of headless human bodies at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby in Slovakia, reported in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. The refutation of creationist mythology is, of course, entirely incidental. The archaeological question is what this extraordinary find tells us about an Early Neolithic farming society. The indications so far are that the heads were not removed by violent decapitation as a form of execution — which might have suggested a society in crisis or conflict — but were skilfully removed around the time of death. That points instead to some form of social, ritual or funerary practice, although the precise meaning of that practice remains uncertain.

The site at Vráble-Veľké Lehemby comprises more than 300 house outlines arranged in three neighbourhoods, with up to 80 buildings inhabited at the same time. The settlement existed for several centuries, approximately between 5250 and 4950 BCE. One neighbourhood was enclosed by a ditch, probably marking a boundary, and it was in or around this ditch, especially near the entrance to the settlement, that archaeologists found the remains of at least 78 individuals. Of these, 77 lacked heads, the single exception being a child whose skull was still present.

Refuting Creationism - Wild Cattle Roamed The Grasslands Of Europe - 4 million Years Before Creation Week

Half-ton early Bovines roamed 4-million-year-old grasslands in Europe | EurekAlert!

Palaeoartistic reconstruction of the environment in the surrounding of Camp dels Ninots maar lake during the early Pliocene.

Artwork by Mauricio Antón.

Nowhere in the Bible will you find any mention of wild cattle roaming the land, nor any indication that domestic animals are highly modified descendants of wild species, reshaped by human selection because their wild ancestors were not conveniently suited to human use. Instead, we find the childish claim that all animals were created for the exclusive benefit of humankind — which raises the obvious question: did the creator not know what humans would later need, or did it simply get things wrong, leaving humans to correct the design by selective breeding?

This is easily explained once we recognise that the authors of Genesis had a narrow, parochial view of the world. They knew little or nothing of Earth’s history or of the origins of life on it, so they made up stories that conformed to their own cultural assumptions and superstitions, often borrowing from neighbouring cultures.

They were completely unaware of the rest of Eurasia beyond their limited view from the Canaanite hills, and equally unaware of the great age of the Earth or the cycles of glacial and interglacial periods that had characterised it for the previous several million years. Indeed, the concept of such deep time seems to have been far beyond their comprehension. They could therefore have had no concept of the early forms of cattle-like bovines that once roamed Europe, already fitted by evolution for life in the changing environments of the Pliocene.

One such animal was a large bovine species, weighing up to about half a ton, which lived in what is now north-eastern Iberia about 4.41 million years ago. The discovery and re-analysis of this animal has just been published in PLOS One by Leonardo Sorbelli of the Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Science, Germany, and colleagues.

The fossils, from the Camp dels Ninots site in Catalonia, include remains from at least 14 individuals, among them eight nearly complete and partly articulated skeletons. The species, Parabos tigneresi, helps fill a gap in the evolutionary history of Eurasian bovines, including the wider lineage that eventually gave rise to modern cattle, bison and buffalo. Although smaller than many living domestic cattle, these animals were larger than comparable bovids of their time, suggesting an early stage in the increase in body size that later became characteristic of the bovine lineage.

The researchers suggest that this increase in size may have been associated with the climatic and environmental changes that characterised Pliocene Europe. The anatomy of Parabos tigneresi also indicates an animal adapted mainly to humid, vegetation-rich environments, consistent with the reconstructed setting of Camp dels Ninots as a water-rich maar lake ecosystem.

This incidental confirmation of an earlier reconstruction of the lake ecosystem at Camp dels Ninots is a good example of how independent strands of evidence converge on the same conclusion. It also illustrates the strength of Darwinian evolutionary theory: organisms are expected to show adaptations to the environments in which they lived, rather than appearing as arbitrary, ready-made forms. In this case, the anatomy of these bovids is consistent with animals adapted to a humid, vegetation-rich lakeside habitat, exactly as the geological and palaeoecological evidence had already indicated.