Refuting Creationism - Refining The Details - How Did The Common Ancestor of Hominins And Chimps Climb Trees?

Speculative depiction of the last common ancestor of hominins and chimpanzees

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Researchers observed and confirmed with measurements that wild sooty mangabey monkeys in an Ivory Coast forest display foot bone flexibility that facilitates vertical climbing up skinny tree trunks to hide, forage or sleep.

Photo: W. Scott McGraw.

Last common ancestor, no matter its feet, could have been a vertical climber

One of the standard creationist tactics is to portray disagreement between scientists as evidence that the science itself is unreliable. Yet disagreement over the details of an evolutionary history is not disagreement over whether evolution occurred. On the contrary, it is often the means by which science advances: competing explanations are identified, their testable implications are examined, and evidence is gathered to determine which assumptions remain tenable.

A long-running example concerns the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, whose descendant lineages diverged some six to seven million years ago. Palaeoanthropologists agree that such an ancestor existed; the disagreement concerns what it looked like and how it moved. In particular, was its foot more like that of a modern African ape, with an ankle capable of substantial upward flexion during vertical climbing, or more like that of a monkey adapted principally to moving along branches?

That question matters because the evolution of habitual bipedalism cannot be understood without reconstructing the locomotion from which it developed. Fossilised foot and ankle bones preserve anatomical structure but not behaviour, so palaeoanthropologists must infer what their owners could do by comparing them with living primates. One influential assumption was that a primate needed a chimpanzee-like ankle to climb vertical tree trunks proficiently. A fossil with a more monkey-like foot might therefore be interpreted as evidence against frequent vertical climbing.

Luke D. Fannin, Carmen Pape and W. Scott McGraw have now tested that assumption with evidence from living animals. For their study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they recorded wild sooty mangabeys, Cercocebus atys, climbing trees in Côte d’Ivoire’s Taï Forest and measured the movements of their feet. Mangabeys lack the highly flexible ankle of a chimpanzee, yet they achieved an average of about 46 degrees of upward flexion through the middle of the foot—virtually the same range that chimpanzees achieve at the ankle.

In other words, two differently constructed feet can solve the same biomechanical problem in different ways. Chimpanzees flex chiefly at the ankle; mangabeys obtain comparable movement from the midfoot. This is a striking example of convergent evolution: similar selection pressures have produced functionally equivalent performances by modifying different parts of an inherited anatomical system.

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

Interwoven Human ancestry

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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.

Creationism Refuted - Common Origin Of Human And Other Ape Laughter.

Apes & humans have been sharing a laugh for 15 million years

A stunning example of how science incidentally refutes creationism has just been published in Communications Biology by researchers at the University of Warwick, UK. This is not merely another example of biologists continuing, despite creationist predictions, not to abandon “Darwinism” in favour of creationist magical thinking — the event that creationists have been confidently expecting any day now for more than half a century. It is also a discovery for which evolution provides the obvious and coherent explanation.

Nor is this one easily dismissed by creationists as the result of “The Fall”, Satanic interference, or any of the other routine excuses used when nature refuses to look intelligently designed. Resorting to “common design” merely makes their putative designer god look as though it deliberately created evidence, which is exactly what the Theory of Evolution predicts, apparently in order to mislead us. As Francis Collins pointed out in The Language of God, this image of God as a cosmic trickster is the ultimate admission of defeat for creationists, and shows Young Earth Creationism to be both theologically and scientifically bankrupt.

The shocking thing is how few Christians ever take their co-religionists to task on social media for being prepared to portray their god in this way, rather than having the moral and intellectual integrity to admit that they are wrong. Even their own god is sacrificed on the altar of their implacable vanity.

So, what is this finding by the University of Warwick group?

Quite simply, it is evidence that humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans share a similar rhythmic pattern in laughter, suggesting that this feature was already present in the last common ancestor of all living great apes, including humans, about 15 million years ago. The finding also offers clues to the evolution of human speech.

The researchers analysed laughter recordings from four orangutans, two gorillas, three bonobos, four chimpanzees and four human children. Across 140 laughter bouts, they found the same basic pattern: all species produced laughter with evenly spaced rhythmic intervals between successive sounds. In other words, great ape laughter is not random noise, but has a conserved rhythmic structure.

However, while this basic rhythm has remained remarkably conserved, human laughter has become faster, more variable and more sensitive to social context. Humans are the only great apes in the study shown to vary the timing of laughter according to context — for example, the difference between involuntary laughter when tickled, polite laughter in a social setting, nervous laughter after a mistake, or infectious laughter in a group. This suggests that the increasing ability to control the timing and rhythm of vocalisations may have contributed to the evolution of speech.

A useful way to frame this is that no single feature “proves” common ancestry on its own. The strength of the evidence lies in the way many independent features — anatomy, genetics, development, physiology and behaviour — all point to the same branching pattern of descent.

Creationism Refuted - Our Ancestors Lived In North America - 56 Million Years Ago

Life reconstruction of Teilhardina

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Our primate ancestors evolved in the cold – not the tropics

At times, it seems almost cruel to keep reminding creationists that another day, another week and another month have passed, and still there is no hint that biomedical scientists are about to abandon evidence-based evolutionary biology and adopt magic-based creationism as a better explanation of the facts. And yet here we are again: another paper, another article, and another example of evolution providing the rational framework for interpreting the evidence.

And, to rub salt into creationist wounds, the evidence deals with events around 56 million years before creationists’ mythical “Creation Week”. As though to refute yet another creationist myth — that scientists are only allowed to publish papers that confirm mainstream scientific orthodoxy — the findings, published by Jorge Avaria-Llautureo of the University of Reading and colleagues in the mainstream journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), challenge the long-standing assumption that the primate lineage originated in warm tropical forests.

The study maps the likely geographic origins of our primate ancestors and reconstructs the historical climate at those locations. Its conclusion is surprising: early primates appear to have lived, dispersed and diversified through cold, arid and temperate regions, not primarily in the tropics. Their later colonisation of tropical regions took several million years and seems to have been driven more by local changes between dry and wet climates than by global warming itself.

One useful example is the tiny early primate Teilhardina, a small, tree-dwelling mammal known from fossils around 56 million years old — roughly 10 million years after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. Fossil evidence suggests that Teilhardina had nails rather than claws, helping it grasp branches and handle food, a characteristic associated with primates. Species of this early primate group appear in the fossil record of North America and then dispersed rapidly across what are now Europe and China.

An article explaining the finding and its significance for understanding our evolutionary origins was published in The Conversation by Jason Gilchrist, a lecturer in the School of Applied Sciences at Edinburgh Napier University. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - Evolving Millipedes Crawl All Over Creationism

Hirudicryptus canariensis

Photo by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek, Virginia Tech

Hirudicryptus canariensis (left) Siphoniulus neotropicus (microscopic image at right) are the two rare millipedes whose DNA helped researchers complete the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders.

Photos by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek for Virginia Tech.

Ancient millipedes still had secrets to tell | EurekAlert!

A paper published today (12 June 2026) in Current Biology is almost guaranteed to upset any creationists with the courage to read it and the ability to understand it. Written by an international team led by Associate Professor Paul Marek and Dr Luisa F. Vasquez-Valverde of Virginia Tech, it reports the completion of the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders, including two rare groups whose DNA had never previously been included in a phylogenetic analysis.

Millipedes were amongst the earliest animals to colonise the land, arriving long before vertebrates had made the transition from water to land. According to the researchers, they beat vertebrates onto land by more than 80 million years. As detritivores, they helped to establish early terrestrial ecosystems by breaking down decaying organic matter and recycling nutrients, gradually helping to create soils in which later plant communities could develop.

For more than a century, biologists have known that two rare groups of millipedes — Siphoniulida and Siphonocryptida — existed, but without fresh specimens it was impossible to analyse their DNA and confirm where they belonged in the millipede family tree. One of the groups includes species barely a centimetre long that spend their entire lives underground; the other is known from only a few locations.

Members of the team therefore travelled to Los Tuxtlas, Mexico, and the Spanish Canary Islands to collect Siphoniulus neotropicus and Hirudicryptus canariensis, the two millipedes whose DNA had not previously been included in an evolutionary analysis. By sequencing DNA from these groups, comparing hundreds of genes across 82 millipede species, and combining those results with evidence from 29 fossils, the researchers were able to determine where the groups fit into millipede history and when their lineages emerged.

The result was especially interesting because one of the supposed “orders”, Siphonocryptida, appears not to be a separate order after all, but part of an existing lineage. The other, Siphoniulida, could finally be placed among its closest relatives on the millipede evolutionary timeline. The analysis also pushed the likely origin of millipedes back to nearly 460 million years ago — roughly 35 million years earlier than the oldest known millipede fossils.

This is bad news for creationists for at least three reasons:

• It shows these arthropods had their origin hundreds of millions of years before their mythical “Creation Week”.
• It shows a long history of descent from a common origin, just as the Theory of Evolution predicts.
• It shows the researchers were entirely dependent on evolutionary theory to frame the question, predict relationships, interpret the DNA and fossil evidence, and explain the results — with no hint that they found evolution inadequate and no need to invoke magic, special creation, or the long-promised “collapse of Darwinism” that creationists have been assuring their followers is imminent, and has been for more than half a century.

Creationism Refuted - Crabby Creationists Scuttle Off

Some of the true crab species included in the study.

Clockwise from top left: Two photographs of Tuerkayana hirtipes; Cardisoma carnifex (by Tsubasa Inoue); and Ocypode sinensis (by Junya Taniguchi)

European shore crab, Carcinus maenas

By © Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Study suggests crabs’ iconic sideways walk evolved from common ancestor | For the press | eLife

Unlike real intelligent design, evolution has no plan, no foresight and no ability to review progress and start again. It is a non-sentient, reactive process, constrained by what already exists, and able to respond to changing conditions only by favouring advantageous variations in the inherited material available to it. The result is that future generations always carry traces of earlier generations — not merely for a few years, but for millions of years.

This simple consequence of descent with modification explains why living organisms can be grouped into clades, and why the descendants of earlier taxa remain members of those taxa. These nested hierarchies are themselves confirmation of the Theory of Evolution because they are exactly what the theory predicts. Conversely, they are evidence against intelligent design, which, if it were real, should show no such inherited constraint, but rather repeated innovation, clean design solutions and optimal responses to environmental change.

For a good example, look no further than the familiar sideways scuttle of a shore crab (Carcinus maenas). This distinctive form of locomotion is characteristic of true crabs, although not universal among them, and a research team led by Associate Professor Yuuki Kawabata of the Graduate School of Integrated Science and Technology, Nagasaki University, Japan, has shown that it probably arose once, in a common ancestor, around 200 million years ago. Their findings have just been published as a Reviewed Preprint in eLife.

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

Neanderthal family

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

Why did the Neanderthals disappear? - UdeMnouvelles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - How Complex Organs Evolve

Using the placenta to understand how complex organs evolve

Recently, a new creationist member of a Facebook group resorted to the familiar tactic of presenting the placenta as a complex organ that could not possibly have evolved. As so often with creationist arguments, this was little more than an argument from personal incredulity dressed up as a challenge. In place of scientific evidence, he relied on a god-of-the-gaps argument and a false dichotomy, implying that if he could not imagine a natural explanation, the only alternative must be magic performed by his preferred deity.

The new member appears to have left the group soon after replies began to appear in the comments, complete with links to articles and papers explaining exactly how the problem can be approached scientifically.

This paper in Nature by Oliver W. Griffith and Günter P. Wagner of Yale University provides precisely the sort of answer that exposes the weakness of this common creationist tactic on social media. Their argument amounts to little more than: “I do not know how this could have evolved, therefore God did it.” That is not an explanation; it is simply ignorance masquerading as evidence, and tells us more of the parochial ignorance of the creationist than they probably intended. The paper uses the evolution of the placenta to explain some basic principles of how complex organs evolved. Needless to say, no magic is involved anywhere in the process.

One of the authors, Oliver W. Griffith, has also written an article in The Conversation explaining their research and what it tells us about the evolution of complex organs in vertebrates. His article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

First, a short explanation of the role of the placental in placental mammals:

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

Tritylodon in its natural setting

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Mystery solved: when mammals’ ancestors became warm-blooded

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

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

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

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

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

First, information about the Karoo fossils:

Refuting Creationism - Ancestral Mammals Laid Eggs - Over 200 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Impression of Lystrosaurus in natural setting

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Lystrosaurus embryo within its partially preserved shell, reconstruction of the animal

Pictures - Professor Julien Benoit Drawing - Sophie Vrard.

Embryo fossil found in South Africa is world’s oldest proof that mammal ancestors laid eggs

It is well established in evolutionary biology that mammals arose from within the synapsid lineage, the ancient group that includes the therapsids - stem-mammals that long predate true mammals. What had remained uncertain, however, was whether those early synapsids still reproduced by laying eggs, as modern monotremes such as the platypus and echidnas do, or whether live birth had evolved much earlier in the mammalian line.

That gap in our knowledge has now been narrowed dramatically and, no doubt to the acute discomfort of creationists, the evidence shows that about 250 million years ago - roughly 244 million years before young-Earth creationists believe the Earth was created - a therapsid was still reproducing by laying eggs. The evidence comes from a fossil embryo discovered in South Africa in 2008 by palaeontologist John Nyaphuli. Even more awkward for creationists, their mythology requires animals to have been created as separate, unrelated ‘kinds’, yet here we have direct evidence from the stem-mammal lineage showing a reproductive stage inherited from deep evolutionary ancestry rather than sudden, magical creation without predecessors.

Now Julien Benoit and Jennifer Botha of the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, together with Vincent Fernandez of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, have used high-resolution CT and synchrotron imaging to examine the curled-up embryo inside the rock and identify it as a young Lystrosaurus, a dicynodont therapsid from the Early Triassic. Crucially, the specimen preserves features consistent with an unhatched embryo, including a tightly curled in ovo posture and an unfused lower jaw symphysis. No calcified eggshell was preserved, so the egg was probably soft and leathery, as expected for a very early synapsid. Their findings are reported in an open access paper in PLOS One.

The authors have also co-authored an article in The Conversation explaining the discovery and its significance. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

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

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Neanderthal at the Goyet Cave.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals shared technology and behavior

Credit: Efrat Bakshitz

Archaeological examination of the Tinshemet Cave floor.

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

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

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

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

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

Homo antecessor working at the Gran Dolia butchery site

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

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

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

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

Creationism in Crisis - An Early Relative of the First Primates From North America - 65.9 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Purgatorius

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Artists impression of Purgatorius unio from Late Paleocene North America

By Nobu Tamura - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link

Miniscule fossil discovery reveals fresh clues into the evolution of the earliest-known relative of all primates - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

Scientists have recently announced the discovery of a small tooth in the Corral Bluffs, in the Denver basin, Colorado that shows one of the group of early mammals from which primates later emerged probably evolved in North America. For Creationists keen to find a reason to dismiss science and the evidence it keeps revealing showing creationism is nothing but an evidence free superstition, this is eerily reminiscent of what they regard as the 'Nebraska Man' hoax.

The supposed hoax was nothing of the sort and was, in reality a creationists lie intended to mislead people, perpetrated by two evangelical Christian con-men, Hank Hanegraff and Grant Jeffrey, who falsely proclaimed it to have been a failed attempt to trick people into believing in evolution - a trick that still has some success on creationists, notorious as they are for failing to fact-check their claims.

Creationists like to pretend that palaeontology is little more than a catalogue of embarrassing mistakes and hoaxes. In reality, of course, the history of palaeontology shows the opposite: new discoveries steadily refine and improve our understanding of life’s history, filling gaps in the fossil record and clarifying evolutionary relationships. A recent discovery reported in a press release by Taylor & Francis and described in a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology is a good example of this process at work.

The discovery concerns a few minuscule fossil teeth belonging to Purgatorius, a tiny, shrew-sized mammal that lived about 65.9 million years ago, shortly after the asteroid impact that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs. Purgatorius is widely regarded as one of the earliest known relatives of the primate lineage—the group that eventually gave rise to monkeys, apes and humans. Fossils of this animal were previously known mainly from Montana and parts of western Canada, but the new finds from the Denver Basin in Colorado extend its known range several hundred miles further south.

According to the researchers, this discovery helps fill an awkward gap in the early fossil record of primate relatives. Slightly younger species appear in the southwestern United States about two million years later, leaving palaeontologists wondering why earlier forms seemed confined to the north. The Colorado fossils suggest that these early primate relatives probably spread southwards fairly rapidly after the mass extinction that ended the Cretaceous Period, diversifying as forests recovered in the aftermath of the impact.

However, before creationists begin sharpening their pencils in preparation for another round of “Nebraska Man” rhetoric, it is important to understand what this discovery does—and does not—show. The paper is not claiming that primates themselves evolved in North America, nor that this tiny mammal was a direct ancestor of humans. Purgatorius is better described as a stem relative of primates—an early member of the broader evolutionary group from which primates eventually emerged. In other words, it sits near the base of the evolutionary tree leading to primates, not within the modern primate group itself.

What the discovery really demonstrates is something far more typical of evolutionary biology: as new fossils are found, the geographical distribution and timing of early evolutionary lineages become clearer. In this case, a few teeth barely larger than grains of rice are helping palaeontologists reconstruct how the earliest primate relatives spread across ancient North America in the chaotic ecological world that followed the extinction of the dinosaurs.

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

"Little Foot" in an African woodland

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Auto)

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

© Amélie Beaudet

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

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - Our Earliest Animal Ancestors May Have Been Sea Sponges - 541 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Some of the first animals on Earth were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge, according to MIT geochemists who unearthed new evidence in very old rocks.

Image: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT

The first animals on Earth may have been sea sponges, study suggests | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Another fatal blow against creationism was revealed recently by geochemists led by Professor Roger E. Summons of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with news that they have found chemical evidence in ancient rocks suggesting that the earliest animals may have been the ancestors of sponges, living some 541 million years ago. Their findings have just been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.

They succeeded in extracting the chemical signature of animal life from rocks in Oman, where they found an abundance of steranes that they determined were the preserved remnants of 30-carbon (C₃₀) sterols — a rare form of steroid that they showed was most likely derived from ancient sea sponges known as demosponges.

Not only is this fatal to creationists' notion of Earth being just a few thousand years old, with all living organisms magically created without ancestry and with different “kinds” unrelated to other “kinds”, but it also delivers another hammer blow to the creationist parody of the so-called 'Cambrian Explosion' as a literal explosive creation of multiple body plans in a single event. Slightly more sophisticated creationists attempt to claim that this was the act of creation for which the tales in Genesis are merely a metaphor, with each day of 'creation week' representing millions of years — a claim that collapses on realisation that, according to Genesis, green plants would have had to exist for millions of years with no sun to drive photosynthesis, since the sun is supposedly created the 'day' after plants.

This analysis pushes the origins of the Cambrian biota back into the Ediacaran, showing not a sudden spontaneous creation 540 million years ago, but the cumulative products of evolutionary diversification, probably beginning with these early multicellular organisms.
In addition to Professor Roger E. Summons of MIT, the team included Dr Lubna Shawar of Caltech, Gordon Love of the University of California, Riverside, Benjamin Uveges of Cornell University, Alex Zumberge of GeoMark Research in Houston, Paco Cárdenas of Uppsala University in Sweden, and José-Luis Giner of the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

Creationism In Crisis - What Caused Homo Floresiensis (The 'Hobbit') To Go Extinct - 40,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'?

Homo floresiensis hunting a Stegodon

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.2)

Reconstruction of Homo floresiensis

By Cicero Moraes et al, Arc-Team Research
CC BY 4.0, Link

The ‘hobbits’ mysteriously disappeared 50,000 years ago. Our new study reveals what happened to their home

Long before anatomically modern Homo sapiens took their first tentative steps out of Africa and established themselves in Eurasia, an archaic hominin, Homo erectus, had already done so about a million years earlier, spreading across Asia into what is now the Indonesian archipelago and diversifying into a number of species and regional variants along the way.

One lineage settled on the island of Flores, where they encountered a miniature species of elephant, Stegodon florensis insularis, which probably became one of their principal sources of meat. By a process known to evolutionary biologists as Foster's Rule or the “island effect”, the descendants of these hominins also became smaller, eventually evolving into Homo floresiensis, popularly known as “The Hobbit” on account of their diminutive stature. Then, quite suddenly, they disappeared from history some 50,000 years ago.

Now an international team of archaeologists, including scientists from the University of Wollongong (UOW), Australia, believe they have found evidence explaining their extinction. It appears to have coincided with the disappearance of Stegodon florensis insularis and to have been driven by extensive climate change that began about 76,000 years ago, culminating in severe summer droughts between 61,000 and 50,000 years ago. The researchers reached this conclusion through analysis of the chemical record preserved in stalagmites from Flores caves, alongside isotopic data from the teeth of Stegodon. Their paper has just been published open access in Communications Earth & Environment.

In addition to the University of Wollongong news release explaining the study, four of the authors have written an article in The Conversation. Their article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Refuting Creationism - Bonobos Can Imagine Things Detached From Reality

Apes share human ability to imagine | Hub

A paper published recently in Science should give creationists something to think about. It shows how our close relatives, the bonobos, can imagine things completely detached from physical reality — rather like children playing games of pretend, or creationists pretending they are leading experts on biology and understand the subject better than the actual experts.

In this study, two researchers from Johns Hopkins University demonstrate that bonobos can engage in imaginative “pretend play”, an ability long assumed to be uniquely human. In doing so, they dismantle yet another supposed human-exclusive trait that creationists cite as evidence of special creation.

In one experiment with a captive bonobo, Kanzi — a 43-year-old individual living at Ape Initiative — a researcher pretended to pour juice from an empty jug into a transparent empty cup, and then pour it again into a second empty cup. When asked, “Where is the juice?”, Kanzi correctly identified the second cup.

In a similar experiment, an imaginary grape was taken from an empty bowl and placed into an empty jar. When asked, “Where is the grape?”, Kanzi again correctly pointed to the jar.

These experiments show that Kanzi was able to imagine and successfully track the movement of invisible, non-existent objects — something human children can typically do by the age of about two.

Creationism Refuted - Early Hominins From Morocco Confirm The African Origin of Homo Sapiens

Thomas Quarry I, Grotte à Hominidés: Mandible ThI-GH-10717 during the excavation.

© J.P. Raynal,
Programme Préhistoire de Casablanca

773,000-year-old mandible ThI-GH-1 from Thomas Quarry in Morocco.

© Hamza Mehimdate, Programme Préhistoire de Casablanca.

Early hominins from Thomas Quarry I (Morocco) reveal an African lineage near the root of Homo sapiens

The discovery and dating (of which more later) of hominin remains in a Moroccan quarry, reported recently in Nature, has provided further confirmation that the origin of Homo sapiens lies in Africa, not Eurasia, contrary to an alternative hypothesis that has occasionally been proposed. The material consists of mandibles and other fragmentary remains, and also sheds light on the evolutionary origins of Neanderthals and Denisovans.

That is not to say that any serious palaeoanthropologists believed humans evolved wholly in Eurasia. Rather, some suggested that the final stages of Homo sapiens evolution may have occurred there, derived from descendants of earlier African migrants such as H. erectus, H. rhodesiensis, or H. antecessor. Others have argued that the so-called ‘muddle in the middle’ of the hominin family tree may represent a single, widely distributed species exhibiting regional variation across both Africa and Eurasia.

However, the Moroccan specimens display a clear mosaic of primitive and derived features — precisely the pattern that creationists call ‘transitional species’ and insist don't exist. These fossils combine traits seen in African sister lineages with features associated with H. antecessor, a pre-Neanderthal/Denisovan European species whose remains are being excavated at the Sima de los Huesos (Cave of Bones) site at Atapuerca, Spain.

The fossils are also exceptionally valuable for palaeoanthropology for another reason. The sediments in which they were found preserve the unmistakable signature of the Matuyama–Brunhes geomagnetic reversal, which occurred around 773,000 years ago when Earth’s magnetic poles flipped. This provides an unusually robust chronological anchor, as the timing of this reversal has been independently verified from multiple, entirely separate lines of evidence.

There is therefore a great deal here for creationists to attempt to dismiss. First, there is the mosaic of primitive and derived features that identify these fossils as genuinely transitional — something creationism insists does not exist. Second, there is the age of the material, securely dated to approximately 763,000 years (±4,000 years) before creationists insist Earth was magicked out of nothing, placing ancestral hominins hundreds of thousands of years before the Bronze Age biblical story of a single, ancestor-free human couple. Finally, and perhaps most inconveniently of all, the dating does not rely on radiometric methods at all, but on geomagnetic reversal stratigraphy, verified beyond any reasonable doubt. The biblical timeline is therefore wrong by many orders of magnitude.

Creationism Refuted - A 'Transitional Species' That is Probably Another Ancestral Hominin

Dr Jesse Martin of LaTrobe University thinks Little Foot could be a whole new branch of the human family tree.

Photograph: La Trobe University

Iconic fossil may be new type of human ancestor, News, La Trobe University

A brief communication, published last November in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology may, if creationists never read past the title (as usual), have produced a frisson of excitement in those circles. It questioned the taxonomic status of one of the most complete fossil skeletons of an early ancestral hominin, Australopithecus prometheus, popularly known as “Little Foot”.

However, reading even a little further would have turned that excitement into disappointment — assuming, of course, that they understood what they were reading. The authors were not questioning whether the fossil was ancestral at all, but whether it had been assigned to the correct position in the hominin family tree, or whether it should instead be recognised as a distinct ancestral hominin species. In other words, this was a discussion about how many transitional species there are, not whether transitional species exist at all.

The only crumb of comfort available to creationists is the familiar claim that this demonstrates how science “keeps changing its mind”, something they take as evidence that science is fundamentally unreliable—presumably including even those parts they routinely misrepresent as supporting their beliefs.

For anyone who understands the scientific method, and the importance of treating all knowledge as provisional and contingent on the best available evidence, this paper represents the principle functioning exactly as it should. Far from being a weakness, this willingness to revise conclusions in the light of new information is what makes science self-correcting and progressively more accurate over time.

The authors of the paper — a team led by La Trobe University adjunct Dr Jesse Martin—carried out a new analysis of the “Little Foot” fossils and concluded that the specimen was probably placed in the wrong taxon when first described on the basis that it does not share the same “unique suite of primitive and derived features” as Australopithecus africanus. Since that initial assessment, additional fossils of A. prometheus have been discovered, and it has become clear that “Little Foot” also differs from those specimens. At the same time, it remains sufficiently distinct from A. africanus that reassignment to that species is not justified. In short, it possesses its own unique combination of primitive and derived traits and should therefore be recognised as a separate species.

Naturally, there is no real comfort here for creationists. The phrase “suite of primitive and derived features” is simply palaeontological shorthand for evidence of descent with modification—what Darwin referred to as transitional forms. It follows that the researchers involved have no doubt whatsoever that the species under discussion evolved from earlier ancestors, and there is no hint that they believe it was spontaneously created, without ancestry, by magic.