An immune system that saves your life in one circumstance can help kill you in another makes sense in the light of evolution: natural selection favours advantages whose benefits outweigh their costs under prevailing conditions, without guaranteeing safety in every eventuality. For creationists who present biological complexity as evidence of perfect intelligent design, however, such compromises require some explaining.
A new study published in Nature on 2 September 2026 provides a particularly revealing example. Researchers found that mammalian cells can join RNA sequences copied from separate genes into a combined message. One resulting protein improves antibacterial defence in mice, but also increases vulnerability to lethal inflammatory responses in experimental models of sepsis. The same molecular mechanism brings both protection and danger.
To understand the discovery, think of DNA as a collection of stored recipes. Messenger RNA, or mRNA, is a working copy that a cell uses to assemble a protein. Scientists have long known that cells can edit these copies, allowing a single gene to produce different proteins. Here, the researchers investigated messages containing material from different genes, sometimes located on different chromosomes. It is rather like making a new recipe by combining instructions from two separate cookbooks. The joining occurs at the RNA level; it does not require the original DNA recipes to merge.
These combined messages are called chimeric RNAs. Crucially, the team demonstrated that one produces a functional protein, named GSDMD–TMEM106A, during inflammation in mice. Most of the other candidate messages have yet to be shown to produce functional proteins, so the discovery should not be mistaken for proof that every detected combination has a useful role.
The evolutionary interest lies in the consequences. Strengthening an inflammatory response can help an animal resist infection, yet the resulting damage can become lethal. Weakening that response can reduce the danger from inflammation while leaving the animal less able to control bacteria. There is no simple setting at which “more immunity” always means “better health”.
This is precisely the sort of trade-off evolutionary biology helps us understand. Natural selection works with inherited mechanisms and their competing consequences; it has neither foresight nor a commitment to the welfare of every individual or to the perfect solution. The study does not reconstruct the evolutionary history of this particular protein, but its findings illustrate why a useful biological feature need not be harmless, let alone perfect. For intelligent-design advocates, the question is therefore more demanding than “Is it complicated?” It is why an allegedly flawless designer’s protective machinery comes with the capacity to inflict fatal damage on the organism it protects.
A newly described giant dinosaur from Brazil presents creationists with more than the familiar problem of a fossil vastly older than their supposed creation of the Universe. Its evolutionary relationships also preserve evidence of a world whose geography has changed profoundly: continents separating, ancestral populations dispersing, and related lineages following different evolutionary paths. This is precisely the sort of historical pattern we expect when common descent operates on a planet reshaped by plate tectonics.
The dinosaur, Dasosaurus tocantinensis, was approximately 20 metres long and lived around 120 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous. Its remains were discovered during construction of a road–rail terminal at Davinópolis, in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Maranhão. Described by Elver Luiz Mayer and colleagues in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, it has its closest known evolutionary relative in what is now Spain. The researchers interpret this affinity as evidence that its ancestors probably reached South America from Europe via North Africa between about 140 and 120 million years ago.
That proposed route needs to be understood against the geography of the time. Africa and South America had not yet completed their separation, and connections between landmasses offered opportunities for dispersal that the modern map conceals. The finding therefore concerns ancestral movements through an ancient landscape, rather than dinosaurs somehow crossing the present-day Atlantic.
The broader evolutionary principle is straightforward. Populations can spread when geographical connections permit; when barriers interrupt gene flow, their descendants can diverge. Consequently, relationships between species should reflect both their ancestry and the changing opportunities for movement and isolation. Evolutionary biology supplies the explanation for the branching relationships, while plate tectonics supplies the changing geographical setting. This particular fossil does not, by itself, prove that continental separation caused a specific speciation event, but its affinities fit the larger picture remarkably well.
For young-Earth creationism, the difficulty is therefore both chronological and explanatory. A dinosaur living 120 million years ago cannot be accommodated within a literal Genesis chronology. Nor does the assertion that a creator suddenly produced separate “kinds” explain why their anatomical relationships should correspond to ancient geographical connections. Common descent makes that correspondence intelligible; magical creation provides no comparable prediction.
What emerges is a history of life unfolding on a changing Earth, with neither continents nor their inhabitants fixed in their present arrangements. Understanding that history requires evidence, evolutionary relationships and deep time — all conspicuously absent from the biblical creation account.
Sometimes, a small footprint exposes an enormous problem for creationism. In this case, it is a partial impression preserved in approximately 55.5-million-year-old volcanic sediment on what is now King George Island, Antarctica. Its age alone places it far outside the few thousand years allowed by a literal reading of Genesis. But its setting tells an equally significant story: an Antarctic landscape capable of supporting terrestrial mammals, profoundly different from the frozen continent we know today.
The discovery, described by Héctor Mansilla-Vera and colleagues in Polar Biology, comprises a partial forefoot-and-hindfoot impression. The researchers interpret its maker as a small carnivorous mammal, possibly a sparassodont—an extinct relative of marsupials otherwise known from South America. That identification remains tentative: the incomplete trace cannot establish a particular species or confidently identify the group. Nevertheless, it records a mammal walking across an Antarctic substrate, providing evidence of its presence where it lived, rather than bones or teeth transported after death. Javier Gelfo’s account of the research explains both the interpretation and its limitations.
This animal inhabited a warmer, forested Antarctica that retained land connections with South America. Antarctica was already at high southern latitudes; its subsequent transformation cannot simply be explained as a warm continent drifting towards the pole. The larger story involves the breakup of Gondwana, the loss of connections between continents, changing ocean circulation and a changing atmosphere.
As tectonic movements opened and deepened southern ocean gateways, they altered the movement of water and heat around Antarctica. Falling atmospheric carbon dioxide also played a major role in the cooling that culminated in extensive Antarctic glaciation around 34 million years ago. Geography and climate interacted over geological time to transform the conditions under which life could survive. Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.
The challenge to creationism is therefore more precise than simply showing that Earth has changed. Biblical literalists themselves invoke catastrophic change through their Flood narrative. What confronts them here is evidence belonging to a much longer, independently reconstructed history: continents separating, connections disappearing, climates shifting and ecosystems being transformed over tens of millions of years. An appeal to an originally “perfect” creation explains none of those details.
This tiny trace offers a glimpse of life on a planet whose geography and habitability have never been permanent fixtures. Understanding it requires geology, palaeontology and climate science working together—and the willingness to distinguish what the evidence demonstrates from what it merely suggests.
An account and discussion of this research by Antonio García was published in La Brújula Verde. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
One of creationism’s more persistent claims is that evolution cannot produce “new genetic information” because doing so would violate the second law of thermodynamics. The proposed escape from this imaginary prohibition is, inevitably, a supernatural information-provider. But the second law contains no ban on mutations producing new biological functions. It concerns entropy: the total entropy of an isolated system cannot decrease. Living organisms exchange energy and matter with their surroundings, and their activities increase the entropy of those surroundings. Building DNA, growing a leaf and evolving a new enzyme require no suspension of physics. The thermodynamic principles are explained here.
The argument also trades on treating genetic “information” as though it were a mysterious substance that only intelligence can manufacture. Genes are physical sequences of DNA, and those sequences can change, duplicate and recombine. Following duplication, one copy can retain an established function while the other accumulates changes that enable a different or more specialised activity. Natural selection can favour useful variants. A new biological capability need not require an entirely new molecular structure, still less a miraculous delivery of instructions.
This is what makes a study by Tatsuya Corlett and colleagues, published in PNAS, particularly relevant. The researchers combined metabolic-reaction networks with protein-fold data to infer the relative order in which enzyme structures emerged. Their model points to a prominent early role for α/β folds—structures containing both alpha helices and beta sheets—and suggests that most oxygen-using enzymes arose through the adaptation of existing folds as oxygen became available. Evolution could expand its biochemical repertoire by modifying structures already present.
The creationist demand for something wholly unprecedented therefore misses how evolution works. Novelty can reside in a changed activity, a different molecular target or a new regulatory relationship. Retaining an ancestral protein framework does not make a newly evolved function any less new. Nor does calling the result “information” establish a thermodynamic obstacle to its origin.
The research also extends the investigation of our shared biochemical ancestry towards the interval before LUCA, the last universal common ancestor of living organisms. LUCA was not necessarily the first life: its enzymes already had an evolutionary history. These results are model-based historical inferences, rather than recovered pre-LUCA proteins or a direct measurement of increasing genetic information. Nevertheless, they offer a way to investigate that earlier history through the organisation of metabolism itself.
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.
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.
Anyone attempting to reconcile Earth’s history with the creation myths in Genesis has another awkward fossil to explain: the remains of a scorpion that lived in Britain approximately 415 million years ago—more than 400 million years before the supposed biblical Creation Week.
The animal,Praearcturus gigas, inhabited the river channels and floodplains of what are now England and Wales during the Early Devonian Period. Although known only from fragmentary remains, its enormous pincers and body plates suggest that it may have approached a metre in length, making it the largest scorpion yet identified. One of its fossil claws is more than 15.9 centimetres long, while the preserved carapace is about 9.4 centimetres wide.
The fossils themselves are not a new discovery. Some were collected in the nineteenth century and have been held in the Natural History Museum’s collections for more than 150 years. First described in 1871,Praearcturus was originally classified as a giant isopod-like crustacean and was subsequently compared with several other arthropod groups. Its identity remained controversial because none of the known specimens preserves an entire animal, including the characteristic segmented tail and sting.
Now, as reported in Plaeontology, researchers from the Natural History Museum, the University of Manchester and Technological University Dublin have re-examined the specimens using detailed photography, anatomical comparisons and computed tomography. Features including its large claw-bearing pedipalps, the structure of its sternum and a stridulatory surface on one of its leg bases provide strong evidence that it was a true scorpion. The researchers also concluded that fossils previously namedBrontoscorpio anglicus andBennettarthra annwnensis probably belonged to the same species and should be treated as junior synonyms ofPraearcturus gigas.
Its age is established by its geological context. The specimens come from the St Maughans Formation of the Anglo-Welsh Basin, a sequence of river and floodplain deposits belonging to the Lochkovian Stage of the Early Devonian. Fossil spores place the relevant rocks within a recognised biological zone dated to approximately 415.8–412 million years ago. This was not the familiar green world of later geological periods: forests had not yet evolved, land plants were still small, and terrestrial ecosystems were only beginning to develop.
Speculative depiction of the last common ancestor of hominins and chimpanzees
AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)
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.
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.
One of the more tangible problems for Bible-literalist creationism is that the rocks beneath our feet contain evidence of creatures that lived and died long before the supposed biblical “Creation Week”. Fossilised bones can sometimes appear remote and abstract, but footprints are different. They record a fleeting moment in the life of an individual: a foot pressed into soft mud, weight transferred forwards, toes lifted and another step taken. For a few seconds, an extinct relative of ours occupied that precise spot—and the impression it left can remain for more than a million years.
At GaJi10, on the eastern side of Lake Turkana in northern Kenya, researchers have now documented 21 hominin footprints made by at least eight individuals approximately 1.43 million years ago. The tracks occur alongside those of hippopotamuses, antelopes and other animals that crossed the same muddy lakeshore during the Early Pleistocene. Volcanic ash associated with the surrounding sediments allowed the track-bearing surface to be dated.
As an international research team reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the footprints provide much more than evidence that hominins were present. Their shape and the pattern of movement recorded in them differ from the more modern-looking tracks attributed to contemporary Homo erectus. The researchers therefore consider them most likely to have been made by Paranthropus boisei—an extinct, bipedal cousin of our own lineage, best known from its enormous chewing teeth, powerful jaws and heavily built skull. The attribution is an inference from footprint anatomy and locomotion rather than an identification that can be made with absolute certainty.
Finding marine fossils more than a kilometre above sea level might seem, at first sight, to be just the sort of discovery biblical literalists could seize upon as evidence of Noah’s flood. After all, if sediments containing the remains of marine organisms occur high in the mountains, surely the sea must once have covered those mountains—or so the familiar creationist argument runs.
The argument depends upon ignoring one of the most elementary facts of geology: continents are not stationary platforms. Their crust is folded, faulted, stretched, compressed, raised and lowered by tectonic processes operating over millions of years. Marine sediments found at high altitude do not necessarily show that the sea rose to that altitude; they may show that a former seabed was subsequently raised far above the sea.
A striking new example has now been documented by Selma Sarı and an international team of geologists in the Mut Basin on the southern margin of the Central Anatolian Plateau in Türkiye. Their study, published in the journal Geology, describes the world’s highest known late Middle Pleistocene marine deposits: sediments now preserved 1,177 metres above mean sea level but deposited beneath the sea during Marine Isotope Stage 7, approximately 230,000 years ago.
The researchers did not simply find shells on a hillside and invent a convenient explanation for them. They combined several independent lines of evidence, including calcareous nannofossils, foraminifera, ostracod communities, palaeomagnetism, stable-isotope measurements and reconstruction of the original water depth. The ostracods indicate that the sediments accumulated about 50 metres below the contemporary sea surface, while the fossil succession and magnetic record constrain when that deposition occurred.
Taking the original water depth and contemporary sea level into account, the researchers calculated that the deposits have been raised at an average rate of approximately 5.2 metres per thousand years. That is an exceptionally rapid geological uplift rate, probably produced by interacting processes deep beneath Anatolia, including break-off of part of the subducting Cyprus slab and mantle flow associated with the Arabian slab. The marine sediments have therefore become a precisely dated marker carried upwards by the movement of Earth’s crust.
This is exactly what creationist flood mythology cannot provide: a coherent explanation that agrees simultaneously with the fossils, sedimentary environment, magnetic record, isotope evidence, reconstructed water depth, regional tectonics and measured chronology. A single recent inundation would not explain why marine sediments occur at different elevations, belong to different geological periods and have subsequently undergone folding, faulting, uplift and erosion.
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.
Words such as rules, pathways and highways can become treacherous when scientific findings pass through the hands of religious apologists. A rule, in ordinary speech, suggests someone who made it; a highway suggests an engineer who decided where it should lead. It is therefore easy to anticipate claims that a major new study of animal chromosomes has discovered evidence that evolution follows rules—and that rules must imply a rule-maker directing evolution towards a predetermined goal.
That, however, is not what the researchers have found.
In the largest comparison of chromosome-scale animal genomes yet undertaken, Darrin Schultz and colleagues analysed 5,821 genomes representing 4,454 species in 19 animal phyla. Their study, published in Science Advances, developed what they call “evolutionary genome topology”: a way of mapping the enormous variety of animal genomes according to the organisation and shared ancestry of their chromosomes. The results reveal recognisable, partly irreversible patterns extending back more than 600 million years to the common ancestor of living animals.
The accompanying University of Vienna press release describes these patterns as “evolutionary highways” and says that genomes evolve according to a limited set of “rules”. Those are useful metaphors, but they describe constraints and consequences—not commands, intentions or a plan.
Animal chromosomes can split, fuse and exchange material, but these processes are not free to produce every imaginable arrangement with equal probability. Existing chromosome structure limits what can happen next, while every change becomes part of the starting conditions inherited by subsequent generations. In particular, when ancestral chromosomes fuse and their genes subsequently become intermingled, the original arrangement cannot simply be reconstructed by reversing the fusion. The researchers call this process “fusion-with-mixing”. It makes chromosome evolution path-dependent: where a lineage can readily go next depends partly upon where it has already been.
This is what “rules” means in this context. It no more implies a supernatural rule-maker than the regular formation of crystals implies a crystal designer, or the course taken by a river implies that someone planned its route. Physical and chemical processes have consistent properties; biological structures impose constraints; and inherited history restricts the range of subsequent possibilities. Regular outcomes can emerge from those natural conditions without foresight or intention.
Nor does the statement that genomes “do not change at random” mean that their future has been prescribed. Mutations and chromosome rearrangements can occur without regard to what an organism needs, but randomness does not mean that every conceivable event is equally likely—or even physically possible. Some rearrangements are more readily produced than others; some are lethal or reduce fertility; some survive genetic drift or natural selection; and every surviving arrangement alters the possibilities available to its descendants. Chance operates within constraints, producing statistical patterns rather than fulfilling a programme.
One of the most important differences between science and creationism is not that science possesses absolute certainty while creationism does not. It is that science has procedures for recognising uncertainty, testing assumptions and preventing an interesting possibility from being promoted prematurely into an established fact. Creationism, by contrast, begins with an asserted certainty and then selects, distorts or dismisses the evidence according to whether it supports the required conclusion.
That distinction is illustrated particularly well by the recent suggestion that Denisovans may have been exceptionally tall. The claim originated in a preprint by Yousuke Kaifu and colleagues describing an incomplete femur and tibia recovered by dredging from the Penghu Channel between Taiwan and mainland China. Ancient proteins preserved in the bones identify them as Denisovan, giving scientists the first known Denisovan leg bones and potentially valuable information about the bodies of these enigmatic archaic humans.
Penghu 2 and Penghu 3 hominin leg bones.
Anterior (a), medial (b), and distal (c) views of the Penghu 2 right femoral shaft. Anterior (d), lateral (e) and distal (f) views of the Penghu 3 right tibia. Symbols: m=medial, p=posterior. Scale bar=10cm.
Reconstructions suggest that the owner of the femur, known as Penghu 2, may have stood about 1.8 metres tall and weighed approximately 83 kilograms. The owner of the Penghu 3 tibia may have been about 1.9 metres tall and weighed around 91 kilograms. These were undoubtedly large individuals by Pleistocene standards, and their estimated dimensions compare with those of some of the largest ancient humans known from Africa and Europe.
But two large individuals do not establish that Denisovans as a population were exceptionally tall. Modern humans vary considerably in height, and no responsible anthropologist would attempt to calculate the average stature of the entire species from two people selected from a crowd. The problem is even greater when dealing with two incomplete bones recovered by trawling rather than from a documented archaeological excavation. Their exact discovery locations and original geological contexts are unknown, while large, robust bones are more likely than small or fragile ones to survive, become caught in fishing nets and be recognised as scientifically interesting.
This is the point made by palaeoanthropologist Sally Christine Reynolds in an article in The Conversation. The height estimates may be perfectly reasonable for the two individuals concerned, but extending those estimates to Denisovans generally would require a much larger and more representative sample. At present, “two Denisovans were tall” is a defensible conclusion; “Denisovans were a tall species” remains an intriguing but weakly supported generalisation.
This is evolutionary population thinking in practice. Species are not collections of identical specimens conforming to an ideal form. They are variable populations in which individuals differ because of their genes, sex, nutrition, health, environment and developmental history. Treating one or two specimens as definitive representatives of an entire species is a remnant of the typological thinking that sits much more comfortably with the creationist notion of separately manufactured and essentially unchanging “kinds”.
Creationists habitually misrepresent scientific disagreements about details as evidence that scientists are abandoning evolution. Nothing of the sort is happening here. Reynolds is not questioning whether Denisovans existed, whether they shared common ancestry with Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, or whether they interbred with the ancestors of some living people. She is questioning whether two bones provide sufficient evidence for one proposed characteristic of the Denisovan population.
Indeed, identifying these bones as Denisovan depended upon evolutionary science. Proteins change through inherited mutations, so similarities and differences in their amino-acid sequences retain evidence of common ancestry. Even when recoverable DNA and diagnostic skeletal features are unavailable, palaeoproteomics can place a fossil within an evolutionary family tree. Creationism supplies no corresponding method for predicting those nested molecular relationships and no explanation for why the history recorded by fossil proteins should agree with that reconstructed from DNA and anatomy.
One qualification should be added to the account in The Conversation. Reynolds states that neither bone has been dated directly. However, a companion preprint reporting radiocarbon and stable-isotope analyses gives Penghu 3 a direct radiocarbon age of approximately 45,575–44,522 calibrated years before the present. Penghu 2 remains undated, and the lack of stratigraphic provenance still prevents the two individuals from being assumed to have lived together or even during the same period. Both studies are also preprints and have yet to complete peer review.
Scientific scepticism therefore does not weaken the evolutionary account; it protects it from exaggeration. Scientists can accept that the bones belonged to two large Denisovans, recognise the importance of their molecular identification and direct dating, and nevertheless withhold judgement on whether Denisovans generally were unusually tall. That willingness to make the conclusion no larger than the evidence can support is one of the defining strengths of science—and the antithesis of a creationist doctrine in which the conclusion was declared infallible before any evidence was examined.
Sally Christine Reynolds's article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commone License, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
Fossil collection sites, Seymour Island, Antarctica. Images credit: Boyang Xia et al.
Embarrassed by the wealth of fossils documenting an orderly succession of changing life over hundreds of millions of years, creationists traditionally fall back on several almost equally implausible attempts to reconcile the evidence with their preferred origin myth. According to young-Earth creationism, Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old, while most of the fossil-bearing geological record was supposedly produced during a single, year-long global flood in which almost every terrestrial vertebrate was exterminated in an act of divine genocide, leaving only a handful of survivors aboard a wooden boat.
The principal pseudo-scientific attempt to explain the orderly fossil record is something creationists call “hydrological sorting”. This proposes that the Flood sorted organisms according to such factors as their size, density, buoyancy, habitat or ability to escape the rising water. The term therefore has a nominal meaning, but it provides no credible explanation for the observed succession of organisms in the rocks. It cannot explain why particular groups appear only after their presumed ancestors, why countless short-lived species occur in a consistent order across different continents, why terrestrial and marine ecosystems succeed one another coherently, or why the same sequence agrees with radiometric dates, palaeomagnetism, plate tectonics and independent records of environmental change.
When this supposed mechanism fails, creationists can retreat into claims that are conveniently immune to evidence: that their creator deliberately planted or manipulated the fossil record to make Earth look ancient; that Satan planted the evidence to deceive the faithful; or that generations of geologists, palaeontologists, physicists and biologists have participated in a vast conspiracy to conceal the “truth”. Each claim abandons any pretence of scientific explanation because none can be tested, falsified or distinguished from an invented excuse. They serve only to protect a predetermined conclusion from inconvenient facts.
The latest inconvenient facts come from three researchers at the China University of Geosciences (Beijing): Boyang Xia, Huaichun Wu and Quanguo Li. In a paper recently published in the open-access journal Fossil Record, they report that fossil penguin bones from Seymour Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula, preserve a geochemical record of changing environmental conditions during the Eocene.
Seymour Island contains one of the world’s richest and most nearly continuous successions of Eocene penguin fossils. Xia and colleagues examined bones from three different levels in the La Meseta and Submeseta formations: an early Eocene horizon dated to 55.3–54.1 million years ago, a younger horizon dated to 49.1–45.8 million years ago, and a middle-to-late Eocene horizon dated to 41.2–37.7 million years ago. For comparison, they also examined bones from living chinstrap and emperor penguins.
Taxonomy is an indispensable tool for organising the living world, but it can also create a misleading impression of nature divided into sharply separated compartments. The familiar Linnaean hierarchy was devised in a pre-evolutionary age, principally to classify organisms as distinct types. It was not designed to accommodate fragmentary snapshots of populations undergoing continuous change over millions of years.
That problem becomes particularly acute in palaeoanthropology. Fossils do not come with labels identifying their species and genus, and palaeoanthropologists cannot test whether their owners could have interbred. They must infer relationships from incomplete and often distorted remains, sometimes consisting of little more than a few teeth or part of a jaw. They must then assign those remains to discrete taxonomic boxes, even though evolution within each lineage was continuous, while populations were also branching, diverging, coexisting and sometimes exchanging genes.
The boundary traditionally drawn between Australopithecus and Homo has always seemed especially arbitrary. It gives the impression that, at some point between the two, evolution took a sudden stride and produced something qualitatively different: a creature sufficiently human to be admitted into our genus. In reality, the characteristics once used to define Homo did not appear together as a package. Bipedalism preceded substantial brain enlargement by millions of years; tool use is no longer regarded as the exclusive preserve of Homo; and fossils repeatedly present mosaics of supposedly “primitive” and “advanced” features.
Nor is there a universally objective amount of anatomical difference that separates one genus from another. A genus is a humanly constructed rank, not something that can be excavated from the ground alongside the fossil. Drawing a firm boundary across a gradually changing lineage can therefore exaggerate the differences on either side of it, artificially turning a succession of small evolutionary changes into an apparent leap.
This is the problem addressed by Monash University palaeoanthropologist Dr Ian Towle in a new paper, Clades, grades, and the genus problem: A case for revising hominin taxonomy, published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology. Towle proposes expanding the genus Homo to include the species currently assigned to Australopithecus and Paranthropus—in effect placing the closely related hominins of the past four or five million years within one broadly defined genus.
To anyone familiar with Africa today, its extensive grasslands and savannahs can seem almost timeless: landscapes of grasses, scattered trees, grazing herbivores, predators and recurrent fires. But, like every modern ecosystem, the African savannah has a history. It was not created fully formed, stocked with its present collection of plants and animals, during a mythical creation week a few thousand years ago. It developed through a succession of environmental and evolutionary changes extending over tens of millions of years.
Some of that history is preserved not on the African continent itself, where erosion and geological disturbance have left gaps in the terrestrial record, but beneath the neighbouring Atlantic Ocean. Plant waxes blown from the land settled on the sea surface and were incorporated into sediments accumulating slowly on the ocean floor. Layer upon layer, these sediments preserved a chemical record of the vegetation growing in north-west Africa at different times.
Now, Anna K. Schartman, Pratigya J. Polissar and Caroline A. E. Strömberg have used these molecular fossils and their carbon-isotope composition to reconstruct some 24 million years of ecological change. Their findings are reported in an open-access paper, “The origin and development of the Miocene northwest African savanna”, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers found that the region’s closed forests and woodlands began giving way to a much more open ecosystem about 15–14 million years ago—approximately five million years earlier than earlier regional reconstructions had suggested. This first open landscape was not equivalent to the modern African savannah. It was rich in C3 grasses and had no close modern counterpart. The familiar C4-grass savannah developed later and in stages, with its most rapid expansion occurring between about 7.4 and 6.4 million years ago.
This does not conflict with research publicised by UC Santa Cruz in 2023, which found locally abundant C4 grasses in parts of eastern Africa between about 21 and 16 million years ago. That earlier research examined terrestrial fossil sites in Kenya and Uganda; the new study reconstructs regional vegetation in north-west Africa from wind-blown plant waxes preserved in marine sediments. Together, the studies show that Africa did not undergo a single, continent-wide transformation. Different mixtures of forest, woodland and grassland appeared in different regions at different times.
One of creationism’s favourite tactics is to treat every apparent gap in the evidence as evidence of absence - although that never seems to apply to creationists' "God did it!" claims for which definitive evidence either for the god's existence or its actions are invariably absent. If archaeologists have not found something, creationists assume it never existed — or, more usually, that scientists cannot explain its absence without invoking the supernatural.
A study published in the Journal of Quaternary Science provides a neat illustration of what can really lie behind such gaps. In this case, the missing evidence was not missing at all. It consisted of thousands of small, unremarkable-looking fragments of animal bone that earlier archaeologists might easily have overlooked, discarded or left uncollected.
The study, led by Monica Mărgărit of Valahia University of Târgoviște, Romania, examined animal remains recovered from Abri 122/1200, a rock shelter in the Vârghiș Gorges of Romania’s Eastern Carpathians. The site contains an extensive Middle Palaeolithic stone-tool industry and abundant remains of animals, including bovids, goats, wolves and cave bears. Luminescence dating indicates that Middle Palaeolithic occupation extended across a long period, approximately from Marine Isotope Stage 7, about 230,000 years ago, into Marine Isotope Stage 3.
Among more than 10,000 bone fragments, the researchers identified 83 bearing combinations of impact damage, microscopic scratches, smoothing, polish and edge wear consistent with their having been used as tools. They distinguished these traces from damage caused by butchery, carnivore activity, sediment movement and other natural processes, using microscopic examination and comparisons with experimentally used bone fragments.
Some had apparently served as retouchers for shaping or sharpening stone tools. Others had been used to scrape or work softer substances such as hides or plant material, while still others had functioned as wedges, multipurpose implements or simple hammers. Most had not been laboriously carved into specialised shapes. A suitable fragment was selected, used for the task at hand and then discarded—an expedient but effective use of a readily available material.
That distinction is important. The discovery does not show that Neanderthals in Romania possessed an elaborate bone-working industry previously unknown to science. It shows something arguably more revealing about their everyday behaviour: they could recognise the useful properties of an ordinary fragment, adapt it to an immediate problem and employ materials other than stone as circumstances required. “Technologically flexible and resourceful” is therefore more accurate than the rather sensational claim that their technology was simply “more advanced”.
How Can Archaeologists Recognise an Expedient Bone Tool?
A broken animal bone is not automatically a tool. Bones can be fractured, scratched, polished or crushed by many processes, including butchery, marrow extraction, carnivore gnawing, trampling, movement through sediment and weathering. Archaeologists must therefore distinguish evidence of deliberate use from damage produced before or after burial.
This study belongs to the field of traceology, or use-wear analysis. Researchers examine the position, orientation and microscopic structure of marks on an object to reconstruct how it may have been used.
Evidence of use
No single scratch or polished patch is normally decisive. Identification depends on combinations of features occurring in places where they would be expected on a working tool:
Localised smoothing and rounding can develop where an edge or projection has repeatedly rubbed against another material.
Microscopic striations may reveal the direction in which a tool was moved. Repeated scraping tends to produce organised wear rather than randomly orientated scratches.
Polish can develop through prolonged contact with relatively soft materials, possibly including hides or plant fibres.
Pits, grooves and small impact scars can indicate that a bone was used as a retoucher to shape or resharpen the edge of a stone tool.
Crushing, flaking and battered ends may identify bones used as hammers, wedges or intermediate pieces through which force was transmitted.
These marks must be distinguished from other forms of damage. Carnivore teeth can leave pits, punctures, scores and ragged edges; trampling can produce irregular scratches; roots can etch branching patterns into a surface; and movement through sediment can abrade an entire bone. Butchery and marrow extraction also produce characteristic cut marks, impact notches and fracture patterns. Those marks demonstrate human activity, but do not necessarily show that the bone was subsequently used as a tool.
Researchers compare archaeological specimens with experimental reference collections. Modern fragments of similar bone are used for scraping, rubbing, hammering, wedging or working stone. The resulting wear is then examined microscopically and compared with that preserved on the ancient specimens. Archaeological context, fracture history and the distribution of wear across each fragment provide additional evidence.
Even then, conclusions are expressed cautiously. Use-wear may show that a bone contacted a hard or soft material and indicate the kind of movement involved, but it cannot always identify the precise task or material with certainty.
Expedient and formally manufactured tools
A formal bone tool is deliberately manufactured. Its maker selects a suitable bone, produces a blank and modifies it by cutting, scraping, grinding or polishing. The finished object may have a regular shape intended for repeated or specialised use.
An expedient bone tool requires much less preparation. Its user recognises that an existing fragment already has a suitable edge, point, weight or shape, perhaps makes a minor adjustment, uses it for an immediate task and then discards it.
This does not mean that an expedient tool was accidental or that its user lacked the ability to manufacture something more elaborate. It represents a practical decision: there is little benefit in spending time making a specialised implement when a conveniently shaped piece of bone can perform the required task immediately.
Most of the specimens from Abri 122/1200 appear to belong to this expedient category. They were not extensively shaped, but their wear indicates that Neanderthals selected and used them as retouchers, scrapers, wedges, multipurpose implements or percussive tools. Their significance lies in the flexibility with which available materials were exploited, not in elaborate craftsmanship.
How archaeological gaps are created
Expedient tools present a particular problem because they can look like ordinary fragments of food waste. Earlier excavations often concentrated on complete, identifiable or visually impressive bones. Small fragments might be placed in storage without detailed examination—or not collected at all.
Consequently, an apparent absence of bone technology can reflect collection practices, preservation and the questions earlier researchers were asking rather than the behaviour of the people who occupied a site.
The Romanian evidence illustrates why gaps in the archaeological record should not be treated as proof that something never existed. Sometimes the missing evidence is already present, awaiting the methods and research questions needed to recognise it.
No Neanderthal skeletal remains have yet been recovered from Abri 122/1200, so the attribution is indirect. It rests on the age of the deposits, their Middle Palaeolithic stone industry and their wider archaeological context. The researchers are now looking for more direct evidence, including ancient Neanderthal DNA preserved in the cave sediments. This qualification is acknowledged openly by the scientists, unlike creationism, in which uncertainty is habitually concealed beneath declarations of dogmatic certainty.
The Romanian report in Gândul therefore describes more than another addition to the Neanderthal toolkit. The research demonstrates how apparent gaps in the archaeological record can be created by preservation, sampling and the questions researchers previously thought to ask. When those methods and questions improve, the gaps become smaller—not because scientists have invented missing evidence, but because they have learnt how to recognise evidence that was hiding in plain sight.
Auto-translated from Romanian: Important discovery at a site in Romania. Neanderthals had more advanced technology than previously thoughtArchaeologists have made an extremely important discovery right on Romanian territory. Specifically, in the site called Abri 122/1200, a cave in the Vârghiș Gorges occupied in the Middle Paleolithic, approximately 230,000 to 60,000 years ago, specialists have identified things that change what was known so far about the Neanderthals who lived on Romanian territory.
Researchers have identified, in bone fragments, the first evidence that they used bone tools for activities such as scraping, sharpening, or splitting.
The new study, led by Monica Mărgărit from the University of Târgoviște, was published in the Journal of Quaternary Science and focused on animal remains intentionally modified by humans. The researchers tried to determine whether the animal bones were simply remains from food consumption or whether, given the observed modifications, they were also transformed into tools for various activities, such as leather processing.
The context is particularly interesting because the Abri 122/1200 site preserves an important lithic industry and a large amount of faunal remains. Previous research has already identified bones from large herbivores, such as representatives of the bovid family, from the genera Bos and Bison, goats, but also the cave bear (Ursus spelaeus).
The bones show a high degree of fragmentation, compatible with the activities of cutting and exploiting the carcasses. During previous archaeological campaigns, fragments of long bones were discovered that appear to have been obtained by striking, most likely in the process of extracting the marrow. Some of the fragments also showed features compatible with their use as tools, geopop.it shows.
Important discovery on Romanian territory
The new study focuses on this aspect: the animal bones were not necessarily just food scraps. Traceological analyses showed that they were intentionally exploited. Some fragments could be selected and modified for use as tools, which demonstrates that Neanderthal technology was not limited to stone.
Although these fragments were not frequently processed or adapted for a very precise purpose, their shapes and characteristics appear to have been considered useful for carrying out certain activities.
The significance of the discovery goes beyond a single artifact. The intentional use of bones demonstrates a wider range of raw materials exploited by Neanderthals and suggests that, in addition to producing stone tools, these communities may have systematically used materials obtained from animal carcasses.
Abri 122/1200 is also an important site for understanding the presence of Neanderthals in the Carpathian region. The most recent research on the chronology of the site indicates that the archaeological levels with Middle Paleolithic industry could be up to about 230,000 years old.
The discoveries at Abri 122/1200 thus contribute to shaping an increasingly complex picture of Neanderthal technology: a system in which stone represented a fundamental raw material, but in which the bones of hunted and consumed animals could also become useful materials for carrying out technological activities.
ABSTRACT
Archeological evidence has demonstrated that Neanderthals utilized mammal bone remains as tools. These findings are geographically widespread, stretching from the Altai Mountains in Central Asia to the Atlantic Ocean. Such an extensive distribution is indicative of a broad pattern of Neanderthal behavior concerning tool use and resource exploitation, although a notable lacuna exists in the archeological record within the Carpathian region that appears as a blank area on the existing map. The main purpose of our study is to address and fill this geographical gap. To this end, we focused on the site of Abri 122/1200 in Romania as a representative case study. The luminescence dating results indicate that the Middle Paleolithic occupation of the cave spans from the Middle Pleistocene (Chibanian) to the Late Pleistocene, approximately from Marine Isotope Stage 7 (MIS 7, around 230 000 years ago) to MIS 3. A crucial aspect of our investigation involved differentiating between taphonomic marks on faunal remains: those resulting from natural processes such as scavenging or environmental factors and those stemming from technological activities like tool production or usewear. Through meticulous analysis, we successfully identified and isolated a consistent set of faunal remains categorized into five distinct typological groups. Our observations reveal that technological interventions on these bones are infrequent; the majority of fragments appear to have been used in their natural state without extensive modification. Fragments show evidence of being used in activities such as the processing of lithic tools, hides, or plant materials, which indicates a more complex utilization pattern than previously assumed. The assemblage from Abri 122/1200 thus exemplifies the importance of re-evaluating other Middle Paleolithic contexts within the Carpathian region. It highlights the variability, origin, and technological significance of bone production and utilization by Neanderthals, challenging traditional perceptions of their technological capabilities and resourcefulness.
The significance of these finds does not lie in the discovery of some spectacularly sophisticated Neanderthal invention. It lies in the evidence of adaptability preserved on apparently insignificant fragments of bone. The occupants of Abri 122/1200 recognised useful shapes and properties in the remains of the animals they exploited, selected suitable pieces for particular jobs and discarded them when those jobs were finished. This was practical problem-solving—the ability to use different materials flexibly rather than depend upon a rigid repertoire of stone implements.
The study also illustrates why creationist arguments based upon gaps in the evidence are so fundamentally dishonest. The apparent absence of Neanderthal bone tools from the Carpathian region did not mean that no such tools had existed. Many were too small and insufficiently modified to attract the attention of earlier excavators. Once researchers asked a more precise question, examined every fragment microscopically and compared its wear with experimentally produced marks, some of the supposedly missing evidence emerged from material that had been present all along.
Nor can the wider archaeological context be reconciled with a young Earth or a recent global flood. Abri 122/1200 preserves Middle Palaeolithic occupations extending through a substantial portion of the Pleistocene, within an independently dated sequence spanning tens of thousands of years. Its stone artefacts, butchered animal remains and expedient bone tools record repeated human activity long before creationists believe their god created the Universe, let alone before their mythical Flood supposedly destroyed the archaeological landscape. The absence of evidence does nothing for creationism; the presence of evidence utterly refutes it.
The researchers are also explicit about the limits of their conclusions. No identifiable Neanderthal remains have yet been found at the site, so the attribution rests upon its chronology, Middle Palaeolithic stone industry and wider European context. Instead of concealing that uncertainty, the team is looking for additional evidence, including ancient DNA in the sediments. That is how science works: conclusions are proportioned to the available evidence and remain open to refinement when new evidence appears.
Creationism predicted none of these discoveries, supplied none of the methods used to recognise them and offers no coherent explanation for their age or archaeological setting. Its only contribution is to rename Neanderthals as descendants of Adam or Noah and dismiss the dating, stratigraphy, genetics and comparative anatomy that show otherwise. Far from exposing a weakness in evolutionary science, the former blank on the Carpathian map demonstrates how science closes gaps, while creationism survives by pretending that every gap must remain permanent.
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