Creationism in Crisis - Hunting for Earth’s First Complex Life

The bird cliff Stappen, southern Bjørnøya (Bear Island) in the Barents Sea. The island is part of Svalbard, Norway.

Michael Haferkamp,
CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Microfossils from a sediment core of the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP), Sediment sample with microfossils

Hannes Grobe (talk), Alfred Wegener Institute,
CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On The Hunt For Earth’s First Complex Life - Universe Today

For most of its history, Earth was not a planet of trees, animals, fungi or anything else visible without a microscope. It was a microbial world. Life had existed for well over a billion years before the first clearly recognisable eukaryotic cells appeared in the fossil record, and for roughly another billion years after that, complex life remained comparatively inconspicuous.

That immense, slowly unfolding history is the subject of On the Hunt for Earth’s First Complex Life, an article in Universe Today by science journalist Bruce Dorminey, based on an interview with University of Oxford palaeontologist Associate Professor Ross Anderson. Anderson studies some of the most elusive fossils on Earth: the microscopic and usually soft-bodied remains of the organisms that preceded animals, plants and fungi.

The article is not a report of one new research paper, but an overview of an active field of research. Fortunately, several peer-reviewed studies provide the scientific background to Anderson’s comments. Together they describe not a sudden act of creation, but a long evolutionary transition from a biosphere dominated by bacteria and archaea to one containing eukaryotic cells, multicellular organisms and, eventually, animals.

From a Microbial World to Complex Life. For most of Earth’s approximately 4.54-billion-year history, life was microscopic. The dates below represent the oldest reasonably secure evidence currently known, not necessarily the moment at which each evolutionary innovation first appeared. Any organism must have evolved before it could leave a fossil, and the earliest members of a lineage may have gone unpreserved or remain undiscovered.

Some major milestones

• About 4.54 billion years ago — Earth formed. The young planet initially experienced intense volcanism, impacts and chemical evolution before stable oceans and environments capable of supporting life developed.
• More than 3.5 billion years ago — microbial life was established. Ancient rocks preserve chemical and structural evidence of organisms that lacked nuclei and other membrane-bound organelles. Some proposed evidence is older, but its biological origin remains disputed.
• By about 2.7–2.3 billion years ago — oxygenic photosynthesis had evolved. Cyanobacteria began using sunlight to extract electrons from water, releasing oxygen as a by-product.
• About 2.4 billion years ago — the Great Oxidation Event. Oxygen began accumulating persistently in the atmosphere. This did not immediately produce complex life, but it profoundly altered ocean chemistry, mineral formation and the evolutionary opportunities available to organisms.
• At least 1.75 billion years ago — recognisable eukaryotes. Organic-walled microfossils from northern Australia are among the oldest well-supported fossil eukaryotes. Their distribution indicates that they lived on or within oxygenated seabeds and probably already possessed mitochondria.
• By about 1 billion years ago — multicellular eukaryotes. The fossil record contains increasingly persuasive examples of multicellular algae and other organisms in which cells were joined and organised. Multicellularity subsequently evolved independently in several eukaryotic lineages.
• About 791 million years ago — diverse eukaryotes in the Svalbard sea. The Svanbergfjellet Formation preserves green algae and several enigmatic organisms with complex multicellular forms.
• About 720–635 million years ago — Cryogenian global glaciations. During the “Snowball Earth” episodes, ice extended into tropical latitudes. The resulting environmental disruption probably caused extinctions while also creating new ecological opportunities after the ice retreated.
• By about 574 million years ago — macroscopic Ediacaran organisms. Large, soft-bodied organisms appeared in marine ecosystems. Some may have been early animals, although the precise affinities of several famous Ediacaran forms remain debated.
• From about 539 million years ago — the Cambrian radiation. Animal diversity, movement, burrowing, predation and biomineralisation expanded dramatically over millions of years. Skeletons and shells also made organisms much more likely to enter the fossil record.

How do scientists recognise a fossil eukaryote?

Finding a microscopic structure in an ancient rock does not automatically establish that it was alive, still less that it was a eukaryote. Palaeontologists first determine whether the object is genuinely biological, whether it was deposited with the surrounding sediment and whether it is as old as the rock containing it. They then examine combinations of features that are difficult to explain as mineral growths, later contamination or ordinary bacterial cells.

• Size: Many early eukaryotic fossils are more than 100 micrometres across, considerably larger than typical bacteria. Size alone is not decisive, however, because some bacteria also produce exceptionally large cells.
• Complex walls: Multiple wall layers, regularly arranged spines, sculptured surfaces and other elaborate structures indicate a degree of cellular control associated with eukaryotes.
• Controlled openings: Some fossils have deliberately formed openings through which a cell apparently emerged from a resistant cyst. Their regular shape and position distinguish them from accidental tears or decay.
• Internal structures: Preserved internal bodies, membranes or consistent patterns of cell division can support a eukaryotic interpretation, although claims that a particular structure represents a nucleus or organelle require especially strong evidence.
• Multicellular organisation: Regular arrangements of connected cells, branching, differentiated regions or structures resembling holdfasts can demonstrate controlled growth rather than a chance aggregation of microorganisms.
• Organic chemistry: Microscopy and spectroscopic techniques can establish that a fossil has a carbon-rich biological wall and reveal how heat, pressure and mineral reactions altered it after burial.
• Geological context: Sedimentology and geochemistry reveal whether the organism lived in a coastal lagoon, on an oxygenated seabed or in deeper anoxic water. Finding the same form repeatedly within an appropriate environment strengthens its biological interpretation.

No single characteristic is necessarily conclusive. Large cells can be prokaryotic, mineral crystals can imitate biological shapes and geological alteration can create misleading structures. The strongest identifications therefore combine morphology, chemistry, repeated occurrence and environmental context.

Even when a fossil can confidently be identified as eukaryotic, its precise relationship to modern organisms may remain uncertain. Many organic-walled microfossils are consequently described by form rather than assigned prematurely to animals, plants, fungi or a particular group of protists. This caution is a strength of palaeontology, not a weakness: conclusions are calibrated to the evidence available and revised when better specimens or analytical techniques become available.

Further information: Susannah M. Porter, “Insights into eukaryogenesis from the fossil record”; Ross P. Anderson and colleagues, “Proterozoic microfossils continue to provide new insights into the rise of complex eukaryotic life”.

For creationists, the timescale alone is fatal. The rocks being examined are hundreds of millions to more than a billion years older than the entire Universe is supposed to be according to a literal reading of Genesis. More importantly, they preserve an ordered history of biological and environmental change that bears no resemblance to a six-day creation followed by a recent global flood.

The cellular innovation behind complex life

A eukaryotic cell is fundamentally more internally organised than a bacterial or archaeal cell. Its DNA is enclosed within a nucleus, while specialised compartments called organelles perform particular functions. Among the most important of these are mitochondria, which use oxygen to release energy from food and make energy-intensive forms of cellular organisation possible.

Refuting Creationism - How Flightless Beetles Evolved On Japanese Islands

Carabus blaptoides

By Adan - Photo taken by Adan at Sendai Miyagi, Japan., CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Reach in or crush the shell? A flightless snail-hunting beetle evolved different body shapes even without a sea barrier | EurekAlert!

Montage created by AI (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Phylogenetic relationships and geographic distribution of Carabus blaptoides

Junji Konuma

Islands have repeatedly provided some of the clearest demonstrations of evolution in action. The most famous example is, of course, Darwin’s finches, whose differently shaped beaks reflect adaptation to different foods in the Galápagos. More recently, as I described in an earlier article about “Darwin’s daisies”, the Galápagos plant genus Scalesia has diversified from a common ancestor into forms with different growth habits and leaf shapes suited to different island environments.

Now scientists studying the Japanese Archipelago have uncovered another striking example of the same fundamental evolutionary process—this time involving flightless beetles and the land snails they eat.

In a paper published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, Junji Konuma of Toho University, Nobuaki Nagata of Japan’s National Museum of Nature and Science, and Teiji Sota of Kyoto University describe the evolutionary diversification of the snail-eating ground beetle Carabus blaptoides. The species is distributed across the Japanese islands and has diversified into eight recognised subspecies.

Because the beetles’ hindwings are reduced, they cannot fly and must disperse on foot. Seas therefore isolate populations on different islands, while sheer distance, topography and environmental variation can restrict movement even between populations on the same large island. This reduced gene flow allows populations to respond independently to local ecological conditions—the familiar starting point for adaptive divergence and, eventually, speciation.

The principal selective pressure appears to be sitting on the beetles’ dinner plate—or, more accurately, retreating into its shell. Different regions of Japan contain different assemblages and sizes of land snails, particularly species of Euhadra and Satsuma. Beetles living where large snails predominate tend to have long, narrow heads and thoraxes. This slender form allows a beetle to push its head deeply into a large shell and reach the animal inside.

Refuting Creationism - Mammals May Have Evolved Live Birth 236 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

"Triassic Mothers," a life reconstruction of a group of Chiniquodon theotonicus individuals, a pregnant female (left) as well as a female (right) breastfeeding few, relatively large neonates.

Credit: María de los Ángeles Miceli Baro.

New fossil evidence challenges the story of mammalian birth

A newly published study suggests that one characteristic commonly associated with modern mammals—giving birth to live young—may have appeared in the mammalian lineage far earlier than palaeontologists previously realised.

Creationists prefer to imagine the major groups of organisms appearing fully formed, equipped from the outset with complete packages of supposedly defining characteristics. Evolution, however, produces no such conveniently bundled collections of features. Characteristics arise, change and sometimes disappear at different times, producing the mosaic of inherited and modified traits documented throughout the fossil record.

Creationists also rejoice at any suggestion that scientists might have to change their minds because, in their simplistic view of science, if something is not exactly and eternally true, it's wrong; there is no concept in creationism of incomplete truths or provisional conclusions contingent on future discoveries. Unlike creationism, though, changing one’s mind when the evidence changes is the hallmark of intellectual integrity, and what give science it's reliability and great strength as a tool for discovering the truth.

So here, to sow confusion in the minds of creationists, is an example of science changing its collective mind and still refuting creationists mythology, because it happened 236 million years before the mythical 'Creation Week'. Significantly too, the authors readily conceded that their conclusion is only provisional and they identify what additional information is needed to confirm or refute it. No such reasoning is ever advanced by creationist apologists because it must never be conceded that creationism could be falsified with evidence, lest that evidence be found.

Refuting Creationism - How Dogs And Humans Co-Evolved Naturally - No Magic Involved

A selection of dogs with a common ancestry. Creationists need to explain why this is not macro-evolution even though the scale of the differences between them and wolves is at least as great as that between humans, chimpanzees and gorillas

Various Internet sources

Eurasian grey wolf (Canis lupus lupus)

By User:Mas3cf, CC BY-SA 4.0,Link

How dogs evolved differently across the globe to match human traits - Taylor & Francis Newsroom

The story of how wolves became domestic dogs is one to which I have returned several times, for both scientific and personal reasons. It is one of the most remarkable examples of two species forming a relationship that changed the evolutionary future of one and the cultural history of the other.

It also provided the inspiration for two of my novels, The Girl and the Wolf and its sequel, The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic. These are, of course, works of fiction, not proposed reconstructions of an event for which the details will probably never be known. In them, however, I tried to imagine a biologically plausible way in which the process might have begun: not with people deciding suddenly to “invent” the dog, but with individual wolves and humans discovering that tolerance, cooperation and mutual protection could benefit both.

Refuting Creationism - Creationists Covered In Cambrian Coprolite.

It never rains but it poos

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)

Life Without Poop

Life With Poop

T Klarenbeek, CC BY-SA

Surprising new theory for leap in evolution – News

It is not often that fossilised faeces take centre stage in an explanation of one of the most important episodes in evolutionary history. However, a review published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution suggests that the evolution of digestive systems—and the resulting production of faecal pellets—may have helped to transform the chemistry and ecology of the oceans during the Cambrian radiation.

In The Cambrian fecal revolution: Fueling the Cambrian Radiation, palaeontologists Julien Kimmig and Russell D.C. Bicknell bring together evidence from fossil digestive systems and coprolites—fossilised faeces—from more than 35 deposits around the world. They found that coprolites became progressively more abundant and varied during the Cambrian Period, ranging from microscopic pellets to centimetre-sized masses containing shells and fragments of other animals.

This change coincided with the evolution of increasingly sophisticated digestive systems. Early animals with blind guts had only one opening through which food entered and waste was expelled. The evolution of a through-gut, with a separate mouth and anus, permitted food to move continuously through the body. Animals could feed more frequently, process a greater variety of foods and adopt new ecological roles. Early arthropods, in particular, developed specialised foreguts and digestive glands capable of extracting nutrients from increasingly diverse prey.

According to the authors, the consequences extended far beyond the animals producing the waste. Faecal pellets packaged organic matter and nutrients—including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and iron—and transported them through the water column and into deeper environments. In modern oceans, this sinking material forms an important part of the biological pump that carries carbon and nutrients away from surface waters. Kimmig and Bicknell propose that the beginnings of a comparable process during the Cambrian helped to fertilise previously nutrient-poor environments and support more complex food webs.

Refuting Creationism - Evolutionary Radiation Of Hawaiian Honeycreepers

Hawaiian honeycreepers

Source: Wikipedia (various contributors)

Loxiodes bailleui

By Jack Jeffrey, USGS - gallery.usgs.gov, Public Domain, Link

Smithsonian Scientists Resolve the Hawaiian Honeycreeper Family Tree | Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute

Only a few days after writing about Darwin’s famous Galápagos finches and how the Galápagos daisy had parallelled their evolutionary radiation, another group of island birds provides an even more spectacular example of adaptive radiation.

This time the setting is the Hawaiian archipelago, and the birds are the Hawaiian honeycreepers — an extraordinary collection of finches that evolved an assortment of beaks, diets and ways of life from a shared ancestral population.

More than 60 species of Hawaiian honeycreeper are known, ranging from thick-billed seed-eaters and nectar-feeders to birds with long, curved beaks for probing flowers or extracting insects from beneath bark. Some became so anatomically different that, before their evolutionary relationships were understood, naturalists found it difficult to believe that they could all be related.

But related they are. According to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Michael G. Campana and colleagues at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute and National Museum of Natural History, the honeycreepers form a single adaptive radiation whose history includes not only repeated branching into new species but also genetic exchange between some of those emerging lineages.

Creationism Refuted - People Were Painting and Drawing On Cave Walls in France Thousands of Years Before 'Creation Week'

Cave paintings at Font-de-Gaume, Dordogne© Centre des monuments nationaux/Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France

Photo: Anne Maigret

VIS light photography of the selected panel at the “Carrefour” of the panels no. 13 and 14 composed of a reindeer and a horse as well as bison and possibly a deer, respectively, and the schematic Bison 15.

© Anne Maigret, C2RMF
From: Reiche, I., Coquinot, Y., Trosseau, A. et al. (2023)

First absolute dating of Palaeolithic paintings in the Dordogne | CNRS

For the first time, scientists have obtained direct radiocarbon dates for Palaeolithic paintings in the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume in what is now southwestern France. A black-line drawing of a bison was created between 13,461 and 13,162 calibrated years before present (cal BP), while two parts of a mask-like figure produced dates ranging from about 16,000 to 14,200 cal BP. In other words, people were producing accomplished works of art in France more than 3,000 years before even the upper limit of 10,000 years that young-Earth creationists commonly allow for the entire age of Earth.

Not that this evidence is likely to persuade many creationists to reconsider their beliefs, of course. Once a preferred conclusion has been declared infallible, any evidence that contradicts it can simply be dismissed as fraudulent, mistaken or somehow “wrong”. One stock evasion is the evidence-free suggestion that radioactive decay rates must once have been different. In the case of radiocarbon dating, even known variations in atmospheric carbon-14 are measured and incorporated into the calibration curves. But no amount of calibration can correct a chronology that is wrong by design.

For anyone more interested in discovering the truth than in finding excuses to protect a preordained conclusion, however, these paintings are fascinating glimpses into how members of our species perceived the world around them, with its bison, horses, cave lions, mammoths and other Ice Age animals. Having visited the Grotte du Pech Merle in the Lot and the Lascaux II faithful reproduction of the famous Lascaux cave in the Dordogne, I can testify to the breathtaking magnificence of these monumental works.

Their purpose can only be surmised. They may have formed part of rituals intended to influence or appropriate the power of the animals; they may have recorded stories, conveyed knowledge or helped to instruct younger members of the group. None of these interpretations can yet be demonstrated conclusively. A controversial paper published in 1998 compared certain features of Upper Palaeolithic cave art with drawings made by a young autistic child with exceptional artistic ability. It did not, however, establish that any particular Palaeolithic artist was autistic.

During my visit to Pech Merle, our guide suggested that one of the great animal friezes might have been drawn in a matter of hours by a single artist, using bold, confident lines in black pigment. That interpretation may remain speculative, but the powers of observation, memory and control evident in those sweeping lines are unmistakable.

The new dating study was carried out on paintings in the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume, near Les Eyzies in the Dordogne, by an interdisciplinary research team led by CNRS researcher Ina Reiche. Direct radiocarbon dating had previously been considered impossible because the black pigments used at Font-de-Gaume, Lascaux and other decorated caves in the region were assumed to consist solely of iron and manganese oxides, which contain no carbon. However, the absence of carbon had never actually been demonstrated.

Using non-invasive Raman microspectrometry and hyperspectral imaging, the researchers examined black-line drawings of a bison and a figure interpreted as a human or animal face, or “mask”. These techniques revealed that charcoal was distributed uniformly throughout the black lines, rather than occurring only in isolated patches, helping to rule out contamination from graffiti or tourist activity.

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

fossil of Tametara mirim

Agustin Martinelli

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - Observed Evolution In A South African Leopard Population

The elusive Cape leopard.

Jana Ohrner/iNaturalist, CC BY-NC

Leopards adapted to South Africa’s Cape so successfully that they’re genetically unique – study

This paper will have creationists hurriedly trying to redefine evolution so that it no longer means what biologists mean by it — change in allele frequencies in a population over time — but instead becomes some childish parody of the idea, carefully constructed to exclude the scientific definition and so safely miss the point. The paper, published last January (2026) in Heredity, shows that a small, isolated population of leopards (Panthera pardus) in South Africa’s Cape Floristic Region is a striking example of incipient allopatric divergence, and possibly early speciation, in progress. The population, estimated at fewer than 1,000 individuals, has developed a distinctive genome and includes small leopards, some with only about half the body mass of leopards elsewhere in Africa.

In what will also disappoint those creationists who are still eagerly awaiting the abandonment of “Darwinism” by mainstream biologists and its replacement by magic-based creationism, the authors — an international group of leopard conservationists and evolutionary biologists — interpret their findings wholly within the framework of evolutionary theory. By comparing whole-genome data from 43 leopards, including 10 from the Western Cape province (WCP), the team found that the WCP leopards diverged from those of northern South Africa about 20,000–24,000 years ago — in other words, many thousands of years before creationists’ mythical “Creation Week”. They found no obvious evidence that genetic drift alone was responsible for this divergence, and concluded instead that it is more likely to reflect the population’s demographic history, long-term isolation and adaptation to the Cape’s distinctive environmental conditions, including low prey availability.

Their conclusion is that the leopards of the Western Cape can be regarded as an evolutionarily significant unit (ESU): a genetically distinctive population representing a unique component of the species’ evolutionary history and therefore one that should be managed and conserved as such.

One of the team, and first author of the paper, Assistant Professor Laura Tensen of the University of Greifswald, has written an article in The Conversation describing the research and its findings. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Refuting Creationism - How Modern Humans Benefitted from Meeting Denisovans

AI-generated Image (Chat GPT 5.5 Thinking)

Image provided by Tucci Lab

Genomes from Oceania offer new clues to human evolution | Yale News

A paper recently published by a Yale University-led team in the journal Science shows how Denisovan genes in the people of Near Oceania have contributed especially to their immune systems, and so have continued to influence human evolution for tens of thousands of years.

Who would be a creationist? It must be galling to wait so eagerly for that great day when biologists finally announce the collapse of evolutionary theory and admit that a better explanation of the observable evidence is one involving unevidenced magic entities doing conjuring tricks with chemistry and physics. That would make biology the first science to abandon natural explanations, ignore Occam’s Razor, and adopt magic as a basic principle. Sadly for creationists, that long-promised day shows no sign of arriving, despite having been predicted any day now for more than half a century.

But then, what would creationism be without a dogged refusal to change its mind when the evidence demands it, and the childish belief that the evidence itself must be part of some vast conspiracy to test the strength of faith? That is not science; it is apologetics dressed up in a lab coat.

The problem, as always, is that reality refuses to conform. The universe continues to produce evidence contradicting creationism and confirming the complex evolution of humans over deep time: migration, isolation, adaptation, bottlenecks, and repeated remixing with genes from other archaic human lineages, themselves the products of long evolutionary histories.

The real-world evidence written into our genomes is that most non-African human populations carry remnants of Neanderthal DNA, while Denisovan ancestry is especially marked in Near Oceanians and in some Asian populations. There is also evidence that Neanderthals and Denisovans themselves met and interbred in central Asia. Human evolution was not a simple ladder, still less a single act of special creation, but a branching, merging, reticulated history of populations moving, separating, adapting and sometimes meeting again.

Some of these archaic genes appear to have mattered because they were useful. In particular, they are often associated with immune responses to pathogenic bacteria and viruses. This makes evolutionary sense: Denisovan-like populations had already adapted to environments outside Africa, including their local burden of pathogens. When the ancestors of present-day Near Oceanians inherited some of that genetic variation through introgression, beneficial variants could be retained by natural selection, even while many other archaic variants were gradually lost.

The Yale-led team filled an important gap in our understanding of human evolution by sequencing the genomes of 177 individuals from 12 distinct populations in different parts of Near Oceania — the southwestern Pacific region that includes Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands — and analysing them alongside 1,284 previously published genomes from individuals worldwide.

They found evidence that the ancestors of Near Oceanian populations interbred with at least three distinct Denisovan-like groups. They also identified thousands of archaic variants that affect how genes are switched on or off, with a notable concentration in immune and antiviral pathways. In other words, Denisovan DNA is not merely a fossil remnant in the genome; in some populations, it is still helping to shape biology today.

Refuting Creationism - Yet Another Gap Is Closing - No God Found

Illustration of the Qreiya 3 fauna.

Image credit: Ian Baylatry.

Fossil discovery fills in missing information about modern fish evolution | Michigan News

Complete skeleton of the oldest jack fish, part of the group that includes modern jacks and trevallies.

A close-up of sharp teeth in an early relative of modern tunas.

Images credit: Professor Hesham Sallam, Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center

There are only two things in the universe faster than light: monarchy and gods. When a monarch dies, the monarchy passes instantaneously to the sovereign’s heir, regardless of where either of them happens to be at the time; and when science shines a light into one of the gaps in which creationists have been hiding their god, the god has already departed. That, presumably, is why no god has ever been detected by science.

Creationist dependence on these god-shaped gaps has produced an ever-shrinking god as science fills one gap after another with evidence. The fallacy depends on the gamble that, unlike every previous gap closed by science, this one will turn out to require a supernatural creation event. It never does, of course, but that never seems to diminish creationist confidence that the next gap will be different.

True to form, science has now closed yet another gap with evidence, not magic. It is one few creationists are likely to know about, and fewer still would be willing to acknowledge, because it concerns a gap in the fossil record between the K–Pg mass extinction, which eliminated the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago, and about 56 million years ago. In other words, it is a 10-million-year interval in the very long pre-‘Creation Week’ history of life on Earth — a history no self-respecting creationist can honestly admit exists without conceding that the Bible’s creation myth is not real history. Specifically, it is a gap in the fossil record of fish evolution, from the devastation at the K–Pg boundary to the later appearance of many species that look markedly different from those that preceded it.

That gap, known to palaeontologists as “Patterson’s Gap”, has now been partly filled by the discovery of the earliest known examples of six modern fish groups by a research team led by Sanaa El-Sayed, a University of Michigan doctoral student and researcher at the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center. The fossils were found in the Qreiya 3 Lagerstätte, dated to 62.2 million years ago, in Egypt’s Eastern Desert. The discovery has just been reported in Science Advances.

Creationism Refuted - A Giant, Intelligent Predatory Octopus - 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A sketch of the giant octopus.

Image: Yohei Utsuki
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Hokkaido University.

Giant octopuses may have ruled the oceans 100 million years ago – Hokkaido University

To a conspiracy-theorist creationist who sees science as an organised plot to trick them into changing their mind, it must seem that the whole world and its dog are ganging up on them. The “conspiracy” has now spread to a team of researchers led by Shin Ikegami of Hokkaido University, Japan, who have announced the discovery of fossilised jaws of giant octopuses that may have been apex predators in Late Cretaceous seas, about 100 million years before creationism’s mythical “Creation Week”. Some of these animals may have reached nearly 20 metres in length, making them among the largest invertebrates yet described.

To a creationist, apparently, it is more plausible to believe that a god self-assembled out of nothing, then made an entire universe out of nothing by magic just a few thousand years ago, than to accept that Earth and life on it are the result of long, slow, scientifically demonstrable natural processes. So, when the evidence says otherwise, the evidence must somehow be forged, misrepresented or misunderstood. Besides, Bronze Age people who thought the world was flat, with a solid dome over it, said so — and what better evidence could there be than that?

What the team of researchers from several Japanese research institutions, together with Jörg Mutterlose of Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, discovered was recently published in Science. Using high-resolution grinding tomography and an artificial intelligence model, they identified fossil jaws hidden inside rock samples from the Late Cretaceous period. The fossils, from Japan and Vancouver Island, date from between about 100 and 72 million years ago. They had been preserved in calm seafloor sediments, retaining fine details, including wear marks that reveal how these animals fed.

Based on the size and shape of the jaws, the researchers estimate that some of these extinct finned octopuses, especially Nanaimoteuthis haggarti, may have reached nearly 20 metres in total length. Their jaws show heavy chipping, scratching, cracking and polishing, consistent with repeated forceful biting into hard prey such as shells, bones or other resistant material. These were not passive, soft-bodied animals drifting harmlessly through the Cretaceous seas; they appear to have been powerful, active predators, competing in ecosystems otherwise assumed to have been dominated by large marine reptiles and sharks.

One especially intriguing finding was asymmetrical wear on the jaws. In two species, one side of the biting surface was more heavily worn than the other, suggesting that these animals may have favoured one side when handling difficult prey. This sort of behavioural lateralisation is associated in modern animals with complex neural processing, raising the possibility that advanced predatory behaviour, and perhaps a degree of intelligence, had already evolved in these early octopus relatives. The discovery also pushes the fossil record of finned octopuses back by about 15 million years, and the broader octopus record by about 5 million years.

Creationism In Crisis - Evolution In Progress As A Familiar Mediterranean Lizard Goes Green

Common wall lizard, Podarcis muralis.
The yellow and orange colour morphs disappeared over time.

Photo: Roberto García Roa

The "Hulk" lizard.

Photo: Roberto García Roa.

“Hulk lizard” knocks out ancient colour palette | Lund University

This lovely example of evolution in progress will no doubt have creationists demanding that science abandon its definition of evolution and adopt their childish “change of kind” parody instead — a caricature which, if it meant one basic type of organism suddenly turning into another, would falsify evolution rather than confirm it.

The example concerns the common wall lizard, Podarcis muralis, a species widespread in the Mediterranean region. For millions of years, populations of this lizard have included three genetically determined throat-colour morphs: white, yellow and orange. These colour forms are not merely superficial differences. They are associated with different strategies for gaining territories, attracting mates and competing with rivals, and their long-term coexistence has been a textbook example of evolutionary balance maintained by natural and social selection.

Now that balance has been disrupted by the spread of a new phenotype: a larger, bright green, aggressive and sexually dominant form, known to science as the green-and-black, white-throated nigriventris phenotype, nicknamed the “Hulk” by the researchers appears to have arisen near Rome several thousand years ago (a mere tick in evolutionary time) and is now spreading through Italy.

As this form spreads through the landscape, the yellow- and orange-throated morphs are disappearing, leaving the white-throated form behind. The change has been so rapid that, had it involved a marked alteration in a structure likely to fossilise, such as teeth or bones, it would appear in the fossil record of the future as a sudden change after a long period of stasis — in other words, exactly the kind of pattern described by punctuated equilibrium. It is, of course, classic evolution: allele frequencies in populations shifting as a newly successful phenotype spreads.

This evolutionary change in progress is the subject of a paper in Science by an international team of researchers led by Professor Tobias Uller of Lund University, Sweden. The team analysed colour data from about 240 populations of P. muralis, comprising more than 10,000 individuals. The results show that the newcomer has significantly altered the long-standing balance within the species, eliminating the yellow and orange morphs as the larger, more aggressive form spreads through the region.

Creationism Refuted - Amazingly Detailed Fossils From Australia - 11-16 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A large trapdoor spider preserved in McGraths Flat.

Michael Frese

Unusual red rocks in Australia are rewriting the rules on exceptional fossil sites

A research paper published online last year in Gondwana Research should have been giving creationists nightmares. It reports work by an Australian and American team of palaeontologists and geologists, led by Tara Djokic of the Australian Museum and UNSW Sydney, showing how iron-rich minerals can preserve fossils in such exquisite detail that individual pigment cells in fish eyes, internal organs of insects and fish, and even delicate spider hairs and nerve cells can be seen in deposits dated to between 11 million and 16 million years old.

The fossils come from McGraths Flat, a Miocene rainforest lake deposit in New South Wales, where organisms were entombed not in the usual shale, sandstone or limestone, but in iron-rich ferricrete composed largely of the iron-oxyhydroxide mineral goethite. Instead of destroying delicate biological structures, as might have been expected, the iron-rich sediment preserved them in astonishing microscopic detail.

This is not the first time iron has been shown to play an important role in preserving soft tissues rather than just the hard bones and teeth that normally fossilise. It was also implicated in Mary Schweitzer’s famous discovery of preserved collagen and soft-tissue-like structures in dinosaur fossils — a discovery that creationists frequently misrepresent today as “proof” that dinosaurs were alive only a few thousand years ago. Despite repeated corrections of these claims, creationist accounts of Schweitzer’s work have grown ever more fanciful with the passage of time, and now routinely include assertions that she found fresh blood and that the tissue was carbon-dated to just a few thousand years old.

In reality, the “fresh blood” claim is a distortion. Schweitzer described microscopic red structures that resembled blood cells, but their appearance was the starting point for a scientific investigation, not a claim that liquid blood had survived for millions of years. Nor was there any question of carbon dating, which is not used to date dinosaur fossils of this age. Schweitzer herself, writing in Scientific American, explained that the scientifically interesting question was not whether the fossil was young, but what chemical processes could allow traces of original biological material to persist for tens of millions of years.

The new paper extends that understanding by showing another way in which soft tissues can be preserved in remarkable detail over deep time. In favourable conditions, microscopic particles of iron-oxyhydroxide, each only about 0.005 millimetres across, can enter tissues and cells before decay destroys them, replicating delicate structures at cellular and even subcellular scales.

How this was discovered, and why it matters for palaeontology, is explained in an article in The Conversation by Tara Djokic. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence and reformatted for stylistic consistency:

How Science Works - 'Miniature Dinosaur' Fossils Identified As Baby Ankylosaurs

Liaoningosaurus paradoxus

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Numerous fossils of Liaoningosaurus paradoxus have so far been discovered.

© Zheng et al. 2025

First armoured dinosaur hatchling discovered in China | Natural History Museum.

Unlike fundamentalist belief systems such as creationism, in which facts are either forced to fit sacred dogma or dismissed with ad hoc excuses, science readily incorporates new information and adjusts its understanding accordingly. That process was neatly illustrated by the paper published in September 2025 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, which reported a reassessment of fossils from China first described in 2001.

These fossils were initially classified as belonging to a miniature armoured ankylosaur named Liaoningosaurus paradoxus. Since then, more specimens have been found, but none exceeds 40 cm in length, which is strikingly odd for ankylosaurs, a group whose members were typically around 3 metres or more long.

Where creationism would brush aside anomalies like this with a shrug and a retreat into theology, muttering about ‘mysterious ways’ or ‘tests’, science treats them as clues that something is not yet fully understood. The existence of these fossils pointed to something that had yet to be properly integrated into our knowledge of ankylosaurs, requiring scientists to refine either their understanding of the animals themselves or of the fossils attributed to them.

Now, a re-examination by a team of four palaeontologists, including Professor Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum, London, has shown that these specimens were not miniature adults at all, but baby ankylosaurs. That makes them the youngest ankylosaurs yet discovered. There is still much to learn, because no adult Liaoningosaurus paradoxus has yet been found. Even so, these hatchling fossils add significantly to our understanding of how ankylosaurs developed.

Creationism Refuted - More Evidence For Creationists To Prove Their Faith is Strong With - By Ignoring It.

Ptychotherates bucculentus in Late Triassic New Mexico.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Artistic rendition of Ptychotherates bucculentus.

Illustration by Megan Sodano for Virginia Tech.

Student identifies new meat-eating dinosaur three times older than T. rex | Virginia Tech News | Virginia Tech Another fossil; another piece of awkward evidence for creationists to ignore. This time, it is reported in the journal Papers in Palaeontology.

The fossil is of an ancestral dinosaur from the Late Triassic, about three times older than Tyrannosaurus rex, dating from an era when dinosaurs had not yet risen to dominance and were still competing with the ancestors of crocodiles and mammals. It was the mass extinction at the end of the Triassic that cleared the way for the dinosaurs, just as their own extinction at the end of the Cretaceous later cleared the way for mammals and birds.

For creationists, the fact that all this unfolded over a vast span of time long before the supposed creation of the small, flat world of Biblical mythology is simply one more test of how much evidence they are prepared to ignore. Unlike science, which stands or falls by the evidence, creationism seems to draw strength from defying it. The greater the weight of evidence against it, the more loudly its followers proclaim their faith to be unshaken. So while creationists on social media endlessly demand that science prove its case to an impossible standard, and try to pass misinformation or ignorance off as “proof” of creationism, they routinely dismiss real evidence and treat stubborn refusal to change their minds as a kind of victory. In creationist circles, winning a debate too often seems to mean not changing one’s mind, even when the facts leave no honest alternative.

This latest inconvenience for creationism comes from Virginia Tech, where student Simba Srivastava succeeded in reconstructing fragments of a dinosaur skull embedded in rock from New Mexico’s Ghost Ranch. The fossil had originally been unearthed in 1982, but was later rediscovered in a drawer at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History by palaeontologist Sterling Nesbitt. Back at Virginia Tech, Srivastava used computed tomography scan data to create a 3D print of the skull, revealing that it belonged to a previously unknown species of early dinosaur.

Refuting Creationism - Another Gap Shrinks And It's More Bad News For Creationists

Helicolocellus cantori in an Ediacaran sea

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

Helicolocellus cantori in an Ediacaran sea

AI-generated image (ChatGPT Latest)

Virginia Tech researcher's team discovers 'missing' sea sponges | Virginia Tech News | Virginia Tech

Scientists have narrowed another gap in the fossil record and, as usual, no gods were found. The gap concerned the long interval between the time molecular-clock analyses suggest sponges first evolved in the Neoproterozoic, perhaps around 700 million years ago, and the earliest widely accepted sponge fossils from the early Cambrian. That gap has now been pushed back into the Late Ediacaran by Virginia Tech geobiologist a paper in Nature.

Creationists normally delight in gaps in the fossil record because they think Darwin somehow “admitted” that missing links were fatal to his theory. In reality, Darwin was doing what honest scientists do: openly acknowledging the limitations of the evidence available in 1859. The key point is that he was writing about the state of knowledge then, not in 2026. Since Darwin’s day, the Theory of Evolution has not only provided a framework for understanding the history of life; it has also told scientists what sort of evidence to look for and where to look for it. As a result, palaeontologists now have access to vastly more fossils than Darwin could ever have imagined, together with genetic evidence and radiometric dating methods that did not exist in his lifetime. More fossils are being found almost daily and invariably confirm the Theory of Evolution.

And those gaps continue to shrink, almost always to the discomfort of creationists, because they so often concern events hundreds of millions, even billions, of years before the narrow timescale allowed by biblical literalism. This fossil is especially awkward for them because it further undermines the familiar creationist misrepresentation of the Cambrian “Explosion” as a sudden, magical appearance of multiple body plans with no ancestry. Instead, this Late Ediacaran sponge adds to the growing evidence that the Cambrian diversification was preceded by a long evolutionary prelude, in which animals were already emerging and diversifying before the Cambrian began. Far from an abrupt act of creation, the picture is one of gradual evolutionary change over immense spans of time, as the largely sessile Ediacaran world gave way to the more active and ecologically complex Cambrian one.

Refuting Creationism - More on the Domestication of Dogs - Long Before 'Creation Week'

Artist’s impression of a human and their canine companion near a settlement in Ice Age Switzerland.

Credit: Oliver Uberti, Nature.

Cover picture for The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic

Canine companions: revealing the genetic history of our first friends | Crick

This is the second of my posts on the domestication of dogs and on why the facts are so awkward for creationists. It concerns research by a team led by Anders Bergström and Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Crick Institute, London, working with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a large international network of collaborators.

The team have shown that the domestication of dogs had already begun well before the invention of farming, when humans in Europe still lived in nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers. At that stage, dogs would have been hunting companions, sentinel guards for encampments, and perhaps even family pets, long before they were adapted for the many tasks later associated with farming, such as herding livestock and guarding flocks. Their findings are published in Nature.

This establishes dogs as the first domestic animals and suggests that the human-dog relationship may have helped lay the groundwork for later animal husbandry and selective breeding.

The story of the domestication of dogs from wolves is something in which I have long taken a special interest, and it was that interest which led me to write two books with fictionalised accounts of how it may have happened - The Girl and the Wolf and its sequel, The Way of the Wolf: A Stone Age Epic.

Biologically, of course, this evolved symbiotic relationship between two species is exactly the sort of outcome the Theory of Evolution leads us to expect. But, embarrassingly for creationists, it also tells a story rooted in deep time, for which creationism has no credible explanation. Worse still for biblical literalists, it makes a mockery of the claim that God created all animals for the benefit of humankind, because that claim presupposes that animals created by an omniscient, omnipotent designer would already be fit for purpose and would not need extensive modification by human selective breeding.

The researchers reached their conclusions by analysing DNA from 216 canid skeletal remains, including 181 pre-Neolithic samples - that is, from before approximately 10,000 years ago. These remains came from sites across Europe and nearby regions, including Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Turkey, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland.

Creationists previously had a little wriggle room when the earliest indisputable domestic dog was thought to date to about 10,900 years ago. They could at least pretend that dogs appeared during their imaginary ‘Creation Week’ or shortly afterwards. That pretence is now no longer sustainable. This study shows that the ancestry of later dogs was already established before 14,200 years ago, and probably earlier still.

Creationism Refuted - Earliest Domestic Dogs - 6,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Cover picture for The Girl and the Wolf

Oldest genetic evidence for domestic dogs identified in Europe and Türkiye | University of Oxford

Artistic reconstruction of Pınarbaşı c. 15,800 years ago based on evidence from archaeological excavations by University of Liverpool.

(c) Kathryn Killackey

This is the first of two blog posts on a pair of recent papers published in Nature on the earliest known domestic dogs and what they tell us about when grey wolves first entered into a domestic relationship with humans. Together, these studies push the earliest firm genetic evidence for dogs back[1] about 10,900 years ago, showing that dog populations were already present in western Eurasia during the Late Upper Palaeolithic. For creationists committed to a young Earth and to the simplistic Bronze Age origin myths of the Bible, that is yet another awkward fact: dogs were already on their way to becoming humanity’s first domestic animal long before their preferred chronology even allows for the Earth to exist. [1.1]

Since then, of course, dogs have been systematically modified by selective breeding to suit the many roles humans have found for them. That alone sits uneasily with the claim that a perfect creator made all animals ready-made for human benefit. But what makes these papers especially interesting to me is not only that they create yet another problem for creationist superstition, but that they touch directly on the background to two novels I have recently published, in which the domestication of wolves forms part of the story.

The first of these books, The Girl and the Wolf, tells the story of Almora, a child of the Drognai clan, who is raised alongside a wolf cub, Sharma, who becomes her inseparable companion. When Almora meets one of the last Neanderthals, Tanu, and they fall in love, Sharma plays a crucial part in bringing them together. The kindness of Almora’s mother, Shana, in rescuing and raising the starving cub becomes the small act from which a much larger change in human history begins.

In the sequel, The Way of The Wolf: A Stone Age Epic, Almora and Sharma have become the stuff of legend, their story spreading far beyond the lands of the Drognai. When Almora’s daughter, Shana — herself of mixed Neanderthal and modern human ancestry — chooses to leave the clan because of the tensions her family’s presence has caused, Almora, Tanu and a small band of Drognai go with her to a distant land. There they discover a people who have taken the legend of Almora and Sharma to heart and formed a close relationship with a pack of tame wolves, a relationship that has helped carry them through hardship into a period of hunting success and prosperity.

These books are fiction, of course, because we cannot know exactly how wolves became domesticated. What we can say is that the current evidence points to a long and complex process rather than a single moment of “invention”. The broad consensus is that some wolves probably began by exploiting scraps around human camps, while humans gradually came to recognise their value as sentinels, scavengers and hunting partners. The rest, as they say, is history.

And according to the first of these two new papers, that history was already under way deep in the Late Ice Age. One study generated nuclear and mitochondrial genomes from canid remains from Pınarbaşı in Türkiye, dated to 15,800 years ago, and from Gough’s Cave in Somerset, dated to 14,300 years ago, and concluded that a genetically homogeneous dog population was already widely distributed across Europe and Anatolia by at least 14,300 years ago. The second study analysed 216 canid remains from Europe and found its oldest dog genome in a 14,200-year-old specimen from Kesslerloch in Switzerland, showing that European dogs were already genetically distinct by then. [1.1]

Refuting Creationism - How New Genetic Information Can Arise Rapidly, Naturally

Lake Malawi cichlids

Source: Wikipedia

A small selection of Lake Malawi cichlids

How ‘supergenes’ help fish evolve into new species | University of Cambridge

Creationists like William A. Dembski constantly reassure their fellow believers that new genetic information cannot arise naturally and therefore requires divine intervention. This claim depends on a misrepresentation of the laws of thermodynamics and a deliberate confusion of information with energy. It is clung to despite the obvious and overwhelming evidence to the contrary, with the same tenacity that creationists bring to their insistence that evolution either does not happen at all or, if it does, must somehow have occurred at an impossibly rapid rate after the Flood to produce such enormous variation within their invented ‘kinds’ from just a single surviving pair.

So now we have yet more contrary evidence for creationists to ignore, this time in the form of an explanation for how the cichlid fishes of Lake Malawi in East Africa were able to evolve into more than 800 species in a fraction of the time it took humans and chimpanzees to diverge from a common ancestor. Readers of this blog with long memories may recall that, back in 2012, I described these fish as a particularly powerful argument against creationism.

The fact of this rapid adaptive radiation, taking place on a timescale that could be independently verified, was already indisputable. What we lacked at the time was a clear understanding of the underlying mechanism that made it possible. That gap has now been filled by researchers from the Universities of Cambridge and Antwerp, who have shown that the source of this new genetic information lies in genetic inversions, where an entire section of DNA is inserted in reverse orientation. They have recently published their findings in the journal Science.

During the normal process of meiosis, in which reproductive cells are formed, crossing-over reshuffles genes to produce new combinations in offspring. But when a segment of DNA has been inverted, that section cannot take part properly in the crossing-over process. As a result, the genes within it remain linked together as an intact block, forming what geneticists call a ‘supergene’. These supergenes can then be inherited largely unchanged across generations. The effect is to create barriers to hybridisation much more quickly than would otherwise be possible, effectively isolating a new gene pool within the wider population and allowing new species to evolve far more rapidly than usual, instead of having novel gene combinations continually diluted by interbreeding across the whole population.