Malevolent Designer - Does The Designer Favour Zebrafish Or Just Hate Humans?

Two zebrafish genes hold the key to regenerating inner ear cells, offering hope for future human therapies.

Stowers Institute for Medical Research

Regrowing hearing cells: New… | Stowers Institute for Medical Research

It's more bad news for Intelligent Design (ID) creationists who believe their putative designer is the anthropophilic, omnibenevolent God of the Bible. Hot on the heels of the discovery that some lemurs do not suffer from the age-related degenerative conditions that cause such misery for humans, comes the news that zebrafish can regenerate lost hair cells—cells that, in humans, enable hearing but cannot be replaced once lost.

These hair cells, located in the human inner ear, detect vibrations and are crucial for hearing. They can be destroyed through prolonged exposure to loud noise, resulting in permanent deafness. However, zebrafish possess homologous cells in their lateral lines—structures that allow them to detect vibrations in water, effectively functioning as a form of hearing. Remarkably, these cells can regenerate under the control of two specific genes.

It doesn't take a genius to realise that, if we accept the intelligent design argument that a divine designer deliberately created these genes, then the same designer could have endowed its supposed special creation—humans—with this regenerative ability too. Within the ID framework, the only possible conclusion is that the designer god chose *not* to give humans this ability, and instead preferred us to go deaf.

The problem for creationists deepens when one considers that these genes exemplify what William A. Dembski of the Discovery Institute cites as evidence of intelligent design: they are complex and specified, containing the genetic information to produce a defined result. Dembski insists that such "complex specified information" can only originate from an intelligent designer.

Creationists, of course, are compelled to reject the notion that these differences are simply the result of evolutionary processes. But if they also refuse to accept that this zebrafish trait—clearly underpinned by "complex specified genetic information"—constitutes evidence of intelligent design (and therefore points to a deliberate *absence* in humans), they are also undermining Dembski's single defining argument for intelligent design.

This striking discovery was made by researchers at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research and has just been published open access in Nature Communications.

Creationism Refuted - There May Have Been Two Or More Species Of the Hominin Paranthropus That Interbred

Parathropus robustus

© Roman Yevseyev.

New clues from 2 million-year-old tooth enamel tell us more about an ancient relative of humans

Where exactly the archaic hominin, Paranthropus robustus fits into the human evolutionary tree remains a subject of debate among palaeontologists. This species lived in southern Africa around 2 million years ago. They walked upright, indicating a shared ancestry with the Australopithecus and the later Homo genus. However, their comparatively small brains and massive jaws and teeth suggest a distinct evolutionary path, likely adapted for processing tough, fibrous plant material.

Determining their precise place in our evolutionary history would ideally require DNA analysis—but DNA does not survive long in the warm African climate. To overcome this limitation, a team of African and European researchers from the fields of molecular science, chemistry, and palaeoanthropology turned to a cutting-edge technique known as palaeoproteomics. By analysing proteins recovered from ancient tooth enamel, they were able to infer aspects of the underlying DNA, since the amino acid sequence in proteins is directly determined by the nucleotide sequence in DNA.

Their findings suggest that the story of early hominins is more complex than previously thought. There may have been more than one closely related species, with evidence of interbreeding or genetic divergence followed by remixing — patterns that would later come to characterise the tangled branches of the hominin family tree.

The research team included three postdoctoral scientists from the University of Copenhagen — Palesa P. Madupe, Claire Koenig, and Ioannis Patramanis — who have written about their work and its significance in the open-access magazine The Conversation.

Their findings are also published in Science.

Their article in The Conversation is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism In Crisis - A 145-Million-Year-Old Fossil Early Mammal From Dorset, England

Imaginative reconstruction of Novaculadon mirabilis. Likely this animal would have been a little larger than a mouse.

Picture credit: Hamzah Imran.

(L-R) Dr Roy Smith and University of Portsmouth student Ben Weston by the flint bed in Durlston Bay near Swanage, which is the layer of rock which the mammal fossil came out of.

Credit: Ben Weston.

New species of tiny Cretaceous mammal discovered by University of Portsmouth student | University of Portsmouth

When someone grows up being threatened with divine punishment for merely entertaining doubts about the literal truth of the Bible, it's hardly surprising that real-world evidence struggles to break through the psychological defences they've built to protect themselves. This phenomenon is what atheist author and philosopher, Professor Peter Boghossian refers to as doxastic closure — a mental state in which contrary ideas are shut out before they can even be considered.

Former young-Earth creationist and now science advocate and geologist Glenn Morton once described it as like having a “gatekeeper demon” perched on the edge of your consciousness—filtering out any facts or logical arguments that challenge creationist beliefs, while admitting only those misrepresentations of science that appear to support them.

In this mindset, inconvenient realities — such as the discovery of a 145-million-year-old fossil of an early mammal — are unlikely to dent the conviction that the Earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old, and that all animals were created in a single supernatural event. In this view, evolution is simply an illusion, no matter how well the evidence supports it.

Even so, for any creationist with the courage and intellectual honesty to read this far, the story of that inconvenient little fossil is well worth exploring. It was discovered by a palaeontology student from the University of Portsmouth, along the Dorset coast of England, and is the subject of a recent paper in Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association.

This find marks the first discovery of a multituberculate jaw at Swanage since Victorian times. Its distinct size and shape confirmed it as a completely new species.

Malevolent Design - What A Benevolent Designer Could Have Given Us, But Chose Not To, Apparently.

Coquerel's sifaka,Propithecus coquereli.

Ring-tailed Lemur, Lemur catta.

Study Suggests Lemurs Age Differently Than Humans | Duke Today

According to creationist superstition, humans were specially created by a perfect, anthropophilic, omnibenevolent creator god. If that were true, it would be reasonable to expect humans to be perfectly designed—free from defects or anything likely to cause long-term suffering.

However, the facts do not support this view. For example, as humans age, they increasingly suffer from a condition known as inflammaging — low-grade, chronic inflammation that contributes to a range of health problems, including heart disease, strokes, diabetes, cancer, and osteoarthritis.

Properly understood, this should give creationists cause for concern. The same designer god apparently gave some other primates—most notably, certain species of lemur—the ability to avoid this consequence of ageing. In fact, these lemurs even show a reduced tendency toward inflammatory conditions as they grow older.

This raises a serious question for Intelligent Design creationists: if the same designer god was capable of creating such a mechanism for lemurs, why did it not see fit to bestow the same gift upon its supposed favourite creation—humans? Or are these inflammatory conditions intended to cause suffering and disease as we age?

The discovery that some lemurs appear to have been specially favoured by a creator god—if we accept the ID creationist premise for the sake of argument—was made by a team of researchers led by Elaine Elizabeth Gomez Guevara, a biological anthropologist in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at Duke University, Durham, USA. As a scientist and biologist, however, she attributes the differences between lemurs and humans to evolution — not to indifference or malevolence on the part of a designer god.

The team has just published their findings in the Journal of Comparative Physiology B.

Refuting Creationism - African Hunter-Gatherers obtained Coloured Stones for Tools - 30,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'.

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Where did Stone Age hunter-gatherers get the raw material for their tools? | University of Tübingen

The Mgwayiza Valley in Eswatini

The Mgwayiza Valley in Eswatini

300,000 years before the Bronze Age pastoralists who later shaped the origin myths found in the Bible set their tales, South African hunter-gatherers were undertaking long journeys to a valley in what is now Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) in search of the right colour of stone for their tools. This is the conclusion of a study led by Dr Gregor D. Bader from the Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen. The stones they collected included red jasper, green chalcedony, and black chert. Researchers examined artefacts from four sites: Hlalakahle, Siphiso, Sibebe, and Nkambeni. Their findings have just been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

What information do you have on the geology of the Mgwayiza Valley, Eswatini? Here’s what current geological and environmental research indicates about the Mgwayiza Valley in Eswatini:

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1. Ancient Cratonic Bedrock
   
   • The valley lies within the Barberton Greenstone Belt, part of the Kaapvaal Craton - one of Earth’s oldest, stable geological units, dating back 3.6–2.5 billion years (1).
   • Bedrock comprises metamorphosed sedimentary volcanic sequences (Onverwacht, Fig Tree, Moodies series) alongside ancient granites such as the Lochiel Granite (~3 billion years old) (2).
   
   

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2. Landscape & Relief Formation
   • Differential erosion of ironstones, quartzites, soapstones, and dolerite dykes has sculpted the region’s rugged scenery, forming commanding ridges (e.g. Ngwenya, Silotfwane) and valleys like Mgwayiza (2).
   • The southern escarpment serves as a critical hydrological catchment, feeding multiple rivers (Motjane, Ngwenya, Nkomati), with ongoing open-pit mining risks to water quality and downstream systems (3).
   
   

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3. Green Chert Resources & Mining
   • Green chert, a cryptocrystalline quartz variant, is abundant and actively mined at the head of the valley. Michael Lee Enterprises holds a controversial mining licence, while environmental assessments have downplayed both ecological and geological significance (4).
   • Local EIA objections critique inadequate geological data—reports lack independent surveys verifying chert deposit size and longevity, with some geologists suggesting only a 7‑year mine life instead of the claimed 173 years (5).
   
   

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4. Archaeological & Scientific Value
   • Geological uniqueness goes hand‑in‑hand with archaeological significance—evidence of Middle and Later Stone Age human activity exists, underscoring the valley’s cultural and lithic importance (6).
   • Scientists view the region as ideal for examining early Earth crust, sedimentary processes, and early life—factors that make its preservation scientifically vital (7).
   
   

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5. Conservation & Risk Analysis
   • As part of the Malolotja Nature Reserve (incl. Mgwayiza Range), this area is a global biodiversity hotspot. It supports rainforest gorges, abundant endemic flora and fauna, and serves as an ecological transition zone (3).
   • Critics argue mining may degrade unique microhabitats, disrupt water systems, and potentially degrade the site’s eligibility for UNESCO World Heritage listing (4).
   
   

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Summary

Mgwayiza Valley showcases a rare combination of ancient Archean geological formations, specific mined resources (green chert), and rich ecological and archaeological overlays. This makes it both scientifically precious and environmentally sensitive. While mining continues, environmental and geological assessments are contested, with concerns over incomplete data and potential irreversible damage.

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The research is also summarised in an official press release from the University of Tübingen.

Where did Stone Age hunter-gatherers get the raw material for their tools?

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International research team from the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Nature Research Society finds early humans in southern Africa traveled long distances to get the right stone color

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A new study has shown that as early as the Stone Age, people in Africa traveled long distances to procure colorful stone, forming the raw material for the manufacture of tools. The study was led by Dr. Gregor D. Bader from the Department of Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen. The researchers investigated worked stone tools from sites up to 40,000 years old and natural rock deposits in what is now the Kingdom of Eswatini on the borders of South Africa and Mozambique, formerly Swaziland. They found that thousands of years ago, hunter-gatherers traveled between 30 and a hundred kilometers to collect certain rock materials with striking colors, such as red jasper, green chalcedony and black chert. The study has been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

In order to reconstruct the movements and migrations of early humans, it helps to look at entire landscapes, so the international research team included several sites with tools and potential sources of raw materials in its study. "Eswatini, with the collections of the National Museum in Lobamba, provided good conditions for this. Artifacts from numerous archaeological sites are kept there," Gregor Bader says. In their study, the researchers examined stone artifacts from the four sites of Hlalakahle, Siphiso, Sibebe and Nkambeni.

By working closely with Dr. Brandi MacDonald from the research reactor in Missouri, USA, Bader's team used neutron activation analysis to determine the origin of the stones. In this process, the stone samples are irradiated with neutrons, resulting in an interaction between the atomic nuclei in the sample and the neutrons. In this process, the resulting products and the radiation released reveal the quantitative composition of the stone sample, the elements it contains and their isotopes, which are similar atoms of different masses. The specific pattern – in research this is also referred to as a geochemical fingerprint – is characteristic of stone materials of different types and their respective places of origin. “Although the method is destructive, only tiny sample quantities are required and the results are excellent,” Bader explains. “By comparing the analysis patterns of the stone used and the rocks found in the region, we can pinpoint the origin of the raw stone.”

Preference shifts to red jasper

Natural outcrop of red jasper in the Mgwayiza Valley, Eswatini

Man-made tools made of green chalcedony and red jasper from the sites had the same geochemical fingerprint as corresponding rock deposits in the Mgwayjza Valley, 20 to a hundred kilometers away. "We have calculated whether the stones used may have been transported via the local Komati and Mbuluzi rivers. However, this could only have happened as far as Hlalakahle, and the other three sites of Siphiso, Sibebe and Nkambeni are a long way from there. Even if we assume that the hunter-gatherers took the shortest routes, we still find considerable distances between the rock deposits and the places where the stones were used. In addition, an exchange of materials with other early human groups is conceivable," says Bader. The stones were transported over long distances. "Colorful and shiny materials seemed attractive to early humans; they often used them for their tools. We can only speculate as to whether the colors had a symbolic meaning."

What is particularly interesting is the finding that color preferences shifted over time, says Bader. While black and white chert and green chalcedony were frequently used in the Middle Stone Age in Africa 40,000 to 28,000 years ago, red jasper was particularly popular in the later Stone Age around 30,000 to 2,000 years ago. “Both colors occurred close together in the same valley and in the same river deposits, so we can assume a deliberate selection of different materials at different times,” says Bader.

Publication: Gregor D. Bader, Christian Sommer, Jörg Linstädter, Dineo P. Masia, Matthias A. Blessing, Bob Forrester, Brandi L. MacDonald: Decoding hunter-gatherer-knowledge and selective choice of lithic raw materials during the Middle and Later Stone Age in Eswatini. Journal of Archaeological Science, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2025.106302

Highlights

• We successfully traced MSA and LSA chert stone tools to their source in Eswatini using Neutron Activation Analysis.
• Green and red chert varieties were transported by hunter gatherers between 20 and up to 100 km distance.
• We observed different preferences for raw materials during the LSA compared to the MSA.

Abstract
Reconstructing past movement and mobility patterns requires a landscape-scale approach with knowledge of potential raw material sources and, ideally, multiple archaeological sites. Building on legacy collections in the Lobamba Museum in Eswatini and the identification of primary lithic raw material outcrops through landscape survey, we can provide scenarios of raw material provisioning for hunter-gatherers in Eswatini over the past 40 000 years. We used Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) to refine the terminology as the three ‘chert’ varieties from the archaeological sites Hlalakahle, Siphiso, Sibebe and Nkambeni are more precisely described as red jasper, green chalcedony and black chert. We were able to identify the primary outcrops for both red jasper and the green chalcedony. Using a least cost path (LCP) analysis together with hydrological and geomorphometric estimates of clast transport in relevant rivers, we reconstructed potential transportation routes of raw material and infer likely provisioning scenarios. During the final Middle Stone Age (MSA), red jasper occurs rarely or is absent in archaeological assemblages, while green chalcedony and other chert variants are frequently observed. This is despite the source of red jasper occurring near the green chalcedony outcrop. During the Later Stone Age (LSA), the red jasper, and a red chert variant of unknown provenance appear more frequently, indicating different raw material provisioning choices.

1. Introduction
Reconstructing hunter-gatherer mobility is crucial to understanding human behavior, their relation and interaction with the landscape, and selective choices regarding natural resources. As stated by Close (Close, 2000, p. 50) “The act of moving is an ephemeral thing, which may or may not leave any material trace in the archaeological record. Usually, it does not“. Understanding where people obtained different types of raw materials for the production of tools or pigments, and over which distances they were transported, offers the opportunity to find these rare traces of past movements or social networks. In southern Africa, several attempts have been made using mineralogical and geochemical characterization of lithic raw materials such as silcrete (Nash et al., 2013, 2022) and earth mineral pigments (ochre) (Dayet et al., 2016; McGrath et al., 2022.1), mostly related to the Middle Stone Age (MSA ∼300 000–28 000) (e.g. Bader et al., 2022.2a, Bader et al., 2022.3b, Bader et al., 2022.4c; McBrearty and Brooks, 2000.1; Wadley, 2015). Recently, Mackay and colleagues (2021) provided a coherent macroscopic study of the Still Bay technocomplex in the Doring River catchment area, where they demonstrated that bifacial Still Bay points (∼77–70ka) from varying raw materials were regularly transported over fairly long distances between 30 and 60 km. Other than the work of Mackay et al., most studies on raw material provenance are site-specific and thus offer only a narrow window towards an understanding of human mobility, migration, and potential networks of exchange. In terms of lithic provenance studies in South Africa, there has been an almost exclusive focus on silcrete, which limits the geographic range of such studies to the Cape coastal belt where this material naturally occurs. Masia (2022.5) is an exception, offering a comprehensive analysis of different raw material varieties from Olieboomspoort Rock Shelter and Mwulu's Cave in Limpopo based on a combination of macroscopic and microscopic characterizations coupled with X-ray fluorescence, thin section petrography, and Inductive Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry.

The most common lithic raw materials used by prehistoric knappers for stone tool production during the MSA and the Later Stone Age (LSA ∼30 – 2ka) of southernmost Africa are silcrete, quartzite, quartz, dolerite, rhyolite and hornfels, depending on the region. Other materials such as opalines, chalcedony or jasper are often grouped under the umbrella terms chert or crypto-crystalline silicates, although the latter requires microscopic investigations. Those materials naturally occur in diverse waxy lustres, colors ranging from red, orange, and grey to black, yellow and green. These variations are driven by distinct formation processes, post depositional alterations and specific elemental concentrations. It is surprising, therefore, that these materials have not yet been the subject of geochemical provenance studies in southern Africa.

1.1. Eswatini study area
Archaeological research in Eswatini started in the 1950s with Johnny Masson conducting intensive surveys and some small-scale excavations at sites like Nyonyane Rock Shelter (Bader et al., 2021.1). Peter Beaumont conducted multiple excavations in the late 1960s, the most famous revealing the oldest ochre mine in the world, Lion Cavern (Boshier and Beaumont, 1972; Dart and Beaumont, 1969). All the material from his excavations is currently stored in the McGregor Museum in Kimberley (Northern Cape, South Africa), but the repatriation process has recently started. Between the late 1970s and 1989, David Price Williams undertook a large-scale archaeological investigation of Eswatini. He founded the Swaziland Archaeological Research Association (SARA) and conducted excavations at important sites such as Sibebe (Bader et al., 2022.2a; Price Williams, 1981), Siphiso (Barham, 1989a) and Nyonyane (Barham, 1989a, 1989.1b), as well as on multiple open-air sites (Price Williams et al., 1982). Since 2016, new archaeological investigations have been undertaken in the country by our joint research team consisting of Swazi, European, South African, Canadian, and American researchers, and SARA has been resurrected. The major achievements of this new episode of research have been the scientific curation of the Price Williams collection in the Eswatini National Museum (Lobamba) supported by the German Archaeological Institute, a re-investigation of the MSA assemblages from Sibebe in the highveld (Bader et al., 2022.2a), a large-scale ochre provenance study based on Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA), and the redating of Lion Cavern using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) (MacDonald et al., 2024). As a direct consequence of the curatorial work in the National Museum, we have access to the assemblages from every site excavated in the country under David Price Williams.

With permission from the Eswatini National Trust Commission (ENTC), we undertook a 10-day expedition to the Mgwayiza Valley within the Malolotja Nature Reserve at the western border of Eswatini to South Africa in 2021. Following the advice of local informants, we went there to find a green chert mine representing a potential source for macroscopically similar material found in several assemblages of the Price Williams Collection, e.g. Hlalakahle or Sibebe. We found the green chert mine on the first day of the expedition, high up at the northernmost extension of the Mgwyiza Valley (Fig. 1, Fig. 2). On the third day, we found several outcrops of a red chert variety up on the cliffs of the western mountain ridge (Fig. 3). Finally, we also surveyed the Mgwayiza stream and located secondary deposits of a black chert variety in the form of big river pebbles. Based on the geomorphology of the area, the primary outcropping of this black chert can only originate from upstream. The green and red chert varieties are macroscopically distinct, and, based on our observation of the Price Williams collection, we were convinced that these materials were used at different times by prehistoric knappers. We took multiple samples from various sections on each of the chert outcrops and recorded GPS coordinates. These archaeological investigations took place at just the right time and represented the last opportunity before permission for green chert mining was granted to a commercial mining company in 2023. Today, the green chert mine has been irretrievably destroyed.

Fig. 1. Map of Eswatini and the locations of archaeological sites and lithic sources mentioned in the text.

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Fig. 2. (a) View of the Mgwayiza valley; (b, c) Green chalcedony outcrop. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)

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Fig. 3. (a) View of the Mgwayiza valley; (b) detail of red jasper outcrop with white quartz veins; (c) knapped materials. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)

Bader, Gregor D.; Sommer, Christian; Linstädter, Jörg; Masia, Dineo P.; Blessing, Matthias A.; Forrester, Bob
Decoding hunter-gatherer-knowledge and selective choice of lithic raw materials during the Middle and Later Stone Age in Eswatini Journal of Archaeological Science 180 106302 (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2025.106302

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

Findings like these present a serious challenge to creationist narratives, particularly the belief that humans were created in their present form only a few thousand years ago. The archaeological evidence from the Mgwayiza Valley—showing that Stone Age hunter-gatherers in southern Africa were selectively sourcing coloured stone for tool-making around 40,000 years ago—demonstrates that Homo sapiens were behaving in symbolically rich, cognitively sophisticated ways long before the biblical timeline would allow for human existence at all.

This kind of long-distance transport and selective use of materials reflects advanced planning, deep environmental knowledge, and cultural traditions. Such behaviours are the product of gradual cognitive evolution, not sudden appearance or divine design.

In addition, the ancient geology of the region—formed billions of years ago as part of the Kaapvaal Craton—further undermines any notion of a young Earth. These formations, and the archaeological layers associated with them, simply cannot be reconciled with claims of a global flood just a few thousand years ago or with any literal reading of Genesis.

As always, the evidence supports a world that is deep in time, shaped by natural processes, and inhabited by humans who have evolved, adapted, and innovated for tens of thousands of years. It is a story not of sudden creation, but of deep history—painstakingly uncovered, layer by layer.

Refuting Creationism - North America's Oldest Pterosaur - From 200 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

An artist’s reconstruction of the fossilized landscape, plants and animals found preserved in a remote bonebed of Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park

Illustration by Brian Engh

Reconstruction of life in Arizona, 200 million years ago.

AI generated image (ChatGPT4o)

A Bone Bed From the Dawn of the Dinosaurs Has Revealed the Oldest Known Pterosaur Found in North America

Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park is a place that many creationists might prefer to ignore—or misrepresent. It offers a vivid record of how life changed during the Triassic Period, between 252 and 201 million years ago. In other words, it documents the history of life in what is now Arizona during the vast stretch of time that predates the so-called “Creation Week,” as described in Bible-based creationist mythology.

In addition to the petrified remains of ancient conifers, the site preserves fossils of long-extinct crocodile-like reptiles and some of the earliest dinosaurs known from North America. Now, a new study of a fossil-rich bone bed from the late Triassic—around 09 million years ago—has revealed new insights into stream ecosystems of that time, including the discovery of the largest pterosaur yet found in North America.

Creationism Refuted - How Evolving COVID-19 Is Making Creationism Sick

Simplified SARS-CoV-2 Evolutionary Tree

AI Generated image (ChatGPT4o)

News, in The Conversation that the latest variant of the Sars-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, XFG, could soon become the dominant variant worldwide, prompted me to ask ChatGPT to construct a family tree for the known variants of the virus, to illustrate the basic principles of evolution that creationists continue to deny.

Construct a family tree of known SARS-CoV-2 variants and explain how this illustrates evolution in progress. Explanation: Evolution in Progress

This tree diagram represents a simplified phylogenetic tree of SARS-CoV-2, showing how the virus has evolved since it first emerged in Wuhan in late 2019.

Creationism Refuted - Evolution By LOSS of Genetic Information

Pycnogonum litoral, adult male feeding on a sea anemone.

C: Georg Brenneis

[Body]

Pycnogonum litorale, adult female feeding on a sea anemone.

C: Georg Brenneis

What the sea spider genome reveals about their bizarre anatomy

Creationists frequently argue that macroevolution without divine involvement is impossible because it supposedly requires the creation of new genetic information to code for novel structures. They assert that such new genetic information cannot arise through natural processes, claiming this would violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. However, try getting a creationist to explain what the Second Law of Thermodynamics actually is, how it relates to genetic information, and why it supposedly forbids gene duplication, and it quickly becomes apparent that they haven’t the faintest idea what they’re talking about.

Of course, this entire argument hinges on a distorted definition of macroevolution, namely the claim that it must involve the appearance of entirely new structures not present in ancestral forms. Like so many creationist arguments, it is built on misinformation and the misrepresentation of fundamental biological concepts. Macroevolution refers to evolutionary changes above the species level, while evolution more broadly is defined as a change in allele frequencies in a population over time.

Another familiar plank in the creationist propaganda platform is the patently absurd claim that evolution cannot occur through a loss of genetic information, on the grounds that lost genetic material is always deleterious—if not fatal—and therefore cannot be passed on to subsequent generations. This claim, too, wilfully ignores well-established mechanisms in evolutionary biology.

So, a recent paper from an international team including researchers from the University of Vienna and the University of Wisconsin–Madison (USA) should present a problem for that narrative. The study shows that the bizarre body plan of marine arthropods known as sea spiders (Pycnogonida) is the result of a lost gene.

If creationists were intellectually honest, they might take this as a cue to question why creationist ‘scientists’ (to use the term loosely) are misleading them. More likely, however, they’ll claim that it’s the mainstream biologists who are doing the lying—despite the fact that the latter group provide empirical evidence to support their conclusions.

The research is detailed in an open-access paper in BMC Biology.

Refuting Creationism - The Mass Extinction 252 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Dr Zhen Xu on fieldwork in China.

Image credit: Zhen Xu

Pre-extinction tropical rainforest seed fern, Gigantopteris, (giant leaves)

Dr Zhen Xu.

New fossils reveal climate tipping point in most famous mass extinction | University of Leeds

Creationists claim that Earth is only a few thousand years old and that it was created perfectly and finely tuned for life—brought into existence without ancestors, from nothing, by means of supernatural command. Their evidence for this extraordinary claim rests on the beliefs of Bronze Age pastoralists who imagined Earth as small, flat, and covered by a solid dome. These ancient myths were eventually written down, bound up in a book later declared by people with a vested interest, to be divinely inspired and historically accurate.

Science, by contrast, presents a very different picture. Far from being a perfect and finely tuned haven for life, Earth is a dynamic and often hostile planet. Life persists here not because conditions are universally benign, but because a small number of organisms have evolved to thrive within narrow environmental niches. Throughout Earth’s long history, global conditions have periodically tipped into extremes so severe that they triggered mass extinction events. Unlike creationist claims, these conclusions are supported by tangible, testable evidence.

One such event—known as the Great Dying—occurred around 252 million years ago, relatively recent in the planet’s \~4.5 billion-year history. This catastrophe, the most severe extinction event known, was likely triggered by intense volcanic activity that caused a rapid and sustained rise in global temperatures. The resulting climate shift led to the collapse of tropical forests, which in turn reduced the planet’s capacity to absorb atmospheric carbon, driving further warming. This cascade of ecological breakdown led to the loss of most marine species and widespread collapse of terrestrial ecosystems.

The outcome was a planetary heatwave that lasted for approximately five million years.

New evidence for the role of rainforest collapse in both the onset and the recovery from the Great Dying has been presented by an international team of scientists, led by researchers from the University of Leeds and the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan. Their findings are detailed in a recent paper published in Nature Communications and summarised in a news release from the University of Leeds.

Malevolent Design - How Having a Bigger Brain Made Humans More Vulnerable To Cancer Than Our Chimpanzee Cousins

A Single Genetic Mutation May Have Made Humans More Vulnerable to Cancer Than Chimpanzees | Newswise

According to creationists, humans are the designer’s special creation, and the Universe, Earth, and all life upon it were created solely for our benefit.

If that were the case, one might reasonably expect human design to be uniquely perfect—free from disease and physical defects. Yet, paradoxically, we are more prone to cancer than our closest evolutionary relatives, the other great apes. Recent research from the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center suggests that this heightened cancer susceptibility may be linked to the very mutation that enabled us to develop our comparatively large brains.

It’s almost as though the 'designer' either deliberately endowed humans with a cancer-promoting mutation or failed to anticipate the consequences of the so-called "complex specified genetic information" (© William A. Dembski / Discovery Institute) introduced to facilitate brain growth—and then neglected to revise the design when the flaw became evident. But, of course, being omniscient, we have to assume, if we accept creationists dogma for the sake of argument, it knew full well what the consequences of its design would be and designed them with that consequence in mind.

The theory of evolution, of course, precisely predicts these kinds of suboptimal trade-offs and their consequences. As an undirected, uncaring process, evolution is concerned solely with reproductive success—not with long-term health, perfection, or ideal design.

Malevolent Designer - How A Common Virus Sneaks Past Our Immune System And Causes Birth Defects

Scientists Uncover How a Common Herpes Virus Outsmarts the Immune System | School of Medicine | University of Pittsburgh.

Intelligent (sic) Design creationists have painted themselves into a corner.

Two of their most prominent arguments—irreducible complexity (Michael J. Behe) and complex specified information (William A. Dembski)—are intended to demonstrate the involvement of an intelligent designer in the natural world. But when these same criteria are applied to harmful parasitic organisms, such as the common herpesvirus (cytomegalovirus), which is the leading infectious cause of birth defects in the United States, the implication is that this virus too is the product of intentional design by the same creator that ID proponents insist is responsible for all life.

Within the framework of Intelligent Design creationism, the conclusion is inescapable: their designer deity—typically equated with the omniscient, omnibenevolent god of the Christian Bible—knowingly and deliberately created a pathogen that causes immense suffering. If ID logic is followed consistently, their deity is not a benevolent creator but a malevolent force that engineers disease and deformity with full foreknowledge of the consequences.

The only escape from this theological and philosophical bind is for ID creationists to refute their own criteria—to claim that irreducible complexity and complex specified information are compelling proof of design when found in beneficial biological systems, but somehow irrelevant or invalid when found in destructive pathogens. In doing so, they are forced to hold two mutually exclusive beliefs simultaneously.

In reality, these hallmarks of design touted by ID advocates are common outcomes of natural evolutionary processes — especially arms races between host defences and parasitic invaders. These processes are inherently unguided and wasteful, which in itself refutes the idea of intelligent planning.

Another striking example of this evolutionary struggle has just been published in Nature Microbiology by researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. Their study sheds light on how the herpesvirus has evolved sophisticated strategies to evade the immune system — a feature that ID logic would classify as evidence of "design."

Refuting Creationism - Observed Evolution Over 125 Years!

Skull and skin from a vole, collected in 1898 in Chicago.

Authors Stephanie Smith and Anderson Feijó examining chipmunk specimens in the Field Museum’s collections.

Chicago’s rodents are evolving to handle city living - Field Museum

The knee-jerk response from any creationist worth his or her salt, when shown evidence of observed instances of evolution, is to demand a redefinition of the term *evolution*—away from its scientific meaning of a change in allele frequency in a population over time, and towards the creationist’s caricature: a species instantaneously transforming into an entirely unrelated taxon. This is, of course, something evolutionary biologists have never claimed, and which—if it ever occurred—would actually refute the Theory of Evolution.

This is the all-too-familiar, disingenuous tactic of setting the bar impossibly high for one’s opponent, while keeping it at ground level for one’s own evidence-free superstition.

So, for those creationists more interested in finding workarounds to ease the cognitive dissonance between what they would like the facts to be and what science actually shows, than learning the truth about the world around us, the news that researchers at Chicago’s Field Museum have demonstrated evolutionary change in the city’s rodent populations over the last 125 years will likely present little difficulty. They can always chant, “But it’s still a chipmunk/vole/etc., so not evolution!”

However, for those with the intellectual integrity and humility to base their opinions on observable evidence, rather than dismissing any evidence that doesn't conform to their preconceived alternative reality, this finding is a compelling vindication of a basic principle of the Theory of Evolution: that species change over time in response to environmental pressures.

The researchers have recently published their findings in the journal Integrative & Comparative Biology.

Refuting Creationism - The Cambrian 'Explosion' Just Blew Up In Creationists' Faces

Cambrian explosion may have occurred much earlier than previously thought - Current events - University of Barcelona

Creationists have long misrepresented the so-called "Cambrian Explosion" as vindication of their belief in the spontaneous creation of complex multicellular life ex nihilo — as though organisms simply appeared, fully formed, without precursors. They portray it as an instantaneous event that defies evolutionary explanation, and falsely claim that it presents an insurmountable problem for evolutionary biology. In doing so, they even misquote the late Stephen Jay Gould, asserting that he admitted Darwinian evolution could not account for it and so invented the concept of "punctuated equilibrium" to paper over the cracks.

In a particularly striking display of cognitive dissonance, this version of events — supposedly occurring half a billion years ago — is frequently cited by the same creationists who insist the Earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old.

As is so often the case with creationist arguments, these claims are simply wrong. The Cambrian Explosion was not an instantaneous event, but a prolonged evolutionary process unfolding over some 10 million years, with evidence showing a transition from the static Ediacaran biota to the more mobile, complex organisms of the Cambrian. Gould, far from being an opponent of evolutionary theory, remained a staunch evolutionary biologist throughout his career. His now largely outdated concept of punctuated equilibrium was never an alternative to evolution, but rather an attempt to explain the appearance of abrupt change in the fossil record — a perception largely due to the compression of deep time in the geological column. When properly scaled, the fossil record easily accommodates the gradual evolution of complex traits.

Trace fossils are an indicator of the palaeoecological conditions in which the organism that generated them lived.

Now, new research by Olmo Miguez Salas of the University of Barcelona and Zekun Wang of the Natural History Museum in London has uncovered compelling evidence that pushes the roots of the Cambrian Explosion even further back in time. Their findings suggest that signs of mobility and bilateral body plans were already emerging within the Ediacaran biota. This extends the evolutionary runway leading into the Cambrian, giving more time for the radiation of novel body plans and for the development of evolutionary arms races—such as the emergence of predation, defence mechanisms, and sensory adaptations.

Their results are published in the journal Geology (paper here) and summarised in a news release from the University of Barcelona.

Creationism Refuted - Now It's Frozen Wolf Cubs From 4,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

14,000-year-old frozen wolf cubs recovered from permafrost at the Syalakh site, Northern Siberia

Famous Ice Age ‘puppies’ likely wolf cubs and not dogs, study shows - News and events, University of York

The mountain of evidence that creationists must ignore to maintain their belief that Earth is a mere 6,000–10,000 years old—because it says so in a book of Bronze Age mythology—just got a little bigger. A new analysis of the DNA of two frozen canid cubs found in Siberian permafrost confirms they were wolves, not early domesticated dogs as once speculated. The cubs, discovered near the village of Tumat in northern Siberia, are around 14,000 years old and genetically similar to modern wolves.

An analysis of DNA from their stomach contents reveals a mixed diet of meat and plant matter, consistent with the diets of contemporary wolves. Remarkably, some of the meat—specifically skin—came from a woolly rhinoceros, likely a calf, as adult rhinos would have been far too large for wolves to hunt. An earlier study had identified black fur in the cubs, prompting speculation that they might be early domesticated dogs, since melanism is commonly associated with dogs but not typically seen in wolves. However, further genomic analysis showed that these cubs belonged to a now-extinct wolf population that was not ancestral to domestic dogs. This suggests the black fur mutation may have been limited to that specific lineage, contributing nothing to the modern dog gene pool.

The puppies were found at the Syalakh site, the first in 2011 and the second in 2015. The site also contains mammoth bones showing signs of burning and processing by humans. This initially led to speculation that the cubs might have been tame or semi-domesticated wolves associated with early humans. However, that hypothesis can now be ruled out based on the genetic evidence. It is believed that the cubs died when a landslide trapped them in their den shortly after their final meal.

How the wolf cubs came to be fed on the skin of a woolly rhinoceros remains uncertain, but one plausible explanation is that it was scavenged from a kill made by humans.

Refuting Creationism - Biofluorescent fish 112 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'.

A tropical striped triplefin, Helcogramma striata.

© John Sparks and David Gruber

Creationists bunker - Evidence keep out! No Science Allowed!

Studies Reveal Fish Biofluorescence Dates Back 112 Million Years | AMNH

I sometimes imagine creationists hiding inside a bunker with no windows, completely cut off from the reality outside, where a torrential rainstorm is underway. From within their sealed refuge, they declare to themselves—and to the world outside—that there is no evidence of rain, simply because they can’t see any.

Their only source of information is a handful of picture books depicting a tropical paradise where it never rains, so they believe everything beyond their bunker must be warm and sunny—just as the picture books describe. Anyone who tells them otherwise, or tries to show them a different picture, must be lying to trick them.

How else can creationists be so insulated from the reality of the deluge of scientific evidence in the real world?

That slightly tortured analogy is by way of introducing another couple of scientific papers concerning the evolutionary divergence of the phenomenon of biofluorescence. Unlike bioluminescence—where light is produced by a physiological process using ATP and functions in total darkness—biofluorescence involves the absorption of ambient light, which is then re-emitted at a different frequency. Specialised proteins absorb this light energy, become unstable in their excited state, and return to their ground state by releasing photons—hence biofluorescence functions in low-light conditions.

Fish in particular, but also sea turtles and corals, use these glowing patterns as signals—for attracting mates, confusing predators, and more. According to two newly published papers by a team led by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), this phenomenon first emerged around 112 million years ago—once again, firmly within Earth’s long pre–'Creation Week' history. Since then, biofluorescence appears to have evolved independently up to 100 times, a clear indication of its adaptive benefits in dimly lit ocean environments.

Beyond the evidence for biological activity in a time creationists claim the Earth didn’t even exist, there's another uncomfortable detail for them: the researchers declare that to understand the pattern of bioluminescence in nature, “...we need to understand the underlying evolutionary story...” Not something a creationist, labouring under the delusion that biologists are abandoning the theory of evolution in favour of creationism, would want to read.

Their findings are published open access in Nature Communications and PLOS ONE.

Creationism Refuted - A Giant Salamander - 5 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Reconstruction of Dynamognathus robertsoni

Matthew Inabinett

ETSU fossil discovery reveals giant ancient salamander

Unlike most of the palaeontology unearthed by science—which is often tens or even hundreds of millions of years older than Earth, according to creationist dogma—this discovery dates to a mere 5 million years ago. But the problem for creationists isn’t one of degree; it’s one of absolutes. If anything is older than Earth according to their doctrine, then that doctrine is simply wrong. It’s as straightforward as that.

Likewise, if even a single transitional or ancestral form exists, then the creationist insistence that such forms don't exist is demonstrably false.

Curiously, despite failing to grasp that binary logic, creationists continue to convince themselves that if they can cast doubt on even the tiniest detail of evolutionary science—perhaps a small gap in the fossil record or a question about a single species—then the entire edifice of modern biology collapses and “God did it!” triumphs by default, all without the faintest scrap of supporting evidence.

With that essentially childish view of how evidence and reasoning work, it will likely make no difference to their claims that a team of researchers from the Gray Fossil Site & Museum and East Tennessee State University (ETSU) have discovered the fossil of a comparatively large salamander dating back around 5 million years. This find sheds light on the explosive diversification of salamanders in what is now Appalachia some 12 million years ago. Today, Tennessee is home to about 50 species of salamander—roughly one in eight of all living species.

Refuting Creationism - How Living Organism's Survived - 700 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Researchers Ian Hawes of the University of Waikato and Marc Schallenberg of the University of Otago measure the physicochemical conditions of a meltwater pond.

Credit: Roger Summons

Pustular microbial mat section such as could have existend in small melt-water ponds.

When Earth iced over, early life may have sheltered in meltwater ponds | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Only by systematically ignoring geological and archaeological evidence can creationists continue to delude themselves into believing that Earth is just a few thousand years old and was perfectly created by an anthropophilic god especially for humans – its supposed “special creation.”

The evidence, however, paints a radically different picture from that childish superstition. Not only was Earth clearly not perfectly created for humans, it wasn’t perfectly created for any life form. And it is far older than creationists assert. In truth, around 600 million years ago, Earth was such a hostile place for life that it was entirely covered in ice. The polar ice sheets had extended until they met at the equator. These “Snowball Earth” conditions led to a mass extinction so severe that it remains something of a mystery how any life survived – especially complex eukaryotic cells.

Now, a multinational team of researchers led by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has found evidence that early life could have survived in small pools of surface meltwater. They reached this conclusion after studying similar meltwater pools on the McMurdo Ice Shelf in Antarctica. What they found not only showed that single-celled eukaryotes can survive in such conditions, but also revealed that the population of prokaryotes varies according to local environmental conditions

These meltwater pools act as microcosms of diverse environments and demonstrate how local factors shape the distribution of different species – exactly as predicted by the Theory of Evolution. Had the conditions been perfect as creationists insist, there could be no variation in the populations in these pools. Variation only arises because the species need to adapt to different conditions - something that would never be needed in perfectly designed conditions.

The team has just published their findings, open access, in the journal Nature Communications.

Malevolent Designer News - How Cold Sores Are Cleverly Designed To Maximise Suffering.

The human genome compacted inside cells
eight hours after infection.

Credit: Esther González Almela
and Álvaro Castells García

(Top) Cropped representative STORM-PAINT images of EdC-AF647 labeled hDNA (magenta), immunolabeled H3 (green), and their merge in mock and HSV-1 infected A549 cells. Scale bar: 2 µm. (Bottom) Zoomed-in regions are shown inside yellow boxes. Scale bar: 200 nm.

González-Almela, E., Castells-Garcia, A., Le Dily, F. et al. (2025)

Centre for Genomic Regulation Website

One of the many problems with Intelligent Design (ID) creationism is its complete failure to account for evolutionary arms races.

According to leading ID proponents like William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe, living organisms and their parasites — including viruses — must have been intelligently designed because they are supposedly “irreducibly complex” and exhibit “complex specified information”. But if that were true, it would mean the same designer is deliberately crafting both parasites and the defence mechanisms their hosts use to fend them off — hardly the mark of a supremely intelligent creator.

A further problem, and one that creationists prefer to ignore, is theological: designing pathogens like viruses is fundamentally incompatible with the notion of a benevolent creator. In fact, it suggests a malevolent intelligence — one more concerned with maximising suffering than promoting life and maximising happiness. So, when science uncovers yet another example of a virus behaving with surgical precision and apparent ingenuity, ID creationists find themselves in a bind. Is irreducible complexity and complex specified genetic information not evidence of intelligent design after all? Or must they admit that the designer is, at best, morally indifferent — or worse, actively malevolent?

The latest headache for the ID camp comes courtesy of the Herpes simplex virus — the one responsible for cold sores. Researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain, with colleagues in Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital, Guangdong, China, have discovered that the virus can radically reorganise a host cell’s genetic architecture — and it does so using the host's own cellular machinery. Their findings have just been published open access in Nature Communications.

Refuting Creationism - Confirmation of A Denisovan Skull - Homo longi

A reconstruction of Homo longi from the ancient Harbin skull found in China.

Image credit: John Bavaro Fine Art
Science Photo Library

Figure 1 The geographic locations and proteomic profiles for the Pleistocene hominin individuals with palaeoproteomic data.

The Middle Pleistocene cranium recovered in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, northeastern China.

Key Evidence Links Harbin Individual's Nearly Complete Skull to a Denisovan--Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.

One of the enduring problems with the Denisovans has been the lack of substantial physical evidence. Although their existence was first confirmed through DNA analysis of a finger bone discovered in the Denisova Cave in Siberia, and genetic traces of interbreeding with Homo sapiens are widespread throughout Southeast Asia and Melanesia—suggesting a remarkably adaptable and far-ranging hominin—fossil evidence has remained frustratingly scant. Beyond the Siberian finger bone, we have only a few bone fragments from a cave on the Tibetan Plateau and a jawbone dredged up by fishermen off the coast of Taiwan. These scattered remnants were insufficient to assign a clear taxonomic identity, so the group remained simply ‘the Denisovans’.

That gap in the fossil record now appears to have been dramatically narrowed. A near-complete skull, dubbed the 'Harbin skull'—also known as 'Dragon Man' or Homo longi—has now been identified as belonging to a Denisovan. This remarkable specimen, found in northeastern China, may finally give the Denisovans a face and, by the conventions of biological nomenclature, the name Homo longi. Since it is the most complete and morphologically distinct fossil now associated with the group, Homo longi may become the formal species name, superseding the informal label ‘Denisovan’.

Of course, Denisovans pose an even greater challenge to creationist dogma than they ever did to palaeoanthropology. Their existence is fundamentally at odds with the belief that all humans descend from a single ancestral couple who committed the so-called Original Sin, for which redemption is supposedly possible only through accepting the mythologised sacrifice of Jesus. The evidence now shows not only that there was no original couple, but that there wasn’t even a single founding species. Modern non-African humans are the product of complex interbreeding events between at least three archaic human lineages—thousands of years before the Earth was allegedly created, according to young-Earth creationist timelines.

The identification of the Harbin skull as Denisovan has just been published by researchers from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China. Their findings appear in papers in Cell and Science, and in a news release from the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.

Refuting Creationism - How Dogs Spread Across The Americas - Then Survived The Legendary Biblical Global Flood

Chihuahua dog in Mexico.

Credit: Urvashi9, Getty Images

Figure 1. Distribution of archaeological samples analysed in this study.

Manin, Aurélie, et al (2025)

Ancient DNA reveals new clues about the incredible journey of dogs in the Americas | University of Oxford

According to the Bible, all living things outside Noah’s Ark were destroyed once Noah, his family, and his chosen animals were safely sealed inside (Genesis 7:4). This supposedly happened around 4,000 years ago, according to the biblical narrative — which creationists firmly believe to be inerrant history.

The snag is, the evidence simply doesn’t support that timeline—or a global flood involving mass extinction by drowning. Not only would such a flood have left a distinctive global deposit of sediment, containing a chaotic mix of ancient and modern animal and plant species from disconnected continents, but it would also have erased all archaeological traces of earlier civilisations and palaeontological evidence of past life. In effect, it would have reset the clocks of both archaeology and palaeontology to start around 4,000 years ago.

Unfortunately for biblical literalists, that’s not what we see. The predicted tell-tale layer of silt is conspicuously absent. Instead, both archaeology and palaeontology reveal a pattern of uninterrupted occupation of the planet by animals and humans stretching back tens of thousands—and, in the case of animal and plant species, hundreds of millions—of years. For anatomically modern humans, there is a consistent archaeological record documenting their spread across all land masses (except Antarctica), during which they domesticated animals such as dogs, which migrated alongside them.

One example of this pattern — the migration of domestic dogs with humans into the Americas between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago — has just been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, by an international team of scientists led by Dr Aurélie Manin from the School of Archaeology at the University of Oxford. They have shown that all South American dogs prior to the arrival of Europeans, trace their ancestry back to a single female. One strain — the Mexican Chihuahua - still shows evidence of that ancestry.