Refuting Creationism - Evolution of Cultivated Cotton - No Magic Required

Wild cotton, on left, has short, brown, and coarse fibers, while modern domesticated cotton has white, fine and abundant fibers. A new study led by Iowa State University scientists identified the northwestern Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico as the original source of domesticated cotton.

Photo: Corrinne Grover/Iowa State University.

Cotton’s roots trace to Yucatan Peninsula, where wild gene pool runs deepest - News Service

My last blog post looked at the evolution of the strawberry and how the evidence of multiple whole-genome duplications and speciation by hybridisation refutes several basic creationist, counter-evidential myths and articles of faith.

This post deals with the evolution and cultivation of the cotton plant, which again refutes the childish notion of divine creation, perfectly suited for use by the creator god's favourite creation, humankind, as well as the creationist article of faith that no new genetic information can arise without the direct intervention of a designer god, because this would supposedly violate the laws of thermodynamics.

As a recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS), by a team of researchers including Professor Jonathan Wendel of Iowa State University, has shown, modern upland cotton, Gossypium hirsutum, is the result of thousands of years of human selection acting on naturally occurring genetic variation. The team traced its domestication to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, probably to the north-western Yucatán, where wild populations still retain the deepest gene pool. Cotton was first domesticated there about 5,000 years ago, which, if creationist chronology were taken seriously, places it before the supposed genocidal global flood, which it appears to have survived along with the people who cultivated it.

The researchers found that domestication transformed a wild, perennial shrub with small bolls and short, coarse, brown fibres into the modern crop with abundant, long, fine, white fibres. This was not the result of a single act of magical design, nor of a sudden, miraculous improvement, but of long-term selection acting on many mutations of relatively small effect, accumulated and filtered over many generations.

The team also showed that, while human selection produced fibres more useful to people, it did so at a cost. Useful traits present in wild populations, such as disease resistance and salt tolerance, were left behind as farmers selected repeatedly from a restricted subset of the original wild gene pool. Each generation of selection narrowed the genetic base still further, pushing cultivated cotton through a genetic bottleneck.

The researchers reached these conclusions by comparing the genomes of cultivated cotton with those of specimens collected from wild populations across the plant's native range. Their analyses showed that domesticated cotton is most closely related to wild cotton from north-western Yucatán, where two random wild plants still show, on average, about twice as much genetic difference as two random modern cultivars.

After cultivated upland cotton spread out of the Yucatán, it eventually became the dominant cotton crop worldwide, displacing or overshadowing other cotton species that had been independently domesticated in South America, Africa and India. Today, Gossypium hirsutum, or upland cotton, accounts for about 90% of the world's cotton crop.

Refuting Creationism - How The Strawberry Evolved - No Magic Needed

Wild starwberry, Fragaria vesca

By Jörg Hempel, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, Link

A genomic time machine traces how the modern strawberry came to be | EurekAlert!

Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did

Dr. William Butler, Physician - (1535–29 January 1618)
Talking of the strawberry.

This and my next blog post deal with essentially the same refutations of creationist mythology and pseudo-science. The mythology is the Bible’s unambiguous claim that a creator god made everything for its favourite creation, humankind; the pseudo-science is the creationist claim that no new genetic information can arise without the direct intervention of that creator god, because, so they tell us, new genetic information can only be produced by magic, otherwise it would violate the laws of thermodynamics [sic]. Both claims are demonstrable nonsense, of course.

The first example concerns a fruit now ripening in UK gardens and fields — the strawberry. If strawberries had been specially created for humans, we might expect them to have arrived fully formed, already perfect for our tastes and purposes. Instead, like other cultivated crops, they bear the marks of a long evolutionary history followed by recent human selection, breeding and improvement.

A May 2025 paper published in the journal Horticulture Research by researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and collaborating institutions, describes a new way to reconstruct the deep evolutionary history of the cultivated strawberry, Fragaria × ananassa. Their work helps explain how the modern strawberry acquired its complex octoploid genome — not by magic, but by ordinary, natural processes of genome duplication, hybridisation and subsequent evolutionary divergence.

Cultivated strawberries, like many crop plants, are polyploids. Humans are normally diploid, with two sets of chromosomes; cultivated strawberries are octoploid, with eight sets. In the notation used by geneticists, humans are 2n, while the cultivated strawberry is 2n = 8x = 56. This genomic complexity is the outcome of a series of ancient whole-genome duplication and hybridisation events in which entire chromosome sets from different ancestral lineages were brought together in one organism.

Whole-genome duplication does not require supernatural intervention. It is a well-known natural process, especially common in plant evolution. Initially, it duplicates existing genetic material, but those extra gene copies then provide raw material for mutation, altered regulation, divergence, subfunctionalisation and neofunctionalisation. In other words, duplicated genes can be retained, modified, silenced, repurposed or combined in new ways. Hybridisation adds another layer of novelty by bringing together different genomes, producing new combinations of genes and regulatory networks in a single evolutionary lineage.

The research team disentangled the strawberry’s complex polyploid genome by exploiting the evolutionary signatures left by long terminal repeat retrotransposons, or LTR-RTs. These mobile genetic elements accumulate in genomes over time and can act rather like molecular time stamps. By comparing patterns of similarity between these elements across chromosomes, the researchers were able to reconstruct the strawberry’s subgenome architecture and infer the timing of major genome-merging events.

Using this serial similarity matrix method, the researchers found evidence for three successive allopolyploidisation events in the evolutionary history of the cultivated strawberry genome: first between about 3.1 and 4.2 million years ago, then between about 1.9 and 3.1 million years ago, and finally between about 0.8 and 1.9 million years ago. The result is a genome composed of multiple subgenomes with different ancestry, interacting and evolving together over time.

What is perfectly clear from this research is that new genetic variation and genomic complexity can arise through entirely natural mechanisms. Polyploidy, hybridisation, mutation, transposable elements and selection are not gaps in biology into which a magic creator needs to be inserted; they are part of the normal machinery of evolution. The cultivated strawberry is not evidence of special creation, but of a long, traceable evolutionary history later shaped by human cultivation.

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.

Unintelligent Design - Evolution By Viral Infection

Pomacea canaliculata egg clusters above the water line.

Apple Snail, Pomacea canaliculata

By KENPEI, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Lingnan University joint research analyses genome of global agricultural pest ‘apple snail’: Ancient viral gene-driven evolution of ‘terrestrial oviposition’ ability - Press Release | Lingnan University

A paper recently published in the journal Advanced Science, by researchers including Assistant Professor Jack Chi-Ho Ip, from Lingnan University, Hong Kong, is deeply problematic for creationists, not only because it describes a process that took place over an immense period of time incompatible with the biblical narrative, but also because it deals with a mechanism for evolution that cannot be waved aside as mere "variation within a kind", or something creationists like to dismiss as "micro-evolution".

Creationists continue to insist that large-scale evolution does not happen, so everything must have been specially created more or less as it is, with only limited variation within the "kind" — a term always left conspicuously undefined, so the goalposts can be moved whenever the evidence becomes inconvenient. This is despite the well-attested mechanisms by which biodiversity arises, including classical Darwinian natural selection acting on inherited variation, and genetic drift, in which chance changes in allele frequencies can lead to a neutral mutation becoming fixed in, or eliminated from, a population gene pool.

There is also the founder effect, where a non-representative sample of a population becomes isolated from the parent population, usually by a physical or ecological barrier. The new population therefore begins with a different allele-frequency profile from the population from which it came. Then there is hybridisation, where hybrid offspring can, in some circumstances, become reproductively isolated from both parent species, forming a new genetically distinct population or species.

And lastly, we have horizontal gene transfer, where an organism acquires genetic material from another biological lineage in its environment. This is especially familiar in bacteria, but it also occurs in animals, often through viruses. Retroviruses are particularly important in this respect because they insert a DNA copy of their genome into that of their host. Over time, the viral sequence may be disabled by mutation, or the host may evolve a defence against it. Either way, the remnant of the virus can become part of the host genome, where it is free to mutate over time. Occasionally, such inherited viral DNA is exapted for a new function, creating useful new genetic information without the slightest need for supernatural assistance. One well-known example is syncytin, derived from ancient retroviral genes, now involved in the formation and function of the mammalian placenta.

Now researchers at Hong Kong's Lingnan University and their collaborators have shown that a viral-derived gene in apple snails is probably involved in their ability to lay eggs out of water — a key adaptation in the evolution of aerial egg-laying and one reason some apple snails have become such successful invasive pests. The gene, associated with the perivitelline fluid surrounding the developing embryo, was probably acquired by the ancestor of the Ampullariidae during the Jurassic. It would be interesting to see a creationist explain how acquiring a gene from an entirely unrelated viral lineage can be described as "variation within a kind". It would also be interesting to see them explain why an intelligent designer would need to borrow viral genetic material to equip a snail to lay eggs above the waterline.

Refuting Creationism - Evolving Millipedes Crawl All Over Creationism

Hirudicryptus canariensis

Photo by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek, Virginia Tech

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

Photos by Rafael Garcia and Paul Marek for Virginia Tech.

Ancient millipedes still had secrets to tell | EurekAlert!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - No Sex Please, We're Ediacaran

A lack of sex held back life’s diversity for millions of years | University of Cambridge

Try debating with a creationist on social media and before long you will be challenged to explain how sexual reproduction evolved, because there must have been a first male and a first female. A regular form of this, betraying the abysmal ignorance of the creationist, is the childish attempt at a "Gotcha!" with, "How long did the first man have to wait for the first woman to evolve?"

Like so many creationist preconceptions about what evolution is and what evolutionary biologists claim, this assumes that each species somehow evolves without ancestry, so everything about it must have arisen spontaneously in a single individual or, in this case, in a single couple. There is no awareness of inheritance from common ancestors, nor of the slow accumulation and honing of traits over time. Presumably, the questioner thinks adult men and women being magicked into existence without parents is a perfectly rational belief.

In reality, sexual reproduction did not begin with men and women. A form of sex almost certainly arose long before animals, among single-celled eukaryotes, and need not have involved anything recognisable as male and female. At its simplest, sex is the mixing of genetic material from different individuals. The interesting question, from the point of view of evolutionary biology, is not where the first man and first woman came from, but what advantage genetic mixing had over cloning or other asexual forms of reproduction, such that it became the predominant, although far from exclusive, method of reproduction among complex organisms.

Now two researchers from the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, UK, believe they have part of the answer, and have just published their findings in Nature Ecology & Evolution. The paper, by Dr Emily G. Mitchell and Professor Andrea Manica, examines how reproductive mode affected competition, dispersal and diversity among Ediacaran animal communities. It is accompanied by a research news item from the University of Cambridge.

The Ediacaran Period, roughly 635-539 million years ago, saw some of the earliest known large animals. Many of them would look nothing like any modern animal: they were sessile, lacked mouths and obvious digestive systems, and probably absorbed nutrients directly from the surrounding seawater. In the relatively benign conditions of the Ediacaran oceans, with limited predation and reduced competition, there was less pressure for rapid diversification. As a result, these early animal communities appear to have changed only slowly for millions of years before the later burst of diversity that preceded and fed into the Cambrian radiation.

But, as they began to colonise the shallower seas and coastal regions, the Ediacaran biota would have encountered increasingly unstable conditions with tides, storms and fluctuating temperatures and nutrient levels, so there would have been competition and selection pressure to adapt to these more hostile conditions. And this is what we see in the fossil record as the Ediacaran biota produced a second wave of more diverse forms, leading eventually to the 'Cambrian Explosion'.

Previous work has shown that some of these Ediacaran organisms reproduced asexually by sending out stolons or runners, rather like strawberry plants do today. Their offspring were clones, physically connected to the parent colony and genetically very similar. That can work well in a stable environment, but it has a serious evolutionary limitation: it restricts the mixing of genes from different lineages. Beneficial mutations that arise in separate clonal lines cannot easily be combined in the same genome, so lineages compete with one another instead of pooling their evolutionary gains.

Sexual reproduction changes that. It does not create evolution by magic; it provides natural selection with more combinations on which to act. Beneficial alleles that arise in different lineages can be brought together in the same genome instead of being trapped in competing clonal lines. This is the Fisher-Muller advantage of recombination: sex can turn evolutionary change from a slow serial process into a more rapid parallel one.

Creationism Refuted - British Fallow Deer Have LOST Genetic Diversity - Over The Last 120,000 Years

Fallow deer, Dama dama

Photo credit: Jiří Nedorost.,
CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Fallow deer

Photo credit: Memurubu, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

UP News - University of Potsdam

A paper just published in iScience should, if they were aware of it, at least cause an honest creationist to question some basic assumptions. It reports that modern European fallow deer, Dama dama, retain only a fraction of the genetic diversity present in their Ice Age ancestors. This finding is based on ancient DNA recovered from the fossilised remains of ten, approximately 120,000-year-old fallow deer from Neumark-Nord in Germany, analysed by researchers from the University of Potsdam, the MONREPOS Research Center and Museum in Neuwied, and Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Creationism continues to take a battering in the world of real science, where yet another paper quite incidentally refutes several of its basic dogmas. Creationists, who are notoriously reluctant to read serious science and would probably struggle to understand it if they did, will no doubt remain blissfully unaware of this constant refutation of their core superstitions.

To ensure that ignorance is maintained, creationist disinformation sites expend considerable effort in spreading distrust of serious science amongst their followers. What cult leader would want his followers reading anything that exposes his claims as bogus?

However, ignoring the facts does not make them go away, and the facts this paper reveals go to the heart of creationist mythology. Firstly, this evidence should not exist at all if the Bible creation myth were real history: a magical creation just 6,000-10,000 years ago, followed by a catastrophic global genocide, would leave no room for a 120,000-year-old population of fallow deer preserved in an Eemian lake environment. Secondly, it undermines the creationist parody of evolution that they so often attack: the false claim that evolution must always mean increasing complexity, and that any loss of genetic information is invariably fatal.

The reduced genetic diversity of modern fallow deer is a clear example of evolution involving a loss of genetic variation within a population. So far as individual deer are concerned, there need be no immediate reduction in fitness; the problem comes when a population has less capacity to respond to environmental change, disease, or other selective pressures, and may then be more vulnerable to extinction. Evolution, of course, has no plan. Unlike intelligent design, or even guided evolution, it cannot foresee future conditions and prepare a species for them. A species can be driven towards extinction by the simple operation of mindless natural processes.

Creationism Refuted - Evolution of Gigantism in British Island Wrens

A St Kilda Wren, Troglodytes troglodytes hirtensis

Photo: Craig Nisbet

A Shetland Wren, Troglodytes troglodytes zetlandicus, Kergord, Mainland, Shetland

Photo credit: Dr Michał Jezierski

New research helps scientists unlock evolution of gigantism in Scottish island wrens - University of Birmingham

Creationists will continually demand evidence for evolution being observed, then, when the evidence is provided, immediately insist that science should adopt their childish parody of evolution, in which one species turns into an unrelated species in a single miraculous event. That is not evolution as any biologist understands it. In fact, if such a thing were ever observed, it would falsify the Theory of Evolution, not confirm it.

By demanding evidence for something no scientist has ever claimed happens, creationists imagine they are somehow refuting science, or at least providing a plausible anti-Darwin argument for people who do not understand the science.

So this example of evolution in living populations will almost inevitably be dismissed by creationists using that same disingenuous tactic. It is evidence for the evolution of island gigantism in isolated populations of the wren, Troglodytes troglodytes, on Scottish islands. And, to rub salt in creationists' wounds, it is not merely a single isolated example, but multiple examples of gigantism evolving in island environments — an example of parallel evolution in response to similar environmental pressures acting on different local populations.

In other words, this is not some local curiosity that can be waved away as a one-off oddity, but the predictable result of isolation, restricted gene flow and similar island conditions acting on related populations. The evidence has just been published, open access, in the Evolutionary Journal of the Linnean Society by researchers led by the University of Birmingham.

The researchers, led by Dr Michał Jezierski, examined four subspecies of island wren, each isolated on a specific Scottish island or archipelago — Shetland, Fair Isle, the Outer Hebrides and St Kilda. Each of these subspecies is geographically isolated, yet exposed to broadly similar island environments, and each differs significantly from the wrens found throughout mainland Britain and continental Europe.

The study showed that the wrens of St Kilda and Shetland show little evidence of interbreeding with the mainland population. These two populations have evolved spectacular island gigantism: a wren from England will typically weigh about 7–10 grams, while a St Kilda wren weighs about 13–16 grams. The largest St Kilda wrens are therefore more than twice the weight of the smallest mainland wrens, and their genetic distinctiveness is so marked that the researchers say they may be on the way to becoming separate species.

Importantly, the genomic evidence shows that the Shetland and St Kilda wrens are genetically distinct from each other, despite having evolved similar enlarged body sizes. In other words, the same broad evolutionary outcome has arisen independently in separate island populations, rather than being inherited from a single already-giant ancestor. That is exactly what evolutionary biology predicts: related populations, isolated in similar environments, can be shaped in similar directions by similar selection pressures, even when the detailed genetic route differs.

Refuting Creationism - How Our Blood Cells Have Evolved From Our Single-Celled Ancestor from 700 Million Years Ago

The origin of blood cells can be traced back approximately 700 million years to when human ancestors were single-celled organisms. When these ancestors evolved into multicellular organisms (animals), macrophages emerged as the first blood cells. Over the course of subsequent evolution, various blood cells, such as mast cells, diversified.

KyotoU / Yosuke Nagahata

The 700-million-year history of our blood cells | EurekAlert!

In a stunning, albeit unwitting, rebuttal of creationist claims, a team of researchers at Kyoto University is due to publish, on 29 May 2026, the results of their investigation into the evolutionary history of animal blood cells in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). The paper, entitled "Animals have expanded the evolutionary legacy of unicellular ancestors in blood cells", is unlikely to please those creationists who keep assuring their dupes that biomedical scientists are about to abandon 'Darwinism' and adopt creationism instead.

It will also disappoint those who insist there is no evidence for the evolution of complex multicellular organisms from single-celled ancestors — what they like to caricature as the 'microbes-to-man hypothesis', as though humans, preferably modern Americans, were the preordained end-point of the entire history of life. That, of course, is creationist teleology masquerading as biology: the assumption that evolution must have been aiming at us because Bronze Age religion says humans are the central purpose of creation.

What the Kyoto University team found was not a sudden, magical appearance of blood cells, but a deep evolutionary continuity. They developed a new method for comparing gene-expression profiles across different animal cell lineages and species, and included unicellular organisms in the comparison in order to trace the possible origin of blood cells back to our single-celled animal ancestors.

Among human blood-cell lineages, macrophages showed the closest resemblance to unicellular organisms. This is hardly surprising, since macrophages still behave in a remarkably cell-autonomous way: they move through tissues, detect targets, engulf bacteria, clear dead cells and remove unwanted material — behaviour strongly reminiscent of free-living phagocytic cells.

The team then traced the gene FOS, commonly expressed in blood cells across animal species, back to a single-celled ancestor that lived about 700 million years ago, around the time when the first animals were evolving. The implication is that the earliest animal blood cells did not appear from nowhere. They arose when early multicellular animals repurposed genetic programmes inherited from their unicellular predecessors.

From there, the researchers were able to reconstruct a family tree of blood-cell lineages spanning roughly 700 million years. Their analysis suggests that early blood cells were macrophage-like, that mast cells later branched from that macrophage lineage, and that prototypic T cells and red blood cells subsequently branched from mast cells. Prototypic B cells, meanwhile, appear to have branched from the macrophage lineage after mast cells had already diverged.

In other words, the blood and immune cells circulating in our bodies today are not isolated, specially-created structures with no history. They are modified descendants of ancient cellular systems, inherited, repurposed and diversified during the evolution of animals from unicellular ancestors.

So, far from supporting the creationist claim that there is no evidence for the evolution of complex life from single-celled ancestors, the evidence is literally circulating in our blood. It is also circulating in the blood and immune systems of other animals, carrying with it a molecular and cellular legacy hundreds of millions of years older than the creation myths of the Bronze Age.

And, as usual, the Theory of Evolution provides the only coherent explanation for the observable facts. The research does not point to separate acts of creation, nor to a sudden magical appearance of blood cells fully formed and without ancestry. It shows descent with modification, inherited genetic programmes, divergence of cell lineages, and the repurposing of ancient biological mechanisms — exactly the pattern evolutionary theory predicts, and exactly the pattern creationism cannot explain without special pleading.

Refuting Creationism - Multiple Origins Of The Japanese People

A mask depicting Aterui 'Lord of Tamo', a famous Emishi chief from the ancient Tohoku District in Japan. The Emishi people from north-east Asia have been identified as a possible third main ancestral group in Japan.

© Avalon.red / Alamy Stock Photo

Geographic regions in Japan from which the samples were recruited are described. These regions include the Japan archipelago, commonly known as Hondo, and the Ryukyu archipelago, which is termed as Okinawa in this study.

From: Xiaoxi Liu et al (2024).

DNA study challenges thinking on ancestry of people in Japan | RIKEN

In my previous post, I showed how scientists, unlike creationists, can and do change their minds when the facts change, using the example of revised dates for the repopulation of the post-glacial British Isles. In this post, I will use another example: a recent revision in our understanding of the origins of the population of the Japanese archipelago.

It had long been believed that a two-part model could largely explain modern Japanese people: indigenous Jomon hunter–gatherer–fishers and later migrants from continental East Asia, associated with rice farming and the cultural transformations that followed. However, whole-genome analysis of 3,256 people from across Japan has shown that the picture is more complex.

The new study identified three major ancestral components: Jomon, East Asian, and a north-east Asian component, most strongly represented in north-eastern Japan and possibly connected with the historical Emishi people. The study was conducted by researchers from RIKEN’s Center for Integrative Medical Sciences. RIKEN is Japan’s National Research and Development Agency and its leading national comprehensive research institute. The research was published, open access, in April 2024 in Science Advances.

The fact that the population history of the Japanese archipelago is best explained by multiple ancestral components, regional structure, migration and admixture is, of course, utterly incompatible with the childish creation and global flood genocide of Bible mythology. It is not a history of people magically created without ancestry, followed by a population reset from a single family of flood survivors. It is the history of an evolved species, carrying in its DNA the record of earlier populations, migrations, interbreeding and selection.

Nor was that the only embarrassing finding for creationists. The researchers also identified DNA inherited from archaic humans, including Neanderthals and Denisovans, in modern Japanese genomes. Some of these introgressed segments are medically relevant. For example, a Denisovan-derived region within the NKX6-1 gene is associated with type 2 diabetes and may influence sensitivity to semaglutide, a drug used to treat the condition. The researchers also identified 11 Neanderthal-derived segments associated with conditions including coronary artery disease, prostate cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and four other diseases. By way of comparison, the RIKEN article also notes earlier research showing that a Neanderthal-inherited cluster on chromosome 3, present in roughly half of all South Asians, is linked to a higher risk of respiratory failure and other severe effects of Covid-19.

In other words, the genomes of modern Japanese people, like the genomes of all modern human populations, contain the traces of real ancestry: migration, admixture, archaic introgression, natural selection and inherited vulnerabilities. This is exactly the sort of messy, contingent history that evolution predicts, and exactly the opposite of what creationists need if their mythology is to be treated as real history.

Creationism Refuted - A Common Protist In An Oxford Pond Refutes Common Design

A ciliated protist, Oligohymenophorea, found in an Oxford pond, has a unique genetic code.

The end of genes: routine test reveals unique divergence in genetic code | Earlham Institute

When working as a Senior Medical Research Technician for Oxford University, one of my pleasures on a sunny Summer day was to take a lunch break walking in the University Parks with colleagues, where we could watch first class cricket free, or, more interestingly, explore the ponds and banks of the Cherwell. Little did we know that almost 60 years later, an organism living in one of those ponds would yield up such compelling evidence that life is the result of an evolutionary process, with no evidence of divine intervention.

Creationists often cite the near-universality of the genetic code as evidence of a single designer using the same system for all life. Of course, the more obvious scientific explanation is common ancestry: all living organisms inherited the same basic translation system from a remote common ancestor, with later lineages modifying it in small but revealing ways. But even on creationist terms, the argument is a hostage to fortune, because if the same code supposedly points to the same designer, then differences in that code raise the obvious question: why would the same designer do the job in different ways?

That awkward question is neatly illustrated by research from the Earlham Institute, published in PLOS Genetics. The research concerns a single-celled ciliate, Oligohymenophorea sp. PL0344, found in a pond in Oxford University Parks, which has done something highly unusual with its genetic code. Codons that normally act as full stops in genes have been reassigned so that, instead of telling the cell to stop making a protein, they now code for amino acids.

This is not a trivial detail. The genetic code is the rulebook by which DNA and RNA sequences are translated into proteins. In most organisms, three particular codons act as stop signals, marking the end of a gene’s protein-coding sequence. Altering those signals might be expected to cause chaos, yet here is an organism in which evolution has tinkered with one of biology’s most fundamental systems and produced a viable alternative arrangement.

For creationists, this creates a familiar problem. The genetic code is invoked when it appears convenient to claim common design, but its exceptions are quietly ignored because they point instead to historical contingency, descent with modification, and evolutionary experimentation. Biology is not showing us the work of an omniscient engineer standardising a perfect system; it is showing us inherited systems being modified, repurposed and patched by evolution.

Creationism Refuted - Butterfly Speciation - 180,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Top Heliconius elevatus
Left: Heliconius pardalinus   Right: Heliconius melpomene

Heliconius elevatus, a hybrid between Heliconius melpomene and Heliconius pardalinus

New butterfly species created 200,000 years ago by two species interbreeding - News and events, University of York

About 200,000 years ago, in the Amazon rainforest of South America, something happened that creationists claim cannot happen. Not only did it happen long before the world existed according to creationist mythology, but a new species arose without the intervention of a supernatural entity, and without the magical creation of a new species without ancestors.

As reported in the journal Nature, a new species of butterfly, Heliconius elevatus, arose through hybridisation involving the ancestors of two related Heliconius species, Heliconius melpomene and Heliconius pardalinus. Today, all three species coexist in the Amazon rainforest.

But that is not the only problem for creationists who continually demand evidence of a “speciation event”, as though speciation were a single moment involving a single individual, rather than the population-level process explained by the Theory of Evolution. This example shows that speciation can be rapid in evolutionary terms, yet still go completely unnoticed. A single hybrid, even if found, would not be regarded as a new species, but as the product of a chance mating between two related species. It is only if hybridisation produces a population that remains distinct over generations, with its own ecological niche, mating preferences and genetic identity, that taxonomists are justified in recognising it as a new species.

In plants, hybrid speciation often involves polyploidy — a doubling of chromosome number — which can prevent hybrids from breeding with either parent species while allowing them to breed with one another. But Heliconius elevatus is a much rarer example of homoploid hybrid speciation, in which a new species arises without a change in chromosome number. The picture is complicated by the fact that, over time, there has been continuing gene flow from one of the parent lineages, H. pardalinus, which has homogenised about 99% of the genome. However, the remaining small islands of DNA introgressed from H. melpomene control traits that help maintain H. elevatus as a distinct species: colour pattern, wing shape, host plant preference, sex pheromones, mate choice and flight behaviour. It is this distinctive combination of traits that enables the new species to coexist with both parent species rather than being absorbed back into either of them.

Creationism Refuted - How Evolution Works

Mimicry in Butterflies Is Seen here on These Classic “Plates” Showing Four Forms of H. numata, Two Forms of H. melpomene, and the Two Corresponding Mimicking Forms of H. erato.

Source - Repeating Patterns of Mimicry. Meyer A, PLoS Biology, Vol. 4/10/2006, e341 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040341, CC BY 2.5, Link

Evolution has reused the same genes for 120 million years, study shows - News and events, University of York

The great day creationists have been assuring themselves is imminent — and have been doing so for at least half a century — when evolutionary biologists finally announce that they have abandoned the Theory of Evolution because it fails to explain the evidence, seems to recede even further with almost every new research paper. Instead of being replaced by creationism, complete with unproven supernatural entities, magic, “unknowable mysteries” and evidence-free Biblical folklore treated as real history, evolution remains the basic framework within which modern biology makes sense of the evidence, formulates hypotheses and interprets results.

Almost invariably, research that appears at first sight to question some aspect of evolution is doing nothing of the sort. It is refining the details. That is the case with a new paper in PLOS Biology by a team led by scientists at the University of York, the University of Sheffield and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, which suggests that, in some circumstances, evolution may be more predictable than a simple caricature of random mutation filtered by natural selection would lead us to expect.

The team analysed the genomes of seven species of Ithomiini and Heliconius butterflies, together with the day-flying moth Chetone histrio. These lineages diverged between about 1 million and 120 million years ago, yet they have evolved remarkably similar wing colour patterns as members of neotropical mimicry rings. These warning patterns signal to predators that the insects are toxic or distasteful, so different species benefit by converging on similar “do not eat me” designs.

What the researchers found was striking. In several butterfly lineages, similar colour-pattern switches were associated with the same two genes, ivory and optix. More precisely, the important changes were not usually in the protein-coding parts of those genes themselves, but in nearby regulatory regions — the genetic switches that determine when and where those genes are turned on and off during wing development. In other words, natural selection has repeatedly arrived at similar visible results by acting on the same underlying developmental toolkit.

This is not evolution being refuted; it is evolution being understood in greater detail. What looks like simple convergence from the outside turns out, at the genomic level, to be a repeated use of the same limited set of viable routes. Evolution is still contingent, still dependent on mutation, recombination, selection and inheritance, but it is not infinitely free to do anything at all. Developmental systems constrain what variations are available, and those constraints can make some evolutionary outcomes more likely than others.

One particularly awkward aspect for creationists such as Stephen Meyer, who insist that new “information” must be intelligently inserted by some unknown mechanism, is that the study shows how major changes in form and appearance can arise from changes in the regulation and arrangement of existing DNA. In the moth Chetone histrio, colour-pattern variation is associated with a large inversion — a section of DNA flipped in orientation — closely resembling the inversion-based “supergene” architecture seen in one of the co-mimetic butterflies, Heliconius numata. No designer is required; ordinary genomic processes, filtered by selection, are enough.

It is also worth noting the timescale. These same genetic routes appear to have been available to lepidopterans since deep in the Mesozoic, around the time of the dinosaurs. The predators, environments and ecological communities have changed enormously since then, but the evolutionary principle remains the same: when similar selective pressures act on organisms with similar developmental machinery, evolution can repeatedly find similar solutions.

Creationism Refuted - Crabby Creationists Scuttle Off

Some of the true crab species included in the study.

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

European shore crab, Carcinus maenas

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

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

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

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

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

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 - The Complex Origins of Modern Humans Revealed - No Magic Required

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

View of the village of Kuboes, on the border of South Africa and Namibia. DNA samples were collected from Nama individuals who have historically lived in the region.

Brenna Henn/UC Davis.

New UC Davis Research Using DNA Changes Origin of Human Species | College of Biological Sciences

Research first published in Nature in 2023 shows just how wide of the mark the Bronze Age authors of the Bible’s origin myths were when they guessed at human origins. Of course, in the absence of any knowledge or understanding of the true age of Earth, the history of life on it, or the existence of deep human ancestry, their guesses were no better than we would expect from people trying to explain the world with folklore rather than evidence.

In fact, as the evidence in the 2023 paper by a team co-led by Professor Brenna Henn of the University of California, Davis, and Simon Gravel of McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, shows, modern humans did not emerge from a single founding couple, or even from one simple, isolated ancestral population. Instead, our origins lie in a complex, dynamic network of human groups that diversified within Africa, evolved in partial isolation, and later exchanged genes as populations moved and merged.

In that respect, human evolution resembles other cases in nature where populations diverge, remain partly distinct, and yet continue to exchange genes — such as the carrion crow/hooded crow Corvus complex, the Eurasian complex of the great tit (Parus major) and its related forms, and the circumpolar herring gull/lesser black-backed gull Larus complex. These examples show evolution not as a neat ladder or a set of separately created “kinds”, but as a branching, reticulating process in which boundaries can be blurred by gene flow.

This process of diversification and later remixing continued in Eurasia, where Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals, Denisovans and, possibly, other human populations. Neanderthals eventually disappeared as a distinct population, or were partly absorbed into expanding Homo sapiens populations, around 40,000 years ago.

Far from the single ancestral couple that may have seemed intuitive to parochial Bronze Age pastoralists, modern humanity emerged from a population history that looks less like a single line of descent and more like a tangled bush with cross-linking branches.

The researchers reached this conclusion by analysing DNA sequenced from saliva samples from 44 modern Nama individuals from southern Africa, an Indigenous population known to carry exceptionally high levels of genetic diversity compared with many other modern groups. From that genetic data, the team developed a model suggesting that the earliest detectable split among ancestral human populations occurred between 120,000 and 135,000 years ago, after two or more weakly differentiated Homo populations had already been interbreeding for hundreds of thousands of years.

Even after that split, migration continued between the populations, producing what the researchers describe as a “weakly structured stem” for modern human origins in Africa. Rather than a single stem from which humanity simply sprouted, human evolution is better understood as a reticulated process: branching, merging, and branching again.

Creationism Refuted - 'Doggerland' Was Lush Forest - Over 6,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Southern Doggerland, 16,000 years ago

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

Southern 'Doggerland' 16,000 years ago.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking).

Warwick Study: Ancient Forests Under North Sea Lost World

More than 16,000 years ago, long before, according to their favourite Bronze Age mythology, creationists' little god created a small flat Earth under a dome centred on the Middle East, people and animals were able to walk from continental Europe into what are now the British Isles. They did so not by walking on water, but across dry land now submerged beneath the North Sea, of which Dogger Bank is one surviving remnant. From this lost landscape, Ice Age fossils such as mammoth teeth and tusks are still regularly dredged up in trawlers' nets.

Whatever hominins left the famous footprints at Happisburgh, Norfolk, almost certainly reached Britain on foot from western Europe, as did, much later, the hominins represented at Swanscombe in Kent and Pontnewydd Cave in Denbighshire, Wales.

Now, evidence presented in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by a team led by Professor Robin G. Allaby of Warwick University's School of Life Sciences shows that southern Doggerland was not a bleak, barren wasteland but supported temperate woodland more than 16,000 years ago. The team reached this conclusion from a detailed analysis of 252 sediment samples from 41 marine cores taken along the prehistoric Southern River in southern Doggerland, where exceptionally well-preserved deposits preserve an environmental record from the Late Pleistocene into the Holocene.

For creationists, the problem is not merely the age of this drowned landscape, awkward though that is for biblical chronology. It is the existence of the evidence itself: well-preserved, datable layers laid down over vast spans of time, preserving a coherent ecological history that can be tested, checked and verified. If biblical mythology were true, those layers should not exist in anything like this form. But they do, and they tell a story utterly at odds with Genesis.

In science, evidence that contradicts a hypothesis counts against it. A theory that repeatedly fails is supposed to be revised or abandoned. Creationism works the other way round. Evidence against it is treated not as a reason to change one's mind, but as a test of faith. By that twisted logic, the more decisively reality refutes it, the more convinced its followers become that they must be right. That is not intellectual strength. It is simply a refusal to let evidence matter.

An interesting aspect to this work, and one that may upset creationists, is the fact that the team used two different, unrelated methods for dating - carbon dating and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating which converged on the same dates.

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]