Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, creationists often claim that mutations cannot create new genetic information.
This argument rests on a deliberate misrepresentation of Shannon information theory, developed by Claude Shannon to optimise the transmission of information. Shannon’s theory equates information with entropy (a measure of uncertainty), not with “meaning”, and it draws on mathematical principles that can be related to thermodynamics. In thermodynamics, energy is conserved—neither created nor destroyed.
Creationists then assume, incorrectly, that this means the “information” in a genome cannot be created. They also tend to overlook the fact that, if their analogy with energy held true, it should also be impossible to destroy genetic information—yet they have no difficulty accepting the latter.
Intrigued by the information I unearthed while researching for my recent blog post about Australia's elapsid snakes and how skinks have evolved resistance to their venom, I discovered that these snakes have evolved from a common ancestor that once lived in the sea, and, while there, picked up a number of 'jumping genes' that are only found in marine animals as diverse as fish, sea squirts, sea urchins, bivalve molluscs and turtles.
The more we learn about genomes, the clearer it becomes that evolution is not a neat or predictable process—it is messy, opportunistic, and deeply influenced by historical contingency. A striking example of this comes from a recent genomic study that traced the origins of Australia’s iconic elapid snakes—not just through their DNA, but through the foreign DNA embedded within it. Researchers have identified at least 14 distinct horizontal gene transfer (HGT) events in these snakes, in which transposable elements—“jumping genes” — from unrelated marine organisms such as fish, tunicates, molluscs, and turtles have been incorporated into the snake genome.
This is compelling evidence that the ancestors of modern Australian elapids passed through a marine environment, acquiring genetic material from the organisms they encountered there. The transfers are not random. They show ecological specificity, temporally sequenced occurrence, and a nested pattern of inheritance — hallmarks of an evolutionary process rather than the actions of an intelligent designer.
For proponents of Intelligent Design creationism, this presents a serious interpretive problem. The idea that different species share features because of a “common designer” does not explain why Australian elapids should contain such a unique suite of genes from marine animals—genes absent in closely related snakes that remained on land. Nor does it account for the fact that many of these sequences serve no obvious function, are neutral or even mildly deleterious, and resemble the genetic detritus typical of unguided evolution.
ID advocates will likely claim this is just more evidence of “design reuse” or “genetic toolkits.” But such claims are not only ad hoc; they fail to explain the clear environmental and phylogenetic patterns observed in the data. The evolutionary explanation, by contrast, is both predictive and parsimonious: snakes dispersed through a marine environment, interacted with marine organisms, and as a result, their genomes bear the signature of that history.
In what follows, we will explore how this discovery not only sheds light on the evolutionary past of Australian elapids, but also exposes the weaknesses in ID’s core explanatory framework. The genome of a snake tells a story—and it's not the story of design.
First, we had the example of Australian lizards which, unlike humans, have been endowed with immunity to snake venom through a simple mutation — the kind of change that creationists like William A. Dembski of the Discovery Institute would insist is the result of "intelligent design" because it is both complex and specified.
Now we have the example of the aquatic golden apple snail, Pomacea canaliculata, which — again, unlike humans — can regenerate a lost or damaged eye. The snail’s eye is genetically and structurally similar to the mammalian eye, so there appears to be no reason why an omnibenevolent, omniscient intelligent designer could not have endowed humans and other animals with that ability too. And of course, according to William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe, the irreducibly complex eye and the complex, specified genetic information are both evidence for intelligent design by the same intelligent designer that designed the mammalian eye and it genetic underpinning.
Creationists, of course, believe that humans are the pinnacle of their putative intelligent designer’s work. So, from their viewpoint, the only reasons it didn't grant us the ability to regenerate eyes — or to resist snake venom — must be that it either didn’t want to, didn’t think to, or didn’t know how to. Yet all of those options are inconsistent with the claimed attributes of being omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.
Which leaves us with only one other explanation: that it wants us to suffer when we damage or lose an eye.
All rather strange, really — especially considering that, according to the Bible, God views blemishes such as blindness as a form of profanity:
And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto Aaron, saying, Whosoever he be of thy seed in their generations that hath any blemish, let him not approach to offer the bread of his God.
For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or any thing superfluous, Or a man that is brokenfooted, or brokenhanded, Or crookbackt, or a dwarf, or that hath a blemish in his eye, or be scurvy, or scabbed, or hath his stones broken;
No man that hath a blemish of the seed of Aaron the priest shall come nigh to offer the offerings of the Lord made by fire: he hath a blemish; he shall not come nigh to offer the bread of his God.
He shall eat the bread of his God, both of the most holy, and of the holy. Only he shall not go in unto the vail, nor come nigh unto the altar, because he hath a blemish; that he profane not my sanctuaries: for I the Lord do sanctify them.
And Moses told it unto Aaron, and to his sons, and unto all the children of Israel.
Leviticus 21:16-24
Almost as an added insult to the humans it denied this regenerative ability to, while giving it to golden apple snails, the golden apple snail is a major invasive agricultural pest which causes widespread damage to rice crops, when it gets into paddy fields.
What if we could peer back through deep time and see what single-celled organisms looked like—not just thousands, but hundreds of millions of years ago—and compare them to their living descendants? It would be a revelation for science… and a nightmare for creationists.
That’s precisely what geobiologist Karen Lloyd and her team at the University of Southern California (USC) are uncovering. They study microorganisms that have made an incredible journey: born in the depths of the ocean, slowly buried under a relentless rain of sediment, and then carried by plate tectonics into the deep Earth, where subduction dragged them beneath continental crust. There, cut off from oxygen and sunlight, they survived for millions of years in a slow-motion existence, drawing nutrients from the surrounding rock. Their metabolic rates became so low they could no longer replicate, yet they endured by “breathing”—in the biochemical sense—through redox reactions, extracting energy from electrons provided by whatever electron donors the rocks could supply. Some have even evolved the ability to “breathe” carbon dioxide, something unknown among terrestrial life.
These organisms’ existence is a direct challenge to creationist dogma—not only because they have persisted for timescales far beyond the Bible’s allowance, but because they reveal how even apparently simple single-celled organisms can diverge and adapt over geological epochs. Environmental pressures have driven them into extraordinary evolutionary niches, each defined by what they have learned to “breathe.” Moreover, they exist in environments in which life as we know it couldn't survive, yet creationists insist that Earth was intelligently created, perfect for life, which begs the question, which life? The life that breathes using arsenic, lives for millions of years deep underground with almost no metabolic activity and survive in the heat and acidity of volcanic hot springs, or life the breathes oxygen and needs a regular supply of water and a narrow range of ambient temperatures in which to survive without special equipment?
Remapping the evolutionary tree of butterflies
A recent piece of research raises insurmountable problems for creationists trying to fit their definition of 'kind' into the real world of living organisms.
We often assume that closely related species look different from one another because visual cues are crucial for mate recognition. In many animals, especially birds, these differences help prevent interbreeding by acting as barriers to hybridisation. This makes particular sense in birds, where genetic architecture is unusually stable — chromosome numbers and gene mappings remain remarkably consistent — so, in theory, many closely related bird species could interbreed if not for the evolution of distinct plumage or mating displays. These are known as prezygotic barriers because they inhibit the formation of hybrid zygotes.
Given this, we might expect the same to apply to other vividly coloured groups like butterflies. But evolution doesn’t follow a single rulebook — it uses whatever tools are available. While visual cues are often important, other senses can also serve to maintain species boundaries. One of the most powerful is the sense of smell, particularly the use of pheromones.
Pheromones are widespread in the natural world, especially among insects. They’re used for everything from attracting mates to triggering mating behaviours. Some male moths, for instance, can detect a female’s pheromones from over a mile away and home in on her with astonishing precision — guided like a missile by the chemical trail.
Now, an international team of researchers has discovered that what was long thought to be a single species of glass-wing butterfly is actually a complex of six genetically distinct species. These butterflies all look nearly identical, thanks to strong selection pressure for Batesian and Müllerian mimicry — many are toxic, and they gain protection by resembling one another. Visual differences would reduce this shared advantage, so selection favours similarity, not distinction. But predators can't detect pheromones — so these butterflies have evolved subtle chemical differences instead, using scent as a hidden cue to prevent hybridisation.
Along with this chemical divergence, the researchers found significant genomic differences between the species, including striking variation in chromosome numbers — from just 13 to as many as 28. The team also discovered that the arrangement of the genes on the chromosomes is very volatile, so, different closely related species can have very different chromosomal arrangements, increasing the pressure for barriers to hybridization to evolve and allowing a species to rapidly radiate into new ecological niches.
So, the question for creationists is, how does this fit in with the definition of 'kinds' required for the Bible-literalist interpretation of taxonomy?
Information about endogenous retroviruses is normally unwelcome news for creationists because they form phylogenies which exactly map onto the evolution of different species from common ancestry. This is no less true of a new research paper published by four researchers from the College of Life Sciences, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China, published in Molecular Biology & Evolution.
Endogenous retroviruses for part of the 'junk' (non-coding/non-regulatory) DNA, but some of it have been exapted for other functions over the years and some of it has placed an evolving taxon onto a new evolutionary trajectory. For example, one exapted retrovirus with immuno-suppressive qualities has made placental mammals possible without the growing embryo being treated as a parasite and attacked by the mother's immune system.
The researchers have uncovered the complex evolutionary history of retroviruses in birds by analysing their genetic “fossils” — endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) — embedded in bird genomes. They scanned the genomes of 758 bird species and identified more than 470,000 ERV sequences, revealing a vast and previously underestimated diversity of retroviruses. These sequences are the remnants of ancient viral infections that became part of the host DNA, passed down from generation to generation.
his story could almost have been tailor-made to embarrass creationists – though, in truth, most scientific papers do that. It concerns the evolution of potatoes by a process that creationists insist never happens: speciation. Adding to their discomfort, this event took place around 9 million years before ‘Creation Week’, during that vast expanse of ‘pre-Creation’ history in which 99.9975% of Earth’s history – and life’s – unfolded.
Speciation is usually a slow, gradual process, occurring over thousands or millions of years as populations diverge under environmental pressures. But in some cases – particularly in plants – a new species can arise almost instantaneously through hybridisation, when a fertile offspring results from the cross between two different species, genetically isolated from both parents.
This latter form of speciation has now been shown to account for the evolution of the potato. Some 9 million years ago, a natural hybridisation event between a tomato-like plant and a species of Etuberosum gave rise to a new lineage. Today, there are around 107 recognised potato species in South America. While closely related to both tomatoes and Etuberosum (a genus with three species that look remarkably like potatoes), neither of those relatives produce tubers. The hybrid did – and that made all the difference.
Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences have demonstrated that this ancient hybridisation created the genetic mechanism for tuber formation. This allowed the new species to survive harsher environments by overwintering underground as stem tubers. From this key innovation sprang a radiation of new potato species, each adapting to a range of ecological niches.
And, as an added discomfort for creationists, the scientists show no signs of thinking that the known mechanisms of biological evolution were inadequate to explain how this speciation event occurred and required a special magical act of divine intervention to make it happen by creating new information in the genome.
The genetic control of tuber formation in potatoes.
The genetic control of tuber formation in potatoes has been the subject of extensive research, particularly because of its agricultural importance and evolutionary significance. The newly published study in Cell (2025) offers a major advance, pinpointing the evolutionary origin and genetic mechanism behind this trait. Here's a summary of what’s currently known, drawing from both the recent paper and prior research:
(b) Scrumping of Pentadesma butyracea (Clusiaceae) by a western gorilla.
Photograph: MMR.
(c) Scrumping of Gambeya albida (syn. Chrysophyllum albidum; Sapotaceae) by an eastern chimpanzee.
Photograph: CH.
The human ability to consume and metabolise alcohol efficiently may trace back to our ape ancestors, who regularly ate overripe and fermented fruit with a naturally high alcohol content. This is according to researchers from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and Dartmouth College, USA.
The bad news for creationists is that this discovery strongly supports the common ancestry of modern apes and humans. The researchers are in no doubt that the Theory of Evolution explains the presence of the same genetic mutation in African apes — including humans — which allows us to metabolise alcohol around 40 times more efficiently than orangutans, which lack the mutation.
This mutation enables African apes to consume fermented fruit — often as a social activity — in a pattern of alcohol consumption strikingly similar to that seen in humans.
To describe this behaviour in wild chimpanzees, the researchers have borrowed the term scrumping — a familiar UK English word for the (often illicit) picking and eating of apples, particularly by children. The word derives from the Middle Low German schrimpen, meaning ‘shrivelled or shrunken’ (to describe over-ripe fruit). It also survives in the name of the traditional West Country cider known as scrumpy.
A recent paper in Nature marks a landmark advance in historical linguistics and ancient human migration studies.
Properly understood, the paper devastates Bible literalist dogmas. In solving what had been something of a mystery for linguistics and anthropology, it utterly refutes basic Bible narratives such as a global genocidal flood and a resetting of the human population of Earth some 4,300 years ago, followed by a repopulation from a focal point in the Middle East.
By sequencing and analysing 180 previously unstudied ancient Siberian genomes and integrating them with over 1,300 global ancient DNA datasets spanning 11,000 years, the study robustly traces the prehistoric roots of the Uralic language family—including Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian—to Central Siberia nearly 4,500 years ago [1, 2]. In doing so, it offers scientific clarity on how languages—and by extension cultures—spread via human migrations over millennia. This extends far beyond simplistic literal interpretations of Bible genealogies, emphasising the deep time, continuous migrations and cultural dynamics that falsify any notion of sudden, static origination of peoples as posited in young‑earth creation narratives.
Likewise, the Harvard Gazette article contextualises these genetic findings for a broader audience, highlighting how interdisciplinary scholarship — particularly the work led by recent graduates under guidance from ancient DNA expert David Reich — identifies a distinct genetic signature (“Yakutia\_LNBA”) strongly associated with speakers of Uralic languages who migrated from Eastern Siberia westward over thousands of years [2]. The piece explicitly notes that language transmission is not genetically deterministic, and warns against over‑simplified correlations. By underscoring the necessity of large data, critical caution, and peer‑reviewed methodology, the article reinforces the fundamentally scientific (not scriptural) basis for understanding human prehistory.
From a Bible‑literalist creationist perspective—which often assumes humanity’s origins in specific, recent Middle Eastern events described in scripture—these studies are significant because they offer:
Robust empirical timelines: ancient DNA data covering up to 11,000 years, demonstrating population movements and admixture across Eurasia.
Clear geographic origins far from the traditional Biblical settings, with linguistic groups emerging from Central Siberian ancestries—not from post‑Flood dispersion from Babel.
Methodological transparency: ancient genomes, radiocarbon dating, linguistic phylogenies, and cultural archaeology collectively underpin conclusions, in stark contrast to dogmatic, text‑based literalism.
What is known of the Yamnaya, their migration and their impact on European society?
The Yamnaya (or Yamna) culture was a highly influential Bronze Age population that emerged on the Pontic–Caspian steppe (modern-day Ukraine and southern Russia) around 3300–2600 BCE. They are best known for their role in a major migratory event that reshaped the genetic, cultural, and linguistic landscape of Europe and parts of Asia.
Key Features of the Yamnaya Culture
Pastoralist Lifestyle: The Yamnaya were semi-nomadic herders, primarily of cattle, sheep, and horses.
Kurgan Burials: They are associated with the construction of kurgans — large burial mounds containing individual or family graves, often with grave goods, indicating social stratification.
Use of Wagons and Domesticated Horses: The Yamnaya are among the earliest groups to use wheeled transport and to domesticate horses for riding and traction, dramatically improving mobility across the steppe.
Patriarchal and Warrior-Oriented Society: Burial practices and grave goods suggest a male-dominated society with an emphasis on warfare and prestige.
Migration and Expansion
From around 3000 BCE, the Yamnaya expanded both westward into Europe and eastward into Central Asia:
Westward Migration (into Europe)
The Yamnaya migrated into Central and Northern Europe, mixing with local Neolithic farming populations.
This movement is thought to correspond with the Corded Ware culture (~2900–2300 BCE), which displays strong Yamnaya ancestry and cultural influences.
Genetic studies indicate that Yamnaya-related ancestry accounts for a significant portion (up to 75%) of the ancestry in many modern northern and central Europeans.
Eastward Expansion (into Asia)
Yamnaya groups moved into the Altai region and Central Asia, laying foundations for cultures such as the Afanasievo culture.
This eastward movement has implications for the spread of Indo-European languages deep into Asia, including links to the Tocharian branch.
Impact on European Society
The Yamnaya migration was transformative:
Genetic Legacy
Ancient DNA studies (notably by David Reich and colleagues) have shown that Yamnaya-related ancestry replaced or substantially mixed with earlier Neolithic farming populations across Europe.
Their arrival is associated with a massive genetic turnover, particularly in northern Europe.
Linguistic Impact
The Yamnaya are widely considered prime candidates for the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the reconstructed ancestral language of most modern European and many Asian languages.
Their migrations likely spread PIE or its early offshoots into Europe and Asia.
Technological and Cultural Influence
They introduced or accelerated the adoption of:
Horse riding and chariotry.
Wheeled vehicles and carts.
New burial customs and metallurgy.
These innovations had a cascading effect on social organisation, warfare, and mobility.
Social Structures
Archaeological and genetic evidence suggests the formation of patrilineal kin-based chiefdoms, with dominant Y-chromosome lineages spreading rapidly, reflecting elite male dominance in expanding societies.
Significance in Refuting Creationism
The Yamnaya's role in shaping European prehistory is incompatible with young-Earth or Biblical-literalist timelines:
Their migrations and cultural influence spanned thousands of years, beginning well before any supposed Biblical Flood (~2400 BCE) or the Tower of Babel.
The evidence for their existence and movements comes from radiocarbon dating, stratigraphy, and genomics — methods rejected or undermined by creationist models.
The Yamnaya language dispersal supports evolutionary linguistics, not the sudden emergence of multiple languages as described in Genesis 11.
In Summary
The Yamnaya were a Bronze Age steppe people whose vast migrations and cultural innovations played a pivotal role in shaping the genetics, languages, and social systems of much of Europe and Asia. Their legacy stands as a powerful testament to deep-time human history, migration, and cultural change—firmly grounded in empirical evidence and thoroughly incompatible with literalist interpretations of the Bible.
Together, the Nature paper and Harvard Gazette explanation represent not only a breakthrough in our scientific understanding of language family origins, but also a powerful rebuttal to any worldview that insists on a literal‑historical reading of Genesis to explain the diversity and dispersal of peoples.
Ancient DNA solves mystery of Hungarian, Finnish language family’s originsParent emerged over 4,000 years ago in Siberia, farther east than many thought, then rapidly spread west
Where did Europe’s distinct Uralic family of languages — which includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian — come from? New research puts their origins a lot farther east than many thought.
The analysis, led by a pair of recent graduates with oversight from ancient DNA expert David Reich, integrated genetic data on 180 newly sequenced Siberians with more than 1,000 existing samples covering many continents and about 11,000 years of human history. The results, published this month in the journal Nature, identify the prehistoric progenitors of two important language families, including Uralic, spoken today by more than 25 million people.
The study finds the ancestors of present-day Uralic speakers living about 4,500 years ago in northeastern Siberia, within an area now known as Yakutia.
Geographically, it’s closer to Alaska or Japan than to Finland.
Alexander Mee-Woong Kim, co-lead author.
Department of Genetics
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Linguists and archaeologists have been split on the origins of Uralic languages. The mainstream school of thought put their homeland in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, a range running north to south about 860 miles due east of Moscow. A minority view, noting convergences with Turkic and Mongolic languages, theorized a more easterly emergence.
Our paper helps show that the latter scenario is more likely. We can see this genetic pulse coming from the east just as Uralic languages were expanding.
Dr. Tian Chen Zeng, co-lead author
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
The discovery was made possible by Kim’s long-term effort to gather ancient DNA data from some of Siberia’s under-sampled regions. As he helped establish, many modern-day Uralic-speaking populations carry the same genetic signature that first appeared, in unmixed form, in the 4,500-year-old samples from Yakutia. People from all other ethnolinguistic groups were found, by and large, to lack this distinct ancestry.
Genetic ties to Yakutia also show up in sets of hyper-mobile forager hunter-gatherers believed to have spread Uralic languages to northern Scandinavia’s indigenous Sámi people and as far south as Hungary, now a linguistic island surrounded by German, Slovak, and other Indo-European languages.
Proto-Uralic speakers overlapped in time with the Yamnaya, the culture of horseback herders credited with transmitting Indo-European across Eurasia’s grasslands. A pair of recent papers, led by Reich and others in his Harvard-based lab, zeroed in on the Yamnaya homeland, showing it was mostly likely within the current borders of Ukraine just over 5,000 years ago.
We can see these waves going back and forth — and interacting — as these two major language families expanded. Just as we see Yakutia ancestry moving east to west, our genetic data show Indo-Europeans spreading west to east.
Professor David Reich, co-corresponding author.
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
But Uralic’s influence was largely anchored in the north.
We’re talking about the taiga — the large expanse of boreal forest that goes from Scandinavia almost to the Bering Strait. This isn’t territory you can simply ride a horse through.
Alexander Mee-Woong Kim
Kim... concentrated in organismic and evolutionary biology at the College and studied archaeology at the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Archaeologists have long connected Uralic’s spread with what is called the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, or the sudden appearance around 4,000 years ago of technologically advanced bronze-casting methods across northern Eurasia.
The resulting artifacts, primarily weapons and other displays of power, have also been tied to an era of global climate changes that could have advantaged the small-scale cultures that spoke Uralic languages during and after the Seima-Turbino phenomenon.
Bronze often had a transformative effect on the cultures that used it. Bronze really catalyzed long-distance trade. To start using it, societies really needed to develop new social connections and institutions. [the need to source raw materials — largely copper and tin — from select locations.]
Dr. Tian Chen Zeng.
A picture of the genetically diverse communities who practiced Seima-Turbino techniques became clear with the advent of ancient DNA science.
Some of them had genetic ancestry from Yakutia, some of them were Iranic, some of them were Baltic hunter-gatherers from Europe. They’re all buried together at the same sites.
Professor David Reich.
The newest genetic samples, assembled by Kim with the help of other archaeologists, including third co-lead author Leonid Vyazov at Czechia’s University of Ostrava, revealed strong currents of Yakutia ancestry at a succession of ancient burial sites stretching gradually to the west, with each bearing rich reserves of Seima-Turbino objects.
This is a story about the will, the agency of populations who were not numerically dominant in any way but were able to have continental-scale effects on language and culture.
Alexander Mee-Woong Kim
Previous studies established that Finns, Estonians, and other Uralic-speaking populations today share an Eastern Eurasian genetic signature. Ancient DNA researchers ruled out the region’s best-known archaeological cultures from contributing to the Uralic expansion
That just meant we needed more data on obscure cultures, or obscure time periods where it was unclear what was happening
Dr. Tian Chen Zeng.
Today, he found, Uralic-speaking cultures vary in how much Yakutia ancestry they carry.
Estonians retain about 2 percent, Finns about 10. At the eastern end of the distribution, the Nganasan people — clustered at the northernmost tip of Russia — have close to 100 percent Yakutia ancestry. At the other extreme, modern-day Hungarians have lost nearly all of theirs.
But we know, based on ancient DNA work from the medieval conquerors of Hungary, that the people who brought the language there did carry this ancestry.
Dr. Tian Chen Zeng.
A separate finding concerns another group of Siberian-spawned languages, once widely spoken across the region. The Yeniseian language family may be contracting today, with the last survivor being central Siberia’s critically endangered Ket, now spoken by just a handful of the culture’s elders. But Yeniseian’s influence was long evident to linguists and archaeologists alike.
Just like ‘Mississippi’ and ‘Missouri’ are from Algonquian, there are Yeniseian toponyms in regions that today speak Mongolic or Turkic languages. When you consider this trace on the landscape, its influence extends far beyond where Yeniseian languages are spoken.
Alexander Mee-Woong Kim
The study locates the first speakers of the Yeniseian family some 5,400 years ago near the deep waters of Lake Baikal, its southern shores just a few hours by car from the current border with Mongolia.
The genetic findings also provide the first genetic signal — albeit a tentative one — for Western Washington University linguist Edward Vajda’s Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis, which proposed genealogical connections between Yeniseian and the Na-Dene family of North American Indigenous languages.
Abstract
The North Eurasian forest and forest-steppe zones have sustained millennia of sociocultural connections among northern peoples, but much of their history is poorly understood. In particular, the genomic formation of populations that speak Uralic and Yeniseian languages today is unknown. Here, by generating genome-wide data for 180 ancient individuals spanning this region, we show that the Early-to-Mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers harboured a continuous gradient of ancestry from fully European-related in the Baltic, to fully East Asian-related in the Transbaikal. Contemporaneous groups in Northeast Siberia were off-gradient and descended from a population that was the primary source for Native Americans, which then mixed with populations of Inland East Asia and the Amur River Basin to produce two populations whose expansion coincided with the collapse of pre-Bronze Age population structure. Ancestry from the first population, Cis-Baikal Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Cisbaikal_LNBA), is associated with Yeniseian-speaking groups and those that admixed with them, and ancestry from the second, Yakutia Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Yakutia_LNBA), is associated with migrations of prehistoric Uralic speakers. We show that Yakutia_LNBA first dispersed westwards from the Lena River Basin around 4,000 years ago into the Altai-Sayan region and into West Siberian communities associated with Seima-Turbino metallurgy—a suite of advanced bronze casting techniques that expanded explosively from the Altai1. The 16 Seima-Turbino period individuals were diverse in their ancestry, also harbouring DNA from Indo-Iranian-associated pastoralists and from a range of hunter-gatherer groups. Thus, both cultural transmission and migration were key to the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, which was involved in the initial spread of early Uralic-speaking communities.
From around 3000 BCE, the Yamnaya began expanding westward into Europe and eastward into Central Asia. In Europe, they merged with existing Neolithic farming populations, giving rise to new archaeological cultures like the Corded Ware culture. Genetic studies show that modern Europeans, particularly in the north and centre, carry a significant proportion of Yamnaya ancestry. This migration also likely played a major role in spreading Proto-Indo-European languages, the ancestor of most modern European and many South and Central Asian languages.
The Yamnaya legacy is deeply embedded in Europe’s genetic and cultural fabric, but it also offers a direct challenge to Bible-literalist creationism. Their existence, migrations, and influence are dated to thousands of years before the supposed Biblical Flood or the Tower of Babel. Their story is reconstructed using ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating, and comparative linguistics—scientific disciplines that directly contradict young-Earth timelines. Far from originating from a single post-Flood population a few thousand years ago, European ancestry is shown to be the result of complex, prehistoric population movements over tens of thousands of years.
In short, the Yamnaya are a vivid example of how real human history, grounded in empirical evidence, diverges sharply from mythological accounts. Their migrations demonstrate the power of science to uncover the dynamic, interconnected, and ancient nature of human societies—undermining any literal reading of Genesis as a factual account of our origins.
Advertisement
What Makes You So Special? From The Big Bang To You
How did you come to be here, now? This books takes you from the Big Bang to the evolution of modern humans and the history of human cultures, showing that science is an adventure of discovery and a source of limitless wonder, giving us richer and more rewarding appreciation of the phenomenal privilege of merely being alive and able to begin to understand it all.
Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It
This book explains why faith is a fallacy and serves no useful purpose other than providing an excuse for pretending to know things that are unknown. It also explains how losing faith liberates former sufferers from fear, delusion and the control of others, freeing them to see the world in a different light, to recognise the injustices that religions cause and to accept people for who they are, not which group they happened to be born in. A society based on atheist, Humanist principles would be a less divided, more inclusive, more peaceful society and one more appreciative of the one opportunity that life gives us to enjoy and wonder at the world we live in.
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
All titles available in paperback, hardcover, ebook for Kindle and audio format.
Prices correct at time of publication. for current prices.
The picture of modern human (Homo sapiens) interactions with Neanderthals (H. neanderthalensis) has just become significantly richer. New evidence reveals not just a single episode of contact within the last 50,000 years, but several waves of interaction spanning much of our species’ 200,000-year history.
It was previously believed that after our last common ancestor with Neanderthals and Denisovans split into separate populations around 600,000 years ago, one lineage remained in Africa and eventually evolved into H. sapiens by about 200,000 years ago. The other migrated into Eurasia and gradually diverged into Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east, with limited contact between them. According to this model, modern humans left Africa around 60,000 years ago, encountered Neanderthals in Eurasia, and interbred with them shortly afterwards—about 40,000 to 50,000 years ago.
However, a new genomic analysis provides evidence for at least three distinct episodes of interbreeding. One occurred around 200,000 to 250,000 years ago—very early in the history of H. sapiens. Another took place about 100,000 to 120,000 years ago, long before the final major migration out of Africa, and the last around 40,000 years ago, as previously believed.
These findings suggest that there may have been multiple early migrations of H. sapiens into Eurasia, followed in some cases by return migrations back into Africa, before the final, successful dispersal around 60,000 years ago.
Some of the team’s evidence comes from detecting H. sapiens DNA in the Neanderthal genome, so these ingressions could have come from earlier migrations that then failed, leaving only their DNA in the Neanderthal population.
There are still unresolve questions about which species migrated out of Africa, when, and whether some, such as H. rhodesiensis, had a wide distribution across African and Eurasia with regional variants, so it is entirely possible that the earliest interactions with Neanderthals could have been between, say H. rhodesiensis which brought Neanderthal genes back into Africa and then interbred with diverging H. sapiens.
See the right-hand panel for an explanation of this so-called 'muddle in the middle'.
The study, led by researchers at Harvard University and Princeton University under the direction of Professor Joshua Akey of Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, also supports the view that Neanderthals did not simply go extinct. Instead, their dwindling populations were gradually absorbed into expanding populations of modern humans.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
