I wrote recently about how and why dinosaurs are such a problem for creationists, which is why some of them resort to the desperate and ludicrously implausible claim that non-avian dinosaurs were contemporaneous with modern humans.
Their problem has now become a little worse with the announcement, in a paper in Scientific Reports, of the discovery of a new species of long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur from Thailand. The study was led by palaeontologists from University College London (UCL), Mahasarakham University, Suranaree University of Technology and Sirindhorn Museum in Thailand. The dinosaur has been named Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis and is described as the largest dinosaur yet found in Southeast Asia. Its fossilised bones were discovered about ten years ago at the edge of a communal pond in Chaiyaphum Province, north-eastern Thailand.
The scale of the animal is impressive. One of its front leg bones, the right humerus, was 1.78 metres long — about the height of an adult human. From the preserved spine, ribs, pelvis and limb bones, the researchers estimate that Nagatitan was about 27 metres long and weighed around 27 tonnes, roughly the same as nine adult Asian elephants.
Nagatitan was a sauropod — one of the long-necked, long-tailed, herbivorous dinosaurs that included animals such as Diplodocus and Brontosaurus. More specifically, it was a somphospondylan titanosauriform, belonging to Euhelopodidae, a clade of sauropods so far known only from Asia. It lived during the Early Cretaceous, about 100–120 million years ago, in what was then a semi-arid landscape crossed by meandering rivers and inhabited by fish, freshwater sharks, crocodile-like reptiles, pterosaurs, smaller herbivorous dinosaurs and large theropod predators.
An open-access paper published in January 2025 in the journal Analytical Chemistry will no doubt have had creationist disinformation merchants rubbing their hands with glee, because it is exactly the sort of finding they can misrepresent to their scientifically illiterate followers as 'proof' that dinosaurs lived only a few thousand years ago, provided they first wrap it in the usual recycled falsehoods about geological dating methods.
The paper, by a team led by Professor Stephen Taylor of the University of Liverpool, with colleagues from the university’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, the Materials Innovation Factory, and the Pasarow Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, reports strong evidence for preserved collagen remnants in a 66-million-year-old dinosaur fossil. The fossil in question is a 22 kg sacrum from Edmontosaurus, a duck-billed hadrosaur, excavated from Upper Cretaceous strata of the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota.
Of course, what creationists will not be telling their followers is that this was not a case of fresh dinosaur meat, intact soft tissue, or anything remotely resembling a recently dead animal. The researchers used several independent analytical techniques. Cross-polarised light microscopy showed a pattern of birefringence consistent with collagen; tandem liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry identified and quantified hydroxyproline, an amino acid strongly associated with collagen in bone; and bottom-up proteomics detected collagen peptide sequences. In other words, the finding is evidence of degraded collagen remnants preserved within an exceptionally well-preserved fossil, not evidence that the fossil is young.
To a creationist disinformation merchant, the question will be: how can we exploit the intuitive but mistaken assumption that all proteins must decay within a few years, so that the presence of collagen remnants can be sold as 'proof' that this dinosaur died recently? To a scientist, the question is very different: since the fossil comes from rocks known from independent geological evidence to be around 66 million years old, what happened during fossilisation to allow traces of original organic molecules to persist for so long?
That contrast could hardly be clearer. Creationism begins with its conclusion and then tries to force every inconvenient fact into it. Science begins with the evidence and asks what the evidence implies. Creationists ask how the facts can be made to protect a predetermined dogma; scientists ask what has to be revised, refined, or investigated further in the light of new evidence.
The real scientific importance of this discovery is not that it challenges the age of the fossil, but that it opens up new possibilities for studying ancient life. If remnants of collagen can survive under particular fossilisation conditions, then other exceptionally preserved fossils may also retain molecular traces that can help clarify relationships between extinct animals, reveal more about dinosaur biology, and improve our understanding of how organic molecules can persist over geological time.
Creationism seeks to close down enquiry by pretending that all the answers were written down by Bronze Age storytellers. Science does the opposite: it asks better questions, develops better techniques, and adds to the sum total of human knowledge.
Llangorse Lake and key Late Palaeolithic sites and other palaeoenvironmental records referred to in the text within the British land mass (green) and the ice sheet extent (white) at 16 ka (ref. 2).
I've posted a few examples recently showing how scientists, unlike creationists, can and do change their minds when the evidence changes. Far from being a weakness, this is one of science’s great strengths. It is creationism, with its fixed conclusions and evidence-proof dogma, that has the fundamental problem.
This post, and my next one, will look at two more such examples. Neither will bring any comfort to creationists hoping to show that science is unreliable, or that scientists simply invent data to protect some preconceived orthodoxy.
The first concerns a revised estimate of when humans returned to what are now the British Isles after the Last Glacial Maximum. The next will look at how new evidence has required a revision of the accepted view of the origins of the population of the Japanese Archipelago. Both, of course, sit very awkwardly with the Bible-based narrative that requires belief in a magical creation without ancestry, followed by a population reset in which all modern humans supposedly descend from eight survivors of a genocidal flood, radiating out from the Middle East only a few thousand years ago.
Firstly, then, the repopulation of the British Isles. It had long been assumed that people moved back into Britain from north-western Europe around 14,700 years ago, as the climate warmed at the end of the last ice age. That estimate has now been pushed back by about 500 years, to around 15,200 years ago. In turn, this has forced scientists to reassess the timing and pattern of the climatic changes that made such a return possible.
The revision arose from improved geochronology and the recalibration of radiocarbon dates. Once the earliest known post-glacial human evidence in Britain was placed at about 15,200–15,000 years ago, there was an obvious problem: the existing climate models suggested that Britain should still have been too cold, not only for people, but also for the grazing animals they depended on, such as reindeer and horses.
Rather than ignore the discrepancy, or force the evidence to fit the old model, scientists did what scientists are supposed to do: they re-examined the data. A reassessment of lake-bed cores, especially from Llangorse Lake in South Wales, showed that parts of southern Britain had indeed experienced an earlier period of summer warming. This would have created the conditions for grassland expansion, the northward movement of prey species, and the return of human hunter-gatherers.
Adrian Palmer has also written an article in The Conversation, in which he explains their findings and why the discovery of earlier human remains made it necessary to reassess the timetable of climate change. His article is reproduced here, under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
Mount Toba in the lake formed in the volcanic caldera
Sometimes, religion can be right, but, as Sam Harris has pointed out, when it is right, it is right by accident. Religious beliefs are not based on testable evidence, predictive models or a willingness to be corrected by facts; they amount to little more than inherited guesses, protected from scrutiny by faith. In the loosest possible sense, creationist stories of a tiny ancestral human population contain an accidental echo of a real scientific idea: human ancestry includes bottlenecks, founder effects and periods when populations were small and vulnerable.
But that is where the similarity ends. There was no global flood a few thousand years ago, no ark, no family of eight repopulating the world, and no magic reset of human history in the Bronze Age Middle East. One of the real events sometimes discussed in this context occurred about 74,000 years ago, when the Toba volcano, in what is now Sumatra, Indonesia, produced one of the largest eruptions of the last 2.5 million years. The eruption ejected an estimated 672 cubic miles, or about 2,800 cubic kilometres, of volcanic material into the atmosphere, with the potential to darken skies, cool the climate and devastate ecosystems close to the volcano. [1]
For some years, this gave rise to the Toba catastrophe hypothesis: the idea that the eruption caused a volcanic winter and drove the human population down to fewer than 10,000 individuals. That would have been a dramatic genetic bottleneck, and it is easy to see why it attracted attention. However, the link between Toba and a species-wide human near-extinction is still debated, and recent archaeological and environmental evidence has increasingly complicated, and in some cases weakened, the original claim. Human groups close to the eruption may well have been wiped out, but evidence from other regions suggests continuity, survival and adaptation rather than global extinction followed by repopulation from a tiny remnant. [2]
The more interesting scientific question, therefore, is not simply whether humanity was almost wiped out, but how different human populations coped with a major environmental shock. Like many catastrophic events, the Toba eruption would have imposed severe local and regional pressures. Those who survived would not have done so because they were specially created or divinely protected, but because some populations had the behavioural flexibility, social cooperation, tool use and ecological knowledge needed to adapt to rapidly changing conditions.
The evidence for the eruption and its possible effects on human evolution is discussed in an article in The Conversation by Jayde N. Hirniak, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at the Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University, USA. Her article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence:
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.
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.
An artist’s interpretation of life and death after the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. The three hair-covered forms (left) represent species of plankton found inside the crater made by the impact. The geometric form (bottom left) is a species of algae. The bones belong to an extinct marine reptile.
The University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences/John Maisano.
That life on Earth eventually recovered after the Chicxulub impact—the asteroid strike that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs and much of the planet’s megafauna—is hardly surprising. If it had not, mammals and birds would not be the dominant land vertebrates today. What may be more surprising is how quickly that recovery appears to have begun, according to new research led by Assistant Professor Chris Lowery of the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) at the Jackson School of Geosciences.
For creationists, the study presents yet another awkward problem. Not only did these events occur 66 million years ago — tens of millions of years before primates evolved, let alone the humans that some creationists insist lived alongside dinosaurs — but the results also show evolution proceeding exactly as evolutionary theory predicts.
Long before anatomically modern Homo sapiens took their first tentative steps out of Africa and established themselves in Eurasia, an archaic hominin, Homo erectus, had already done so about a million years earlier, spreading across Asia into what is now the Indonesian archipelago and diversifying into a number of species and regional variants along the way.
One lineage settled on the island of Flores, where they encountered a miniature species of elephant, Stegodon florensis insularis, which probably became one of their principal sources of meat. By a process known to evolutionary biologists as Foster's Rule or the “island effect”, the descendants of these hominins also became smaller, eventually evolving into Homo floresiensis, popularly known as “The Hobbit” on account of their diminutive stature. Then, quite suddenly, they disappeared from history some 50,000 years ago.
Now an international team of archaeologists, including scientists from the University of Wollongong (UOW), Australia, believe they have found evidence explaining their extinction. It appears to have coincided with the disappearance of Stegodon florensis insularis and to have been driven by extensive climate change that began about 76,000 years ago, culminating in severe summer droughts between 61,000 and 50,000 years ago. The researchers reached this conclusion through analysis of the chemical record preserved in stalagmites from Flores caves, alongside isotopic data from the teeth of Stegodon. Their paper has just been published open access in Communications Earth & Environment.
Figure 3. View facing west over the surface of the deposits in the main chamber at the start of the current fieldwork, showing the paint markings made by Mr Redshaw.
A good thousand years before creationism’s god allegedly created the first two humans, the body of a young girl was being buried in a cave in Cumbria, northern England.
The girl’s remains were discovered about three years ago in Heaning Wood Bone Cave by local archaeologist Martin Stables, from the nearby village of Great Urswick. The University of Lancashire team have now succeeded in extracting enough DNA to determine that she was between about 2.5 and 3.5 years old when she died.
Jewellery in the form of a deer tooth pendant and pierced beads has been radiocarbon dated to around 11,000 years ago, strongly suggesting this was a deliberate burial. This raises the question of why the cave held such significance as a burial site. Modern hunter-gatherer groups often regard caves as gateways to a spirit world, so it is possible that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers in northern Europe held similar beliefs.
The team also showed that at least eight other individuals were buried in the cave over a period spanning roughly 4,000–11,000 years ago, from the Early Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age — ironically, the latter being the period when the creation myths of the Bible were being invented. The authors of those Bronze Age stories, of course, would have known nothing whatever of hunter-gatherer societies in northern Europe, their cultural history, or their spiritual traditions.
No doubt we will see the traditional creationist misrepresentation of this evidence, with unfounded assertions that radiocarbon dating “doesn’t work” and that scientists simply make things up to conform to some notional Darwinian narrative. Making things up to fit a pre-existing story is something creationists themselves routinely do. It seems to be characteristic of those who set out to deceive that they accuse others of doing exactly what they themselves practise.
About a million years before creationism’s putative designer supposedly fashioned a small flat world beneath a solid dome — the imagined cosmos of Bronze Age pastoralists in the Middle East who authored the Bible’s creation myths — ancient frogs and birds, the ancestors of today’s New Zealand species, lived and died and became fossilised deep in a cave near Waitomo on Aotearoa’s North Island.
Of course, confined as they were to within a few days’ walk of the Canaanite hills, the authors of those myths could have had no inkling of people and places in far-flung regions of a spherical planet. Their tales were based entirely on what they imagined to be the whole universe, and contain nothing that existed beyond their narrow horizons.
How these New Zealand fossils were unearthed, and what they can tell us about Aotearoa’s deep past, is the subject of a paper just published in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology, by a research group led by Associate Professor Trevor Worthy of the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University.
It is, of course, a story vastly different from Biblical mythology — the evidence for which stubbornly refuses to manifest itself, and instead consistently refutes it, revealing it to be the product of parochial ignorance and an attempt to force-fit what little was known into prevailing cultural assumptions: what Christopher Hitchens aptly called “the fearful infancy of our species”.
The findings show that around 33–50% of species went extinct about one million years before humans first arrived on Aotearoa (New Zealand). The cause appears to have been a combination of rapid climate change and catastrophic volcanic activity. The discovery helps fill a fifteen-million-year gap in our knowledge of Aotearoa’s history.
Excavations at St Bathans in Central Otago have allowed palaeontologists and geologists to reconstruct the period between 20 and 16 million years ago, but until now there has been very little information about the long stretch between then and one million years ago.
Among the discoveries was a new species of parrot, Strigops insulaborealis, an ancient relative of the flightless kākāpō, but one that could probably fly; an extinct ancestor of the modern takahē; and an extinct species of pigeon closely related to Australian bronzewing pigeons.
To forestall the traditional creationist attempt to discredit both the discovery and the scientists who made it — by claiming the dating methods are flawed or even fraudulent — the fossils can be dated accurately because they lie between two layers of volcanic ash: one deposited around 1.55 million years ago, and another about one million years ago. Volcanic ash can be dated with a high degree of confidence using Uranium–Lead (U–Pb) dating of zircon crystals.
Stonehenge in Wiltshire, southern England, is a mysterious place that speaks of a culture and political–religious authority of which we know almost nothing, probably motivated by belief in long-dead gods whose supposed presence was, at the time, undoubtedly considered to be “all around”. This is much as theists of all religions assert of their god or gods today. Who these people were, remains one of the great mysteries, as does how they moved such massive stones into place to build a stone circle with extraordinary precision, and how they transported them over long distances long before the domestication of the horse.
We know they were not the later Welsh-speaking Celts, who did not arrive in Britain until around 1,000 BCE — some two millennia after construction of Stonehenge began. Those Celts replaced the Beaker culture, which itself had replaced the Neolithic farming communities who first built the monument. Construction began around 3,000 BCE, initially as a bank-and-ditch enclosure with a circle of wooden posts. This was later replaced, around 2,500 BCE, by a circle of massive sarsen stones sourced locally from the nearby Salisbury Plain, with the smaller bluestones brought from the Preseli Hills in south-west Wales. The so-called “altar stone” was added last. Its precise origin remains unresolved, with conflicting evidence suggesting either north-west Scotland or west Wales as its source.
While the question of where most of the stones came from has largely been resolved, what remains is the long-standing puzzle of how they were transported using only human labour. The motivation was clearly strong enough to justify the immense effort and manpower involved, and the fact that it was human effort that moved them has now been established beyond reasonable doubt by the falsification of an alternative hypothesis — namely, that the stones were carried to Salisbury Plain by a passing glacier during the last Ice Age.
The refutation of this idea provides a neat example of how science tests and falsifies hypotheses, though it will no doubt unsettle creationists who cling to the absurd belief that the entire history of the Earth can be compressed into a timescale of just 6,000–10,000 years. The work was carried out by two researchers from Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, and relied on dating zircon crystals — a highly accurate method for determining the age of rock formations, as regular readers of this blog will know — along with apatite grains, which similarly exploit the radioactive decay of uranium isotopes into stable lead isotopes.
There's nothing quite like leaving a message behind to tell future generations that you were here.
Creationists, of course, have a message from about 5,000 years ago telling them that there were ignorant Bronze Age storytellers living in the Middle East — but sadly the only truth in their stories was the one they didn’t explicitly state: that they were making things up to explain what they didn’t know, which meant a great many stories to invent. They couldn’t have guessed, of course, that their tales would later be written down, bound up in a book, and then proclaimed to be the inerrant word of a creator god; otherwise they might have made more of an effort to get it right, or at least admitted they didn’t know. As it is, all we really learn from them is just how ignorant they were, and how vivid their imaginations must have been.
To be fair, it may not have been their intention to mislead and misinform, but that has been the result — mostly, it has to be said, through the fault of those who later declared their tales to be the authentic word of a god, because that conveniently suited their political agenda.
People living much earlier, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, left a much clearer and more honest message in the form of cave art, and particularly hand stencils. All they really say is, “Hi there! I was here!” — with no attempt to elevate themselves to a special status or claim to know things they didn’t know. Where they depicted the animals around them, they showed them just as they saw them: wild and free.
This cave art, which precedes the celebrated art of the French and Spanish caves by tens of thousands of years, has now been identified as the oldest known cave art, telling an unambiguous story of people living there around 70,000 years ago — long before anatomically modern humans made their presence felt in Western Eurasia. The discovery and the methods used to date the art were published in Nature, in a paper that marks a defining moment in our understanding of early symbolic behaviour.
Four of the researchers — Maxime Aubert, Professor of Archaeological Science, Griffith University; Adam Brumm, Professor of Archaeology, Griffith University; Adhi Oktaviana, Research Centre of Archeometry, Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional (BRIN), Jakarta, Indonesia; and Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Professor of Geochronology and Geochemistry, Southern Cross University, New South Wales, Australia — have also written an article in The Conversation that explains the significance of the find in accessible terms. Their piece is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
The Bronze Age creation myths preserved in the Bible assert that Earth is only some 6,000–10,000 years old, depending on how the text is interpreted. The difficulty for those who insist on treating the Bible as literal history is that these claims are casually and repeatedly refuted by real-world evidence. That leaves creationists with few options other than bearing false witness against scientists or asserting that the physical evidence itself must be deceptive—despite their own scripture reassuring them that the god it describes “cannot lie” (Titus 1:2).
The problem is compounded by the fact that scientists are continually improving their ability to measure the age of things, including the histories of entire continents. We can now say, with a high degree of confidence and with abundant supporting evidence, that Earth is billions of years old and has undergone profound changes over that vast span of time. These include the movement of tectonic plates, the rise and erosion of mountain ranges, repeated fluctuations in sea level, major climate shifts, and the appearance, spread, and extinction of forests and entire orders of animal and plant life.
That ability has now taken another significant step forward. A team of scientists from Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and the University of Cologne in Germany has developed a technique that not only allows rocks to be dated, but also reveals what has happened to them over immense spans of time—recorded in microscopic zircon crystals as they were exposed at Earth’s surface, buried, and later re-exposed. Their findings have just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Three members of the team have also published an open-access article in The Conversation, which I will reproduce below under a Creative Commons licence, formatted for stylistic consistency. Before that, however, here is an explanation of how this remarkable technique works, and why it allows scientists to reconstruct the deep-time history of entire landscapes.
Pencil marks note specific years along tree rings from a Japanese cedar.
Tomozo Yagi/AP Images for American Association for the Advancement of Science (“AAAS”); publisher of Science
A cosmic carbon spike
Cosmic rays from solar flares or other extraterrestrial sources collide with gas molecules in our atmosphere, spawning neutrons. When a free neutron knocks a proton out of a nitrogen atom, it forms the radioisotope carbon-14 (14C). The more energetic the event, the higher the ratio of
14C to stable carbon isotopes. Trees breathe in these isotopes as carbon dioxide (CO2)
As though 2026 hadn't started badly enough for creationism, it just got a whole lot worse, with news that geochronologists have a method with which they can pinpoint carbon-14 dates to exact years, removing virtually all sources of error and, devastatingly for creationists, one of their traditional ways to dismiss evidence they don't like has evaporated. But this isn't new information; it's something creationists have either been kept ignorant of, have been pretending not to know about it, or, more likely, did not understand the subject well enough to realise it refuted their claims. It was actually published in Science in April 2023
One of the most persistent fall-back positions in creationist rhetoric is not to deny individual discoveries outright, but to retreat into claims that scientific dating methods are too uncertain to be trusted. Radiocarbon dating, in particular, is routinely portrayed as vague, circular, or endlessly “adjusted” to fit preconceived evolutionary timelines. This claim relies heavily on the idea that dates come with wide error bars that can supposedly be stretched, compressed, or reinterpreted to accommodate a much younger history.
Creationists also rely on the unsupported assertion that radioactive decay rates were much higher once upon a time - a process that coincidentally stopped as soon as we developed the technology to measure it accurately. This claim also sits uncomfortably with another creationist claim - that the Universe is so fine-tuned that altering any of its parameters by even the smallest an=mount would make life impossible. The inconsistency of these two claims is lost on those who have no understanding of how radioactive decay depends on nuclear forces and altering those would make the formation of atoms impossible, so high decay rates when they believe life was created would mean not even Earth could exist, let alone organic molecules.
But perhaps the most amusing accusations against science is that carbon-14 dating assumes a constant ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere, but in fact it is variable, depending on solar activity. Not only is this known and is routinely compensated for using dendrochronology because tree rings contain an accurate record of these changes, but it forms the very basis of this devastating rebuttal of creationist claims - we can accurately pinpoint spikes in carbon-14 production and correlate them with known events in history, thus removing any reasonable margin of error.
The discovery and dating (of which more later) of hominin remains in a Moroccan quarry, reported recently in Nature, has provided further confirmation that the origin of Homo sapiens lies in Africa, not Eurasia, contrary to an alternative hypothesis that has occasionally been proposed. The material consists of mandibles and other fragmentary remains, and also sheds light on the evolutionary origins of Neanderthals and Denisovans.
That is not to say that any serious palaeoanthropologists believed humans evolved wholly in Eurasia. Rather, some suggested that the final stages of Homo sapiens evolution may have occurred there, derived from descendants of earlier African migrants such as H. erectus, H. rhodesiensis, or H. antecessor. Others have argued that the so-called ‘muddle in the middle’ of the hominin family tree may represent a single, widely distributed species exhibiting regional variation across both Africa and Eurasia.
However, the Moroccan specimens display a clear mosaic of primitive and derived features — precisely the pattern that creationists call ‘transitional species’ and insist don't exist. These fossils combine traits seen in African sister lineages with features associated with H. antecessor, a pre-Neanderthal/Denisovan European species whose remains are being excavated at the Sima de los Huesos (Cave of Bones) site at Atapuerca, Spain.
The fossils are also exceptionally valuable for palaeoanthropology for another reason. The sediments in which they were found preserve the unmistakable signature of the Matuyama–Brunhes geomagnetic reversal, which occurred around 773,000 years ago when Earth’s magnetic poles flipped. This provides an unusually robust chronological anchor, as the timing of this reversal has been independently verified from multiple, entirely separate lines of evidence.
There is therefore a great deal here for creationists to attempt to dismiss. First, there is the mosaic of primitive and derived features that identify these fossils as genuinely transitional — something creationism insists does not exist. Second, there is the age of the material, securely dated to approximately 763,000 years (±4,000 years) before creationists insist Earth was magicked out of nothing, placing ancestral hominins hundreds of thousands of years before the Bronze Age biblical story of a single, ancestor-free human couple. Finally, and perhaps most inconveniently of all, the dating does not rely on radiometric methods at all, but on geomagnetic reversal stratigraphy, verified beyond any reasonable doubt. The biblical timeline is therefore wrong by many orders of magnitude.
Normally, creationists seize on any concentration of animal fossils that can be attributed to flooding as supposed “evidence” for their favourite Bronze Age myth of a global genocide. On that basis, they should be delighted by recent news from Romania describing a rich deposit of dinosaur fossils that appears to have accumulated as a result of flooding in the Hațeg Basin.
There is, however, a serious snag. These fossils occur in deposits dated to around 72 million years ago — tens of millions of years before creationists believe the Earth even existed — and the evidence points clearly to repeated local flooding events, not a single global catastrophe.
The discovery of the fossil site is reported in the journal PLOS ONE by the Valiora Dinosaur Research Group, a collaboration of Hungarian and Romanian palaeontologists co-led by Gábor Botfalvai and Zoltán Csiki-Sava of the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Department of Palaeontology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
This paper will have creationists searching for reasons to dismiss evidence that would, if they were prepared to accept it honestly, force them to concede that their beliefs are wrong. It reports a discovery by researchers at Stellenbosch University showing that dinosaur eggshells can be dated with a high degree of precision using an already well-established technique: uranium–lead (U–Pb) radiometric dating.
Until now, U–Pb dating has been most famously applied to zircon crystals in volcanic ash, where the age can be determined by measuring the ratio of radioactive uranium isotopes to the stable lead isotopes produced by their decay. In this study, however, the same underlying principles are applied to calcite crystals preserved in dinosaur eggshells.
Geometric and mathematical patterns on Halafian pottery.
Scientists have once again — almost certainly unintentionally — produced evidence that the Bible is profoundly wrong about human history. This time it comes in the form of pottery shards dating back more than 8,000 years to the Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia (c. 6200–5500 BCE). These artefacts show that people were not only producing sophisticated ceramics, but were decorating them with complex mathematical patterns long before the formal invention of numbers and counting systems.
According to the biblical account of global history, Earth was subjected to a catastrophic genocidal reset, inflicted in a fit of pique by a vengeful god who had failed to anticipate how his creation would turn out. Rather than simply eliminating humanity and starting again with a corrected design, this deity allegedly chose to preserve the same flawed model in a wooden boat while drowning everything else beneath a flood so deep it covered the highest mountains. The implicit hope appears to have been that repeating the experiment would somehow yield a different result.
As implausible as that story already is, we now possess a vast body of archaeological and palaeontological evidence showing not only that Earth is vastly older than the biblical narrative allows, but that this supposed catastrophic reset never occurred. The latter is demonstrated by the existence of civilisations that predate the alleged flood and continue uninterrupted through it, as though it never happened at all. Their material remains include artefacts that would have been completely destroyed or displaced by such a deluge, and settlement sites that show no sign of burial beneath a chaotic, fossil-bearing sedimentary layer containing mixed local and foreign species.
No such global layer exists. Instead, human artefacts are found precisely where they were made and used, unaffected by any mythical torrent scouring the planet clean.
The designs on the Halafian pottery themselves are particularly revealing. They include repeating patterns — for example, binary progressions such as 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 — suggesting that this culture possessed systematic ways of dividing land or goods to ensure equitable distribution.
As I’ve pointed out many times, 99.9975% of Earth’s history took place before the period in which creationists—treating the Bible as literal historical truth—believe the planet itself existed. It is remarkable how effectively biblical literalists manage to ignore, distort, or otherwise dismiss almost the entire body of geological, archaeological, and palaeontological evidence in order to cling to the easily refuted notion of a 6,000–10,000-year-old Earth and a global genocidal flood supposedly occurring about 4,000 years ago.
Unsurprisingly, discoveries such as the one below make no impression whatsoever on committed creationists.
Now archaeologists from Aarhus University, working with colleagues from the National Museum of Denmark as well as teams from Germany, Sweden, and France, have uncovered yet another piece of evidence destined for creationist dismissal: blue pigment on a stone artefact dating from around 13,000 years ago. Their findings were recently published in Antiquity.
Not only should this archaeology not exist at all if the biblical timeline were correct, but even if it had somehow escaped the supposed global flood, it would necessarily be buried beneath a thick, worldwide layer of sediment containing a chaotic mixture of fossil plants and animals from disconnected continents. No such layer has ever been found anywhere on Earth. A truly global flood, as described in Genesis, would have left unmistakable and ubiquitous geological signatures. It did not.
The blue pigment was discovered on a shaped, concave stone originally thought to be an oil lamp but now believed to have served as a mixing palette. Until now, only black and red pigments had been identified on Palaeolithic artefacts, leading archaeologists to assume these were the only colours available. The presence of blue pigment suggests something more nuanced: selective use of colours for different purposes, with blue likely used primarily for body decoration or dyeing clothing—activities that rarely leave direct archaeological traces.
56 million years ago, in that vast expanse of pre–‘Creation Week’ history when 99.975% of Earth’s story unfolded — long before creationists imagine the Universe even existed — an event occurred that gives the lie to the claim that their putative designer created Earth as a safe and stable planet, finely tuned for the existence of (human) life. Earth’s temperature rose by roughly 6 °C as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere increased dramatically.
The cause of this, the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), lay in the disruption of one of Earth’s major feedback systems. Plants sequester carbon through photosynthesis and lock it into their tissues, but that system was pushed out of balance until a new equilibrium eventually formed. It took some 70,000–100,000 years for the planet to recover.
The problem was that higher temperatures caused many plants to fail because they had evolved for cooler conditions, and evolution proceeds far too slowly to cope with rapid environmental change. As plant productivity collapsed, less carbon was sequestered, which in turn drove temperatures higher — a classic positive feedback loop, triggered by a relatively small initial shift.
The worrying parallel today is that the current rate of anthropogenic warming is around ten times greater than at the onset of the PETM.
How we know this — and how the PETM reshaped climate and the terrestrial biosphere — is explored in a paper by an international team of scientists, published open access (in unedited form) in Nature Communications.
Two of the authors have also written a summary of their research in The Conversation. Their article is republished here under a Creative Commons licence, with formatting adjusted for consistency.
56 million years ago, the Earth suddenly heated up – and many plants stopped working properly
Forest life in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
As we show in new research published in Nature Communications, one consequence was that many of the world’s plants could no longer thrive. As a result, they soaked up less carbon from the atmosphere, which may have contributed to another interesting thing about this prehistoric planetary heatwave: it lasted more than 100,000 years.
Today Earth is warming around ten times faster than it did 56 million years ago, which may make it even harder for modern plants to adapt.
Rewinding 56 million years
Plants can help regulate the climate through a process known as carbon sequestration. This involves capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via photosynthesis and storing it in their leaves, wood and roots.
However, abrupt global warming may temporarily impact this regulating function.
Investigating how Earth’s vegetation responded to the rapid global warming event around 56 million years ago – known formally as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (or PETM) – isn’t easy.
To do so, we developed a computer model simulating plant evolution, dispersal, and carbon cycling. We compared model outputs to fossil pollen and plant trait data from three sites to reconstruct vegetation changes such as height, leaf mass, and deciduousness across the warming event.
The three sites include: the Bighorn Basin in the United States, the North Sea and the Arctic Circle.
We focused our research on fossil pollen due to many unique properties.
First, pollen is produced in copious amounts. Second, it travels extensively via air and water currents. Third, it possesses a resilient structure that withstands decay, allowing for its excellent preservation in ancient geological formations.
56-million-year-old fossilised palm pollen from the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, United States.
Vera Korasidis
A shift in vegetation
In the mid-latitude sites, including the Bighorn Basin – a deep and wide valley amidst the northern Rocky Mountains – evidence indicates vegetation had a reduced ability to regulate the climate.
Pollen data shows a shift to smaller plants such as palms and ferns. Leaf mass per area (a measure of leaf density and thickness) also increased as deciduous trees declined. Fossil soils indicate reduced soil organic carbon levels.
The data suggest smaller, drought-resistant plants including palms thrived in the landscape because they could keep pace with warming. They were, however, associated with a reduced capacity to store carbon in biomass and soils.
In contrast, the high-latitude Arctic site showed increased vegetation height and biomass following warming. The pollen data show replacement of conifer forests by broad-leaved swamp taxa and the persistence of some subtropical plants such as palms.
The model and data indicate high-latitude regions could adapt and even increase productivity (that is, capture and store carbon dioxide) under the warmer climate.
A glimpse into the future
The vegetation disruption during the PETM may have reduced terrestrial carbon sequestration for 70,000-100,000 years due to the reduced ability of vegetation and soils to capture and store carbon.
Our research suggests vegetation that is more able to regulate the climate took a long time to regrow, and this contributed to the length of the warming event.
Global warming of more than 4°C exceeded mid-latitude vegetation’s ability to adapt during the PETM. Human-made warming is occurring ten times faster, further limiting the time for adaptation.
What happened on Earth 56 million years ago highlights the need to understand biological systems’ capacity to keep pace with rapid climate changes and maintain efficient carbon sequestration.
Vera Korasidis, Lecturer in Environmental Geoscience, The University of Melbourne and Julian Rogger, Senior Research Associate, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
Abstract
The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) around 56 million years ago was a 5–6°C global warming event that lasted for approximately 200 kyr. A warming-induced loss and a 70–100 kyr lagged recovery of biospheric carbon stocks was suggested to have contributed to the long duration of the climate perturbation. Here, we use a trait-based, eco-evolutionary vegetation model to test whether the PETM warming exceeded the adaptation capacity of vegetation systems, impacting the efficiency of terrestrial organic carbon sequestration and silicate weathering. Combined model simulations and vegetation reconstructions using PETM palynofloras suggest that warming-induced migration and evolutionary adaptation of vegetation were insufficient to prevent a widespread loss of productivity. We conclude that global warming of the magnitude as during the PETM could exceed the response capacity of vegetation systems and cause a long-lasting decline in the efficiency of vegetation-mediated climate regulation mechanisms.
Rogger, J., Korasidis, V.A., Bowen, G.J. et al. Loss of vegetation functions during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. Nat Commun (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-66390-8
Events like the PETM expose the fragility of the systems that sustain life and demonstrate how easily they can be tipped into new and often hostile states. Far from being the work of an infallible designer fine-tuning a planet for a single favoured species, Earth’s history shows a world continually shaped by feedback loops, chance events and the slow, directionless process of evolution. When those systems are pushed too far or too fast, life suffers — and it takes tens of thousands of years for the planet to recover.
What makes the comparison with today so stark is the rate at which we are forcing change. The PETM was a natural carbon-cycle disturbance that unfolded over millennia. Our own contribution has taken place in a geological instant, yet it is already driving shifts comparable in magnitude to that ancient warming pulse. If slow change overwhelmed ecosystems then, the acceleration humanity has produced is even more concerning.
Understanding the PETM is not simply an academic exercise. It is a reminder, written in deep time, that there are limits to what living systems can endure and that “business as usual” can push Earth into states incompatible with the world we inherited. The past cannot tell us exactly what will happen next, but it does show that the consequences of inaction are neither abstract nor remote. The warning signs are etched in the rocks; whether we heed them is up to us.
One thing we know is that there is no watching sky daddy who's going to come and rescue us from our folly.
According to new open-access research just published in Nature by a team led by Arizona State University palaeoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie, ‘Lucy’ (Australopithecus afarensis) was not the only hominin living on the Ethiopian Highlands 3.4 million years ago. This was part of the vast span of human evolutionary history that occurred long before creationists believe Earth was made as a small, flat world with a dome over it somewhere in the Middle East. Living alongside ‘Lucy’ was another species, now named Australopithecus deyiremeda.
However, A. deyiremeda differed from A. afarensis in several important ways — differences that reflect how two species can coexist in the same region by adapting to distinct ecological niches. A. deyiremeda, for instance, had an opposable big toe suited to climbing, indicating a more arboreal lifestyle than A. afarensis. Isotope analysis of A. deyiremeda’s teeth also shows that it had a different diet.
The first indication that another species might be present came in 2009 with the discovery of foot bones, announced publicly in 2012. In palaeontology, it is standard practice not to name a new species based on such fragmentary remains, especially when cranial bones are absent. Although teeth were also found in the same area, there was initially insufficient evidence to link them definitively to the foot bones.
Then, in 2015, the team had enough material to announce and name the new species, though they were still unable to demonstrate that the foot bones belonged to it. Now, ten years on, they believe they finally have sufficient fossil evidence to make that connection.
This news is unlikely to trouble creationists, who already have a ready supply of scientifically baseless excuses for dismissing ‘Lucy’: that it was forged; that scientists fabricated the evidence; that it was assembled from scattered bones found six miles apart; that ‘carbon dating’ was used (despite not being applicable at that age); or that radioactive decay rates have changed in the last 6,000–10,000 years, making 6,000 years only appear to be 3.4 million.
For those with the intellectual honesty and humility to form opinions based on evidence, however, the discovery offers a fascinating example of how multiple ancient hominins coexisted — and, in evolutionary terms, how two species sharing a common ancestor can diverge to occupy different ecological niches.
