How we Know The Bible Is Wrong - This Evidence Wouldn't Exist If The Genesis Myths Were Real History

An artist’s reconstruction of a Marathousa 1 paleolithic woman producing a digging stick from a small alder tree trunk with a small stone tool. This kind of wood was used for the Marathousa 1 digging stick. Use-wear analysis of stone tools at Marathousa 1 shows evidence of woodworking.

Credit: Original art by G. Prieto, copyright K. Harvati.

Earliest evidence of wooden tools used by humans - University of Reading

This is another of those pieces of evidence that should not exist if the Bible narrative were true — yet it does. The only honest conclusion is that the Bible narrative is false. It simply never happened. In scientific terms, this is falsification.

The evidence was published on 26 January 2026 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). It consists of two worked wooden objects discovered at Marathousa 1, in Greece’s central Peloponnese, by an international team led by researchers from the University of Reading, the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment. The tools have been dated to about 430,000 years ago, making them the earliest known hand-held wooden tools and pushing back direct evidence for this kind of technology by at least 40,000 years.

That is awkward evidence for creationists, because the Bible is commonly interpreted by them as saying that humans were created only about 6,000–10,000 years ago, followed by a catastrophic global flood that supposedly covered even the highest mountains. Such an event should either have obliterated fragile evidence of wooden tool use or buried it beneath a thick, worldwide layer of flood sediment containing the remains of the animals and plants destroyed in that catastrophe. And, of course, loose wooden tools submerged in a global flood would hardly be expected to remain neatly preserved in the archaeological context in which they were used.

Yet these wooden tools exist. They were recovered from secure Middle Pleistocene deposits, not from some chaotic jumble of flood debris. They are associated with stone tools, worked bone and butchered animal remains, including elephant, showing that Marathousa 1 was a lakeshore site used by early humans for a range of activities, including butchery and woodworking. In other words, the evidence is not floating around without context; it forms part of a coherent archaeological scene about 420,000 years older than the creationist date for the magical creation of Earth and everything on it.

One of the objects is a small alder trunk fragment with clear traces of shaping and use-wear, consistent with a multifunctional digging stick probably used at the edge of the ancient lake. The other is a much smaller worked piece of willow or poplar, possibly representing a previously unknown type of small Pleistocene wooden tool. A third piece of alder, initially investigated as a possible artefact, appears instead to have been marked by a large carnivore, possibly a bear — another indication that humans and carnivores were exploiting the same lakeshore environment.

The Marathousa 1 site lay in the Megalopolis Basin, a region that appears to have acted as a glacial refugium during a critical period in human evolution, when more complex behaviours and more diverse technologies were developing. The finds show early humans using not just stone, but wood and bone too — exactly what we should expect from intelligent, adaptable hominins making use of the materials around them, and exactly what is so rarely preserved because wood normally decays long before it can fossilise or survive archaeologically.

How Creationists Lie To Us - Ken Ham Shows Us His Cult Is For Fools Who Believe Lies

Tiny fossils found in 1.7 billion-year-old mud yield clues to the evolution of complex life.

The creationist Ken Ham’s website, Answers in Genesis (AiG), is notorious for the way it exploits the ignorance of its target readership and their eagerness for spurious “scientific” validation of evidence-free superstition. For example, AiG recently posted on X, formerly Twitter, asserting that the fossil record is “the graveyard of the global flood”:

The fossil record is the graveyard of the global flood. pic.twitter.com/1OWyNcEk5o

— Answers in Genesis (@AiG) May 20, 2026

What AiG does not say, of course, is that fossils are not found in a chaotic jumble, as would be expected from a single global catastrophe. They occur in a consistent geological sequence, with older rocks containing older fossil assemblages and younger rocks containing later ones. The succession is not random; it records changing environments, extinctions, radiations and evolutionary transitions over immense spans of time. The rocks themselves contain independent evidence of their age and origin — including stratigraphic relationships, geochemical signatures, volcanic ash layers where present, and other dating markers — and many sedimentary sequences accumulated gradually over thousands, millions, or even hundreds of millions of years.

Nor do fossil-bearing rocks show the global mixing that a planet-wide genocidal flood should have produced. Instead, they preserve organisms that lived in particular environments at particular times. Marine organisms occur in marine sediments; freshwater organisms in freshwater deposits; terrestrial organisms in terrestrial deposits. Local and regional faunas remain local and regional.

We do not find Australian marsupials randomly mixed through Cambrian marine deposits, nor African mammals churned together with Jurassic dinosaurs and Ordovician trilobites. If a flood had covered even the highest mountains, tearing up ecosystems across the planet and carrying bodies wherever the currents took them, that is exactly the kind of disorder we should expect. It is not what the fossil record shows.

So, far from proving there was a global genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago, fossils in sedimentary rocks demonstrate exactly the opposite. They record a long, ordered, localised and historically structured history of life on Earth. That history is not only incompatible with the childish flood myth promoted by AiG; it is one of the strongest lines of evidence for evolution over deep time. And that is probably why Ken Ham’s creationist organisation needs its followers to believe otherwise. The tactic is perfectly plain and deliberately dishonest: if the facts contradict your claims, misrepresent the facts.

Creationism Refuted - Another Giant Dinosaur - From SouthEast Asia, Over 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis

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Artistic impression of Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis

‘Last titan’: Southeast Asia’s biggest dinosaur discovered | UCL News - UCL – University College London

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.

Refuting Creationism - Collagen In a 66-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Fossil - Time To Crank Up The Creationist Lie Machine

Discovery of collagen in fossil bone could unlock new insights into dinosaurs - News - University of Liverpool

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.

Refuting Creationism - Repopulation of Post-Glacial Britain - 5,200 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Hunter-gatherers in post-glacial Britain

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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).

Matthews, I.P., Palmer, A.P., Candy, I. et al.(2025).

Humans returned to British Isles earlier than previously thought at the end of the last ice age

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.

The study was conducted by a team led by Ian P. Matthews and Adrian P. Palmer of the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, who published their findings in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

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:

Creationism Refuted - A Possible Human Population Bottleneck - 64,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Toba supereruption

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An Impression of the Toba Supereruption, 74,000 Years Ago

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A massive eruption 74,000 years ago affected the whole planet – archaeologists use volcanic glass to figure out how people survived

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:

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

Southern Doggerland, 16,000 years ago

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Southern 'Doggerland' 16,000 years ago.

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking).

Warwick Study: Ancient Forests Under North Sea Lost World

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

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

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

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

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

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

Refuting Creationism - Rapid Evolution After The Dinosaur Extinction - 66 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

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.

Evidence of ‘Lightning-Fast’ Evolution Found After Dino-Killing Asteroid Impact | Jackson School of Geosciences | The University of Texas at Austin

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.

Their findings have just been published in the journal Geology.

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.

Creationism In Crisis - What Caused Homo Floresiensis (The 'Hobbit') To Go Extinct - 40,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'?

Homo floresiensis hunting a Stegodon

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Reconstruction of Homo floresiensis

By Cicero Moraes et al, Arc-Team Research
CC BY 4.0, Link

The ‘hobbits’ mysteriously disappeared 50,000 years ago. Our new study reveals what happened to their home

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.

In addition to the University of Wollongong news release explaining the study, four of the authors have written an article in The Conversation. Their article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Creationism Refuted - The Oldest Known Human Remains in Northern Britain Are From 1,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'!

A Mesolithic burial, 11,000 years ago

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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.

Photo by Martin Stables.

DNA analysis reveals Northern Britain’s oldest human remains are of a young female child

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.

This unwelcome news for creationists comes from an international team led by archaeologists at the University of Lancashire, who have just published their findings in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society.

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.

Refuting Creationism - Life In A New Zealand Cave - 1 million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Prehistoric New Zealand Cave

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AI generated image of the NZ cave

P Scofield, Canterbury Museum.

1m-year-old 'lost world' discovered – News

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.

Refuting Creationism - How U-Pb Dating Proves Humans Not Glaciers Transported the Stonehenge Stones

Grains of sand prove people – not glaciers – transported Stonehenge rocks

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.

Creationism Refuted - Messages From Nearly 70,000 Years Ago.

Adhi Agus Oktaviana illuminating a hand stencil.

Max Aubert

Humanity’s oldest known cave art has been discovered in Sulawesi.

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:

Creationism Refuted - What Was Happening In Australia Long Before 'Creation Week'

An ancient Australian landscape shaped by millions of years of slow erosion, Kalbarri National Park, Western Australia.

Maximilian Dröllner

Binocular microscopic images of zircon crystals separated from various studied rocks: (a) gabbro A1: P4, A2: S20; (b) porphyritic granite, B1: S1, B2: L1, B3: S5, B4: S6; (c) fine-grained granite, C1: L3, C2: S12, C3: S7, C4: S12; (d) mylonitic granite, D1: S4, D2: S5, D3: L5, D4: P2; (e) leucocratic granitoid, E1: S3, E2: L5, E3: G1, E4: P2; bars: 100 m.

Shahbazi, Hossein; et al. (2014)

A ‘cosmic clock’ in tiny crystals has revealed the rise and fall of Australia’s ancient landscapes

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.

Creationism Refuted - Why Cosmic Ray Storms Make C14 Dating So Accurate - Running Rings Around Creationists

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)

Marking time: Cosmic ray storms can pin precise dates on history from ancient Egypt to the Vikings | Science | AAAS

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.

Creationism Refuted - Early Hominins From Morocco Confirm The African Origin of Homo Sapiens

Thomas Quarry I, Grotte à Hominidés: Mandible ThI-GH-10717 during the excavation.

© J.P. Raynal,
Programme Préhistoire de Casablanca

773,000-year-old mandible ThI-GH-1 from Thomas Quarry in Morocco.

© Hamza Mehimdate, Programme Préhistoire de Casablanca.

Early hominins from Thomas Quarry I (Morocco) reveal an African lineage near the root of Homo sapiens

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.

Creationism Refuted - A Rich Collection of Dinosaur Fossils from 72 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

The ancient environment and its fauna.

Reconstruction by Tibor Pecsics

Paleontoligists have discovered an exceptionally rich dinosaur site in Transylvania.

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.

Creationism Refuted - Highly Accurate Dating of Dinosaur Eggs

The Gobi Desert, where many dinosaur eggs have been found.

Dinosaur eggshells unlock a new way to tell time in the fossil record | Stellenbosch University

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.

The scientists have published their method, open access, in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

How We Know The Bible is Wrong - Human Artifacts That Would't Exist If The Bible Was Real History

World’s Earliest Botanical Art Discovered By HUJI Archeologists, and Evidence of Prehistoric Mathematical Thinking - The Canadian Friends of Hebrew University

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.

The findings of the archaeologists, Professor Yosef Garfinkel and Sarah Krulwich of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, are published, open access, in the Journal of World Prehistory.

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.

Refuting Creationism - Scientists Find Blue Pignment That shouldn't Exist If The Bible Tales Are True

Europe's oldest blue pigment found in Germany

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.