How Science Works - Scientists Revise The Age Of Mammoth Fossils - But It's Even Worse News For Creationists

AI-generated impression of Columbian mammoths around the sinkhole trap

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The center of the sinkhole has thin laminated sediments and extensive bone galleries. We sampled near here for MS-16-4 and MS-16-5 using metal tubes.

Mahan SA, et al (2026)

Luminescence Data for the Mammoth Site, Black Hills, South Dakota 2016-19 | U.S. Geological Survey

Creationists who seize on revisions in scientific dating as evidence that scientists cannot be trusted might want to read this particular example to the end. A famous mammoth graveyard in South Dakota has indeed been reassessed, and its previously accepted age has been substantially revised. Unfortunately for young-Earth creationism, the revision moves it much further into the past. An age already incompatible with the biblical timetable has become an even greater problem.

In a paper published in Quaternary Research, Shannon A. Mahan and colleagues report new dates for the fossil-bearing sediments at the Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, South Dakota. Long associated with an age of approximately 26,000 years, the deposit now yields luminescence ages of roughly 160,000–232,000 years — around six to nine times that familiar estimate. These are dates for the surrounding sediments, rather than direct measurements of each mammoth’s death, but they place the assemblage in a substantially earlier chapter of the Pleistocene.

How can a fossil’s age change so dramatically? A scientific date is a measurement of a particular physical process. Its reliability depends on choosing suitable material, understanding what happened to it after burial, and checking the result against other evidence.

What was dated originally?

The mammoth bones lacked preserved collagen — the protein commonly used for radiocarbon dating bone. Researchers therefore analysed carbon in the bones’ mineral component, apatite. However, interactions with groundwater can alter that carbon after burial. The resulting measurement may reflect later chemical changes rather than the animal’s death, making ancient remains appear much younger. This is a problem with the sample’s history, not evidence that radioactive decay is unreliable.

What does luminescence measure?

The new study dated feldspar grains in the surrounding sediment. Natural background radiation gradually builds up a trapped-electron signal within these minerals. Sufficient exposure to sunlight empties those traps, effectively resetting the clock. After burial, the signal accumulates again. Measuring it, together with the local radiation dose rate, allows researchers to estimate the time since the grains were last exposed to light.

Does that date the mammoths?

It dates sediment burial, rather than an animal’s death directly. The connection depends on geological evidence that the bones and sediment accumulated together. At the Mammoth Site, the main feldspar results place the fossil-bearing deposits approximately 160,000–232,000 years ago, although the detailed chronology still requires refinement.

Why trust a revised date?

Confidence grows through independent checks, not through refusing to change an answer. Here, analyses at two laboratories and comparisons with earlier dating work exposed weaknesses in the accepted chronology. Further uranium-series dating is planned. Revising an interpretation when better evidence becomes available is precisely how science improves its account of the past.

Sources: Mahan and colleagues, Quaternary Research
Phys.org research report.

As described in Sandee Oster’s report for Phys.org, the site contains more than 60 mammoths, predominantly young male Columbian mammoths. The prevailing explanation is that a warm, spring-fed sinkhole became a lethal trap: animals entering the water could not climb back up its steep, slippery sides. Their remains accumulated in the basin. The earlier radiocarbon measurements were problematic because the bones lacked preserved collagen, leaving researchers to analyse bone apatite, whose carbon can be altered by interaction with groundwater.

The new investigation used infrared-stimulated luminescence dating of feldspar grains, with analyses undertaken at two laboratories. This estimates the time since sediment grains were last exposed to sufficient light to reset their dating signal. The researchers also identify thin sediment layers deposited by runoff entering the pond. Uncertainty remains over the detailed chronology, and further uranium-series work is planned.

For creationists, the awkward point is not merely the increased age. It is how the correction was made. Scientists questioned an established interpretation, investigated the limitations of the material previously dated, and tested the chronology using a different physical process. If dates were simply manufactured to produce predetermined answers, why expose the discrepancy and publish a substantial revision? Here, changing the answer is evidence that the answer remains accountable to observations.

Creationism Refuted - The Evidence That Wouldn't Be There If The Bible Were True - Climate Change Over 130,000 Years

AI-generated image showing sediment accumulating over time on an Australian lakebed.

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Australia’s ancient rainfall patterns more complex than previously believed – News

For creationists who attribute much of Earth’s sedimentary record to a single, year-long global flood, the difficulty goes well beyond explaining how so much sediment accumulated. They also need to explain why natural archives preserve evidence of changing environments over periods vastly longer than their preferred age of the entire Universe. Producing layers of mud is one thing; reproducing a dated history of changing climate is quite another.

A new study by Alexander F. Wall and colleagues, published in Quaternary Science Reviews brings that problem into focus. The researchers analysed 69 natural palaeoenvironmental archives from tropical Australia, collectively spanning the past 130,000 years. Their purpose was to reassess how the complexity of rainfall patterns changed through the last glacial cycle.

Their conclusion challenges the suggestion that rainfall became uniquely variable and geographically patchy during the Holocene, the geological epoch encompassing approximately the past 11,700 years. Older records generally preserve less detail, so their apparent simplicity may reflect the limitations of the surviving evidence. A blurred photograph does not establish that the landscape it depicts contained fewer features.

The relevance to creationism is straightforward, although testing the biblical flood story was no part of the researchers’ purpose, but like almost all science, they did that incidentally, simply by revealing the facts. A flood can erode older deposits, transport fossils and produce successive sediment layers. None of those observations, however, demonstrates that it can reproduce the chronology and environmental history reconstructed from natural archives. A credible alternative would have to account for the ages, the sequence of environmental changes and the differences between locations together. Simply labelling everything “Flood sediment” supplies no such explanation.

Refuting Creationism - Bible Mythology Dead And Buried Beneath The Gondwana Supercontinent

Artists impression of the supercontinent Gondwana.

Source: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty (Royalty-free)

Reconstruction of Greater Gondwana at ca. 500 Ma or at 550 to 500 Ma compared with conventional paleogeographic interpretations (inset).

From: Tao Wang et al.(2026).

Gondwana really was a supercontinent. And it helped kick-start life on Earth

More than half a billion years before the supposed ‘Creation Week’ of biblical literalism, moving continents were reshaping the planet and helping to establish the environmental conditions in which early animals diversified. That is the inconvenient historical setting of new research into Gondwana: a vast continental assembly whose formation, geological activity and subsequent fragmentation belong to a timescale that bears no resemblance to the few thousand years allowed by young-Earth creationism.

A paper in Science Advances , by Tao Wang of the State Key Laboratory of Deep Earth and Mineral Exploration, Institute of Geology, Beijing, China, and colleagues, suggests that Gondwana was substantially larger than conventional reconstructions show. As co-author Bill Collins explains in his accompanying account in The Conversation, isotopic evidence in granites identifies ancient continental material now concealed beneath younger geological formations across much of Asia. Including these overlooked fragments increases Gondwana’s estimated share of Earth’s continental landmass to roughly 80 per cent, making it a supercontinent even under a restrictive definition of that term. This reconstruction concerns the world of approximately 550–500 million years ago.

Its significance extends beyond redrawing an ancient map. The researchers propose that the reorganisation of plate boundaries associated with Gondwana’s assembly established an enormous belt of volcanic activity. Sustained emissions of greenhouse gases could then have helped alter the climate, contributing to conditions favourable to the diversification of Cambrian life. This is a proposed connection between geological and biological change, rather than a demonstration that volcanism alone caused the Cambrian radiation.

One distinction matters here: despite the article’s headline, this concerns the diversification of life, not its original appearance. Life already had a long evolutionary history before the Cambrian, and animals existed before that period began. Nor was the Cambrian ‘explosion’ an instantaneous event resembling a magical creation. The term describes a geologically rapid evolutionary diversification, unfolding over millions of years.

For creationism, therefore, the problem is more substantial than another inconvenient date. Here is a testable account connecting the history of continents with the environmental context of biological evolution. Continents assemble, plate boundaries change, volcanoes influence the atmosphere, and organisms evolve in the resulting conditions. None of this requires foresight or a predetermined destination. It requires physical processes, evolving populations and the immense passage of time.

Refuting Creationism - Why Nature Creates Fossils Of Different Ages In The Same Deposit - Unlike The Mythical Genocidal Flood

AI depiction of how shells accumulate in sediment

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Collection of creatures that can disturb sediment and relocate shells.

Florida Museum.

Paleontologists spent 20 years carbon-dating thousands of marine fossils, then used them to decode a process fundamental to Earth’s history – Research News

A fossil bed is not necessarily a collection of animals that lived and died together. Two shells lying side by side can belong to creatures whose lives were separated by hundreds or thousands of years. For creationists who interpret fossil-bearing deposits as the products of a single, year-long biblical Flood, that raises an awkward question: how much history is actually represented within a supposedly catastrophic snapshot?

An international study, published in PNAS, brings substantial evidence to bear on that question. Drawing on two decades of research, the team assembled dates for more than 7,500 marine fossils, obtained using radiocarbon dating and other methods. They investigated “time averaging”: the mixing of remains from different generations within the same assemblage.

Their principal finding was that sediment accumulation rate is the strongest predictor of this mixing. Where sediment accumulates slowly, remains from successive generations can collect before permanent burial. Faster accumulation generally limits that opportunity. Comparisons between observations and computer simulations showed that sedimentation exerted a stronger influence than the other factors examined, including mixing by burrowing animals and the destruction of skeletal remains. These findings concern the relatively recent fossil record; their application to much deeper time still requires testing.

The creationist response cannot therefore consist merely of declaring that the fossils were all buried by Noah’s Flood. Burial and death are different events. A sudden event could gather older shells and redeposit them, but that would concede that the resulting assemblage contains a history predating the catastrophe. It would still be necessary to explain the age differences, the source of the older material and the surrounding sedimentary evidence.

Nor does a vague appeal to “errors in carbon dating” solve the problem. An identical age offset applied to every specimen would leave their age differences intact. Other proposed errors would need to be specified, quantified and shown to account for the observed pattern. Simply assuming that inconvenient measurements must be wrong is not an explanation; it is a refusal to accept evidence.

The significance of this research is that the history preserved within fossil assemblages can be investigated and measured. Scientists can ask how much time a collection represents, identify the processes responsible and test their explanations against thousands of specimens. For Flood geology, the challenge is to produce an equally convincing account of those observations. A biblical narrative, however confidently repeated, supplies neither the measurements nor the explanation.

Creationism Refuted - Fossils On Mountains Are Evidence Of Dynamic Geology, Not A Flood

TOL-1 Section, Mut Basin, Türkiye.

Credit: Selma Sarı.

The Durupinar site in Eastern Anatolia (Türkiye) often misrepresented by creationists as the fossil remains of Noah's Ark.

By Mfikretyilmaz - Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link

International research team finds the world's highest late Middle Pleistocene marine deposits

Finding marine fossils more than a kilometre above sea level might seem, at first sight, to be just the sort of discovery biblical literalists could seize upon as evidence of Noah’s flood. After all, if sediments containing the remains of marine organisms occur high in the mountains, surely the sea must once have covered those mountains—or so the familiar creationist argument runs.


The argument depends upon ignoring one of the most elementary facts of geology: continents are not stationary platforms. Their crust is folded, faulted, stretched, compressed, raised and lowered by tectonic processes operating over millions of years. Marine sediments found at high altitude do not necessarily show that the sea rose to that altitude; they may show that a former seabed was subsequently raised far above the sea.


A striking new example has now been documented by Selma Sarı and an international team of geologists in the Mut Basin on the southern margin of the Central Anatolian Plateau in Türkiye. Their study, published in the journal Geology, describes the world’s highest known late Middle Pleistocene marine deposits: sediments now preserved 1,177 metres above mean sea level but deposited beneath the sea during Marine Isotope Stage 7, approximately 230,000 years ago.


The researchers did not simply find shells on a hillside and invent a convenient explanation for them. They combined several independent lines of evidence, including calcareous nannofossils, foraminifera, ostracod communities, palaeomagnetism, stable-isotope measurements and reconstruction of the original water depth. The ostracods indicate that the sediments accumulated about 50 metres below the contemporary sea surface, while the fossil succession and magnetic record constrain when that deposition occurred.


Taking the original water depth and contemporary sea level into account, the researchers calculated that the deposits have been raised at an average rate of approximately 5.2 metres per thousand years. That is an exceptionally rapid geological uplift rate, probably produced by interacting processes deep beneath Anatolia, including break-off of part of the subducting Cyprus slab and mantle flow associated with the Arabian slab. The marine sediments have therefore become a precisely dated marker carried upwards by the movement of Earth’s crust.

This is exactly what creationist flood mythology cannot provide: a coherent explanation that agrees simultaneously with the fossils, sedimentary environment, magnetic record, isotope evidence, reconstructed water depth, regional tectonics and measured chronology. A single recent inundation would not explain why marine sediments occur at different elevations, belong to different geological periods and have subsequently undergone folding, faulting, uplift and erosion.

Creationism Refuted - How The Grand Canyon Was Formed - No Magic Flood Involved

Grand Canyon’s oldest and deepest rocks were unearthed by massive cliff across ancient USA.

Lost mega-escarpment across ancient USA may explain Grand Canyon missing billion years

Creationists sometimes point to the Great Unconformity in the Grand Canyon as evidence of Noah’s mythical global flood. But an unconformity is not a layer deposited by a flood. It is a surface representing an interval during which older rocks were exposed, eroded and sometimes deformed before younger sediments were laid on top of them. What is “missing” is not evidence; it is rock that either was never deposited or was subsequently removed, with the surviving rocks preserving evidence of what happened in the intervening time.

Creationists attempts to fit the Grand Canyon into their Biblical flood myth range from the sublime to the ridiculous, none of them in the least plausible and designed to appeal to the parochial ignorance that typifies American creationism. Their conclusion is always sacred and immune to contradiction. Facts are accepted or rejected based on whether they support the conclusion or not. Science, by contrast, starts with a neutral view, collects evidence, then takes a view that accounts for that evidence, as always in science, the facts are neutral and the conclusion provisional, contingent on the discovery of more evidence.

At parts of the Grand Canyon, Cambrian sedimentary rocks rest upon much older Precambrian rocks, leaving more than a billion years of geological history unrepresented by sedimentary strata at that particular location. Far from supporting the idea that the canyon’s rocks were deposited during a single year-long catastrophe, the contact records a succession of events involving sedimentation, burial, tectonic disturbance, uplift, prolonged exposure, erosion and renewed deposition.

A new study published open access in the journal Geology now proposes a mechanism that may explain much of the extraordinary erosion responsible for this gap in the south-western United States. Thomas M. Gernon of the University of Southampton and colleagues have reconstructed a continent-scale escarpment that may have developed along the western margin of Laurentia—the ancient continental core of North America—as the supercontinent Rodinia began breaking apart approximately 800–750 million years ago.

Creationism in Crisis - Penguin Fossils Expose Creationist Lies

Ancient Penguin Fossils Offer New Window into Antarctica’s Changing Climate | Blog

Fossil collection sites, Seymour Island, Antarctica.
Images credit: Boyang Xia et al.

Embarrassed by the wealth of fossils documenting an orderly succession of changing life over hundreds of millions of years, creationists traditionally fall back on several almost equally implausible attempts to reconcile the evidence with their preferred origin myth. According to young-Earth creationism, Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old, while most of the fossil-bearing geological record was supposedly produced during a single, year-long global flood in which almost every terrestrial vertebrate was exterminated in an act of divine genocide, leaving only a handful of survivors aboard a wooden boat.

The principal pseudo-scientific attempt to explain the orderly fossil record is something creationists call “hydrological sorting”. This proposes that the Flood sorted organisms according to such factors as their size, density, buoyancy, habitat or ability to escape the rising water. The term therefore has a nominal meaning, but it provides no credible explanation for the observed succession of organisms in the rocks. It cannot explain why particular groups appear only after their presumed ancestors, why countless short-lived species occur in a consistent order across different continents, why terrestrial and marine ecosystems succeed one another coherently, or why the same sequence agrees with radiometric dates, palaeomagnetism, plate tectonics and independent records of environmental change.

When this supposed mechanism fails, creationists can retreat into claims that are conveniently immune to evidence: that their creator deliberately planted or manipulated the fossil record to make Earth look ancient; that Satan planted the evidence to deceive the faithful; or that generations of geologists, palaeontologists, physicists and biologists have participated in a vast conspiracy to conceal the “truth”. Each claim abandons any pretence of scientific explanation because none can be tested, falsified or distinguished from an invented excuse. They serve only to protect a predetermined conclusion from inconvenient facts.

The latest inconvenient facts come from three researchers at the China University of Geosciences (Beijing): Boyang Xia, Huaichun Wu and Quanguo Li. In a paper recently published in the open-access journal Fossil Record, they report that fossil penguin bones from Seymour Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula, preserve a geochemical record of changing environmental conditions during the Eocene.

Seymour Island contains one of the world’s richest and most nearly continuous successions of Eocene penguin fossils. Xia and colleagues examined bones from three different levels in the La Meseta and Submeseta formations: an early Eocene horizon dated to 55.3–54.1 million years ago, a younger horizon dated to 49.1–45.8 million years ago, and a middle-to-late Eocene horizon dated to 41.2–37.7 million years ago. For comparison, they also examined bones from living chinstrap and emperor penguins.

Refuting Creationism - Transformation of the Northwest African Landscape - Over 24 Million Years

24 million Years ago

5.3 million years ago

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Northwest Africa, 24 Million years ago.

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African grasslands became widespread over five million years earlier than previously known | EurekAlert!

To anyone familiar with Africa today, its extensive grasslands and savannahs can seem almost timeless: landscapes of grasses, scattered trees, grazing herbivores, predators and recurrent fires. But, like every modern ecosystem, the African savannah has a history. It was not created fully formed, stocked with its present collection of plants and animals, during a mythical creation week a few thousand years ago. It developed through a succession of environmental and evolutionary changes extending over tens of millions of years.

Some of that history is preserved not on the African continent itself, where erosion and geological disturbance have left gaps in the terrestrial record, but beneath the neighbouring Atlantic Ocean. Plant waxes blown from the land settled on the sea surface and were incorporated into sediments accumulating slowly on the ocean floor. Layer upon layer, these sediments preserved a chemical record of the vegetation growing in north-west Africa at different times.

Now, Anna K. Schartman, Pratigya J. Polissar and Caroline A. E. Strömberg have used these molecular fossils and their carbon-isotope composition to reconstruct some 24 million years of ecological change. Their findings are reported in an open-access paper, “The origin and development of the Miocene northwest African savanna”, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers found that the region’s closed forests and woodlands began giving way to a much more open ecosystem about 15–14 million years ago—approximately five million years earlier than earlier regional reconstructions had suggested. This first open landscape was not equivalent to the modern African savannah. It was rich in C₃ grasses and had no close modern counterpart. The familiar C₄-grass savannah developed later and in stages, with its most rapid expansion occurring between about 7.4 and 6.4 million years ago.

This does not conflict with research publicised by UC Santa Cruz in 2023, which found locally abundant C₄ grasses in parts of eastern Africa between about 21 and 16 million years ago. That earlier research examined terrestrial fossil sites in Kenya and Uganda; the new study reconstructs regional vegetation in north-west Africa from wind-blown plant waxes preserved in marine sediments. Together, the studies show that Africa did not undergo a single, continent-wide transformation. Different mixtures of forest, woodland and grassland appeared in different regions at different times.

Refuting Creationism - No 'Waters Of The Deep'!

Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscopy (STXM) with nanometer resolution of the selected inclusion.

Camarda, C., Gervasoni, F., Jalowitzki, T. et al (2026).

Schematic cross-section showing a cold subducted slab descending through the mantle transition zone into the deep mantle. The cold, very cold slab and hot geotherms are represented by dashed lines.

Camarda, C., Gervasoni, F., Jalowitzki, T. et al (2026).

Analysis of a super-deep diamond reveals how water travels to the Earth’s interior

Creationists have long been fond of two superficially impressive but scientifically worthless arguments. The first is that tiny amounts of carbon-14 detected when diamonds are placed in an accelerator mass spectrometer somehow show that diamonds—and therefore Earth—are only a few thousand years old. The second is that the discovery of “water” deep inside Earth confirms the biblical “fountains of the great deep” and, when convenient, explains where all the water from Noah’s supposed global flood subsequently disappeared.

A paper recently published in Scientific Reports brings these two favourite misconceptions together in a combination that may prove irresistible to professional misrepresenters of science. It therefore seems prudent to explain what the researchers actually found before the inevitable claims begin circulating.

Carolina Camarda and colleagues examined an irregular diamond, just 3 millimetres long, recovered from the Juína region of Brazil. Super-deep diamonds form at depths greater than about 300 kilometres, rather than at the approximately 150-kilometre depths typical of most diamonds, and can preserve microscopic inclusions of minerals that record conditions far below the surface.

Using synchrotron X-ray tomography, diffraction and spectroscopy, the team mapped more than 100 inclusions inside the diamond. One completely sealed inclusion, only about 35 micrometres across, contained a complex mixture of goethite—an iron oxyhydroxide with the formula FeOOH—together with hematite and magnetite. Another inclusion contained ferropericlase, a mineral characteristic of the deep mantle, supporting the conclusion that the diamond originated far below the crust.

The researchers propose that the goethite originally formed within hydrated oceanic crust or lithosphere. As that crust was carried downwards at a subduction zone, the goethite changed into a high-pressure form capable of surviving within a relatively cold descending slab. At still greater pressures and temperatures it began to decompose into iron oxides, releasing H₂O and oxygen into the surrounding mantle. The diamond then encapsulated part of this mineral assemblage, preserving evidence of the process.

In other words, the discovery concerns the slow transport of surface-derived water downwards through plate subduction. It is not evidence of a primordial subterranean ocean bursting upwards to flood Earth. Nor does it show where the water from an imaginary global flood went afterwards. The “water” carried by goethite is chemically incorporated into its crystal structure, principally as hydroxyl groups; it is not a liquid ocean occupying enormous caverns beneath the crust. It can be liberated as molecular water only when the mineral undergoes chemical reactions under extreme mantle conditions.

The study examined one microscopic inclusion and made no estimate of a hidden ocean, no calculation of the volume of floodwater that could be accommodated, and no suggestion that surface water could disappear hundreds of kilometres into the mantle within a few months. What it describes is part of Earth’s deep-water cycle, driven by plate tectonics and operating over geological time. Indeed, the direction of transport in the authors’ model is exactly the reverse of the “fountains of the great deep”: hydrated rocks are carried from the ocean floor into the mantle, where some of their bound water is eventually released.

Nor did the researchers carbon-date the diamond. The paper contains no radiocarbon measurement at all. Carbon-14 has a half-life of about 5,730 years, making radiocarbon dating useful for formerly living material up to roughly 50,000–55,000 years old under ordinary conditions. It cannot determine whether a diamond formed hundreds of millions or billions of years ago, and mantle carbon does not necessarily begin with the atmospheric carbon-14 ratio required for conventional radiocarbon dating.

Creationism Refuted - People Were Painting and Drawing On Cave Walls in France Thousands of Years Before 'Creation Week'

Cave paintings at Font-de-Gaume, Dordogne© Centre des monuments nationaux/Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France

Photo: Anne Maigret

VIS light photography of the selected panel at the “Carrefour” of the panels no. 13 and 14 composed of a reindeer and a horse as well as bison and possibly a deer, respectively, and the schematic Bison 15.

© Anne Maigret, C2RMF
From: Reiche, I., Coquinot, Y., Trosseau, A. et al. (2023)

First absolute dating of Palaeolithic paintings in the Dordogne | CNRS

For the first time, scientists have obtained direct radiocarbon dates for Palaeolithic paintings in the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume in what is now southwestern France. A black-line drawing of a bison was created between 13,461 and 13,162 calibrated years before present (cal BP), while two parts of a mask-like figure produced dates ranging from about 16,000 to 14,200 cal BP. In other words, people were producing accomplished works of art in France more than 3,000 years before even the upper limit of 10,000 years that young-Earth creationists commonly allow for the entire age of Earth.

Not that this evidence is likely to persuade many creationists to reconsider their beliefs, of course. Once a preferred conclusion has been declared infallible, any evidence that contradicts it can simply be dismissed as fraudulent, mistaken or somehow “wrong”. One stock evasion is the evidence-free suggestion that radioactive decay rates must once have been different. In the case of radiocarbon dating, even known variations in atmospheric carbon-14 are measured and incorporated into the calibration curves. But no amount of calibration can correct a chronology that is wrong by design.

For anyone more interested in discovering the truth than in finding excuses to protect a preordained conclusion, however, these paintings are fascinating glimpses into how members of our species perceived the world around them, with its bison, horses, cave lions, mammoths and other Ice Age animals. Having visited the Grotte du Pech Merle in the Lot and the Lascaux II faithful reproduction of the famous Lascaux cave in the Dordogne, I can testify to the breathtaking magnificence of these monumental works.

Their purpose can only be surmised. They may have formed part of rituals intended to influence or appropriate the power of the animals; they may have recorded stories, conveyed knowledge or helped to instruct younger members of the group. None of these interpretations can yet be demonstrated conclusively. A controversial paper published in 1998 compared certain features of Upper Palaeolithic cave art with drawings made by a young autistic child with exceptional artistic ability. It did not, however, establish that any particular Palaeolithic artist was autistic.

During my visit to Pech Merle, our guide suggested that one of the great animal friezes might have been drawn in a matter of hours by a single artist, using bold, confident lines in black pigment. That interpretation may remain speculative, but the powers of observation, memory and control evident in those sweeping lines are unmistakable.

The new dating study was carried out on paintings in the Grotte de Font-de-Gaume, near Les Eyzies in the Dordogne, by an interdisciplinary research team led by CNRS researcher Ina Reiche. Direct radiocarbon dating had previously been considered impossible because the black pigments used at Font-de-Gaume, Lascaux and other decorated caves in the region were assumed to consist solely of iron and manganese oxides, which contain no carbon. However, the absence of carbon had never actually been demonstrated.

Using non-invasive Raman microspectrometry and hyperspectral imaging, the researchers examined black-line drawings of a bison and a figure interpreted as a human or animal face, or “mask”. These techniques revealed that charcoal was distributed uniformly throughout the black lines, rather than occurring only in isolated patches, helping to rule out contamination from graffiti or tourist activity.

Refuting Creationism - Ceremonial Rituals In An Australian Cave - 15,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

GunaiKurnai grass-burning ritual, 25,000 years ago

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GunaiKurnai grass-burning ritual, 25,000 years ago, Cloggs Cave, Victoria, Australia.

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Microscopic plant remains reveal 25,000 years of GunaiKurnai rituals deep in a Victorian cave

A point I have made before in this blog is that the ignorance of the Bible’s authors is revealed as clearly by what they omitted as by what they included. When examined in the light of modern science, many of their claims turn out to be wrong, showing that they filled gaps in their knowledge with stories that reflected the prevailing superstitions of their culture. Meanwhile, the omissions reveal just how narrow their geographical and intellectual horizons were.

There is no unmistakable fact in the Bible that could not have been known, inferred or imagined by people living in the ancient Near East when its various books were written. There is no knowledge that required revelation from an omniscient being and no awareness of vast regions, peoples or periods of history lying beyond the experience of its human authors.

That is entirely understandable if the Bible is a collection of human writings. It is much more difficult to explain if its ultimate author was an omniscient god. Such an author would not have shared the cosmological limitations of ancient people or presented the world in the familiar ancient Near Eastern form found in Genesis: primordial waters divided by a firmament, dry land beneath it, and the Sun, Moon and stars placed in that firmament as lights. Whatever ingenious reinterpretations modern apologists may retrofit to the text, there is nothing in it that anticipates the real structure, age or scale of the Universe.

Nor is there any hint that people were already living on the other side of the planet. Archaeological evidence from Madjedbebe in northern Australia indicates human occupation by about 65,000 years ago. The Bible’s authors knew nothing of Australia, its First Peoples or the tens of thousands of years of human history that had already elapsed before the supposed events of Genesis.

What is perhaps more surprising is that educated adults today can still imagine that the Genesis creation myth is an accurate and inerrant account of history, despite its demonstrable errors and enormous omissions. The text contains no Australia, no Americas, no Pacific peoples and no conception of the deep human past—only the restricted world known to its authors, projected onto the entire planet.

Augustine of Hippo provides an illuminating example of how treating Scripture as historical fact could obstruct an otherwise rational consideration of the evidence. Contrary to a common misconception, Augustine did not insist that Earth was flat. By his time, its spherical shape had been understood by educated Greeks and Romans for centuries, and Augustine was prepared to concede that it might be demonstrated scientifically.

What he could not accept was that the far side of a spherical Earth might be inhabited, because that appeared irreconcilable with the biblical claim that every human descended from a single original man—and, after the supposed global flood, from Noah and his family. In De Civitate Dei, he wrote:

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

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

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

AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking)

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.