Stonehenge in Wiltshire, southern England, is a mysterious place that speaks of a culture and political–religious authority of which we know almost nothing, probably motivated by belief in long-dead gods whose supposed presence was, at the time, undoubtedly considered to be “all around”. This is much as theists of all religions assert of their god or gods today. Who these people were, remains one of the great mysteries, as does how they moved such massive stones into place to build a stone circle with extraordinary precision, and how they transported them over long distances long before the domestication of the horse.
We know they were not the later Welsh-speaking Celts, who did not arrive in Britain until around 1,000 BCE — some two millennia after construction of Stonehenge began. Those Celts replaced the Beaker culture, which itself had replaced the Neolithic farming communities who first built the monument. Construction began around 3,000 BCE, initially as a bank-and-ditch enclosure with a circle of wooden posts. This was later replaced, around 2,500 BCE, by a circle of massive sarsen stones sourced locally from the nearby Salisbury Plain, with the smaller bluestones brought from the Preseli Hills in south-west Wales. The so-called “altar stone” was added last. Its precise origin remains unresolved, with conflicting evidence suggesting either north-west Scotland or west Wales as its source.
While the question of where most of the stones came from has largely been resolved, what remains is the long-standing puzzle of how they were transported using only human labour. The motivation was clearly strong enough to justify the immense effort and manpower involved, and the fact that it was human effort that moved them has now been established beyond reasonable doubt by the falsification of an alternative hypothesis — namely, that the stones were carried to Salisbury Plain by a passing glacier during the last Ice Age.
The refutation of this idea provides a neat example of how science tests and falsifies hypotheses, though it will no doubt unsettle creationists who cling to the absurd belief that the entire history of the Earth can be compressed into a timescale of just 6,000–10,000 years. The work was carried out by two researchers from Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, and relied on dating zircon crystals — a highly accurate method for determining the age of rock formations, as regular readers of this blog will know — along with apatite grains, which similarly exploit the radioactive decay of uranium isotopes into stable lead isotopes.
There's nothing quite like leaving a message behind to tell future generations that you were here.
Creationists, of course, have a message from about 5,000 years ago telling them that there were ignorant Bronze Age storytellers living in the Middle East — but sadly the only truth in their stories was the one they didn’t explicitly state: that they were making things up to explain what they didn’t know, which meant a great many stories to invent. They couldn’t have guessed, of course, that their tales would later be written down, bound up in a book, and then proclaimed to be the inerrant word of a creator god; otherwise they might have made more of an effort to get it right, or at least admitted they didn’t know. As it is, all we really learn from them is just how ignorant they were, and how vivid their imaginations must have been.
To be fair, it may not have been their intention to mislead and misinform, but that has been the result — mostly, it has to be said, through the fault of those who later declared their tales to be the authentic word of a god, because that conveniently suited their political agenda.
People living much earlier, on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, left a much clearer and more honest message in the form of cave art, and particularly hand stencils. All they really say is, “Hi there! I was here!” — with no attempt to elevate themselves to a special status or claim to know things they didn’t know. Where they depicted the animals around them, they showed them just as they saw them: wild and free.
This cave art, which precedes the celebrated art of the French and Spanish caves by tens of thousands of years, has now been identified as the oldest known cave art, telling an unambiguous story of people living there around 70,000 years ago — long before anatomically modern humans made their presence felt in Western Eurasia. The discovery and the methods used to date the art were published in Nature, in a paper that marks a defining moment in our understanding of early symbolic behaviour.
Four of the researchers — Maxime Aubert, Professor of Archaeological Science, Griffith University; Adam Brumm, Professor of Archaeology, Griffith University; Adhi Oktaviana, Research Centre of Archeometry, Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional (BRIN), Jakarta, Indonesia; and Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Professor of Geochronology and Geochemistry, Southern Cross University, New South Wales, Australia — have also written an article in The Conversation that explains the significance of the find in accessible terms. Their piece is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
The Bronze Age creation myths preserved in the Bible assert that Earth is only some 6,000–10,000 years old, depending on how the text is interpreted. The difficulty for those who insist on treating the Bible as literal history is that these claims are casually and repeatedly refuted by real-world evidence. That leaves creationists with few options other than bearing false witness against scientists or asserting that the physical evidence itself must be deceptive—despite their own scripture reassuring them that the god it describes “cannot lie” (Titus 1:2).
The problem is compounded by the fact that scientists are continually improving their ability to measure the age of things, including the histories of entire continents. We can now say, with a high degree of confidence and with abundant supporting evidence, that Earth is billions of years old and has undergone profound changes over that vast span of time. These include the movement of tectonic plates, the rise and erosion of mountain ranges, repeated fluctuations in sea level, major climate shifts, and the appearance, spread, and extinction of forests and entire orders of animal and plant life.
That ability has now taken another significant step forward. A team of scientists from Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and the University of Cologne in Germany has developed a technique that not only allows rocks to be dated, but also reveals what has happened to them over immense spans of time—recorded in microscopic zircon crystals as they were exposed at Earth’s surface, buried, and later re-exposed. Their findings have just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Three members of the team have also published an open-access article in The Conversation, which I will reproduce below under a Creative Commons licence, formatted for stylistic consistency. Before that, however, here is an explanation of how this remarkable technique works, and why it allows scientists to reconstruct the deep-time history of entire landscapes.
Pencil marks note specific years along tree rings from a Japanese cedar.
Tomozo Yagi/AP Images for American Association for the Advancement of Science (“AAAS”); publisher of Science
A cosmic carbon spike
Cosmic rays from solar flares or other extraterrestrial sources collide with gas molecules in our atmosphere, spawning neutrons. When a free neutron knocks a proton out of a nitrogen atom, it forms the radioisotope carbon-14 (14C). The more energetic the event, the higher the ratio of
14C to stable carbon isotopes. Trees breathe in these isotopes as carbon dioxide (CO2)
As though 2026 hadn't started badly enough for creationism, it just got a whole lot worse, with news that geochronologists have a method with which they can pinpoint carbon-14 dates to exact years, removing virtually all sources of error and, devastatingly for creationists, one of their traditional ways to dismiss evidence they don't like has evaporated. But this isn't new information; it's something creationists have either been kept ignorant of, have been pretending not to know about it, or, more likely, did not understand the subject well enough to realise it refuted their claims. It was actually published in Science in April 2023
One of the most persistent fall-back positions in creationist rhetoric is not to deny individual discoveries outright, but to retreat into claims that scientific dating methods are too uncertain to be trusted. Radiocarbon dating, in particular, is routinely portrayed as vague, circular, or endlessly “adjusted” to fit preconceived evolutionary timelines. This claim relies heavily on the idea that dates come with wide error bars that can supposedly be stretched, compressed, or reinterpreted to accommodate a much younger history.
Creationists also rely on the unsupported assertion that radioactive decay rates were much higher once upon a time - a process that coincidentally stopped as soon as we developed the technology to measure it accurately. This claim also sits uncomfortably with another creationist claim - that the Universe is so fine-tuned that altering any of its parameters by even the smallest an=mount would make life impossible. The inconsistency of these two claims is lost on those who have no understanding of how radioactive decay depends on nuclear forces and altering those would make the formation of atoms impossible, so high decay rates when they believe life was created would mean not even Earth could exist, let alone organic molecules.
But perhaps the most amusing accusations against science is that carbon-14 dating assumes a constant ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in the atmosphere, but in fact it is variable, depending on solar activity. Not only is this known and is routinely compensated for using dendrochronology because tree rings contain an accurate record of these changes, but it forms the very basis of this devastating rebuttal of creationist claims - we can accurately pinpoint spikes in carbon-14 production and correlate them with known events in history, thus removing any reasonable margin of error.
The discovery and dating (of which more later) of hominin remains in a Moroccan quarry, reported recently in Nature, has provided further confirmation that the origin of Homo sapiens lies in Africa, not Eurasia, contrary to an alternative hypothesis that has occasionally been proposed. The material consists of mandibles and other fragmentary remains, and also sheds light on the evolutionary origins of Neanderthals and Denisovans.
That is not to say that any serious palaeoanthropologists believed humans evolved wholly in Eurasia. Rather, some suggested that the final stages of Homo sapiens evolution may have occurred there, derived from descendants of earlier African migrants such as H. erectus, H. rhodesiensis, or H. antecessor. Others have argued that the so-called ‘muddle in the middle’ of the hominin family tree may represent a single, widely distributed species exhibiting regional variation across both Africa and Eurasia.
However, the Moroccan specimens display a clear mosaic of primitive and derived features — precisely the pattern that creationists call ‘transitional species’ and insist don't exist. These fossils combine traits seen in African sister lineages with features associated with H. antecessor, a pre-Neanderthal/Denisovan European species whose remains are being excavated at the Sima de los Huesos (Cave of Bones) site at Atapuerca, Spain.
The fossils are also exceptionally valuable for palaeoanthropology for another reason. The sediments in which they were found preserve the unmistakable signature of the Matuyama–Brunhes geomagnetic reversal, which occurred around 773,000 years ago when Earth’s magnetic poles flipped. This provides an unusually robust chronological anchor, as the timing of this reversal has been independently verified from multiple, entirely separate lines of evidence.
There is therefore a great deal here for creationists to attempt to dismiss. First, there is the mosaic of primitive and derived features that identify these fossils as genuinely transitional — something creationism insists does not exist. Second, there is the age of the material, securely dated to approximately 763,000 years (±4,000 years) before creationists insist Earth was magicked out of nothing, placing ancestral hominins hundreds of thousands of years before the Bronze Age biblical story of a single, ancestor-free human couple. Finally, and perhaps most inconveniently of all, the dating does not rely on radiometric methods at all, but on geomagnetic reversal stratigraphy, verified beyond any reasonable doubt. The biblical timeline is therefore wrong by many orders of magnitude.
Normally, creationists seize on any concentration of animal fossils that can be attributed to flooding as supposed “evidence” for their favourite Bronze Age myth of a global genocide. On that basis, they should be delighted by recent news from Romania describing a rich deposit of dinosaur fossils that appears to have accumulated as a result of flooding in the Hațeg Basin.
There is, however, a serious snag. These fossils occur in deposits dated to around 72 million years ago — tens of millions of years before creationists believe the Earth even existed — and the evidence points clearly to repeated local flooding events, not a single global catastrophe.
The discovery of the fossil site is reported in the journal PLOS ONE by the Valiora Dinosaur Research Group, a collaboration of Hungarian and Romanian palaeontologists co-led by Gábor Botfalvai and Zoltán Csiki-Sava of the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Department of Palaeontology, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.
This paper will have creationists searching for reasons to dismiss evidence that would, if they were prepared to accept it honestly, force them to concede that their beliefs are wrong. It reports a discovery by researchers at Stellenbosch University showing that dinosaur eggshells can be dated with a high degree of precision using an already well-established technique: uranium–lead (U–Pb) radiometric dating.
Until now, U–Pb dating has been most famously applied to zircon crystals in volcanic ash, where the age can be determined by measuring the ratio of radioactive uranium isotopes to the stable lead isotopes produced by their decay. In this study, however, the same underlying principles are applied to calcite crystals preserved in dinosaur eggshells.
Geometric and mathematical patterns on Halafian pottery.
Scientists have once again — almost certainly unintentionally — produced evidence that the Bible is profoundly wrong about human history. This time it comes in the form of pottery shards dating back more than 8,000 years to the Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia (c. 6200–5500 BCE). These artefacts show that people were not only producing sophisticated ceramics, but were decorating them with complex mathematical patterns long before the formal invention of numbers and counting systems.
According to the biblical account of global history, Earth was subjected to a catastrophic genocidal reset, inflicted in a fit of pique by a vengeful god who had failed to anticipate how his creation would turn out. Rather than simply eliminating humanity and starting again with a corrected design, this deity allegedly chose to preserve the same flawed model in a wooden boat while drowning everything else beneath a flood so deep it covered the highest mountains. The implicit hope appears to have been that repeating the experiment would somehow yield a different result.
As implausible as that story already is, we now possess a vast body of archaeological and palaeontological evidence showing not only that Earth is vastly older than the biblical narrative allows, but that this supposed catastrophic reset never occurred. The latter is demonstrated by the existence of civilisations that predate the alleged flood and continue uninterrupted through it, as though it never happened at all. Their material remains include artefacts that would have been completely destroyed or displaced by such a deluge, and settlement sites that show no sign of burial beneath a chaotic, fossil-bearing sedimentary layer containing mixed local and foreign species.
No such global layer exists. Instead, human artefacts are found precisely where they were made and used, unaffected by any mythical torrent scouring the planet clean.
The designs on the Halafian pottery themselves are particularly revealing. They include repeating patterns — for example, binary progressions such as 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 — suggesting that this culture possessed systematic ways of dividing land or goods to ensure equitable distribution.
As I’ve pointed out many times, 99.9975% of Earth’s history took place before the period in which creationists—treating the Bible as literal historical truth—believe the planet itself existed. It is remarkable how effectively biblical literalists manage to ignore, distort, or otherwise dismiss almost the entire body of geological, archaeological, and palaeontological evidence in order to cling to the easily refuted notion of a 6,000–10,000-year-old Earth and a global genocidal flood supposedly occurring about 4,000 years ago.
Unsurprisingly, discoveries such as the one below make no impression whatsoever on committed creationists.
Now archaeologists from Aarhus University, working with colleagues from the National Museum of Denmark as well as teams from Germany, Sweden, and France, have uncovered yet another piece of evidence destined for creationist dismissal: blue pigment on a stone artefact dating from around 13,000 years ago. Their findings were recently published in Antiquity.
Not only should this archaeology not exist at all if the biblical timeline were correct, but even if it had somehow escaped the supposed global flood, it would necessarily be buried beneath a thick, worldwide layer of sediment containing a chaotic mixture of fossil plants and animals from disconnected continents. No such layer has ever been found anywhere on Earth. A truly global flood, as described in Genesis, would have left unmistakable and ubiquitous geological signatures. It did not.
The blue pigment was discovered on a shaped, concave stone originally thought to be an oil lamp but now believed to have served as a mixing palette. Until now, only black and red pigments had been identified on Palaeolithic artefacts, leading archaeologists to assume these were the only colours available. The presence of blue pigment suggests something more nuanced: selective use of colours for different purposes, with blue likely used primarily for body decoration or dyeing clothing—activities that rarely leave direct archaeological traces.
56 million years ago, in that vast expanse of pre–‘Creation Week’ history when 99.975% of Earth’s story unfolded — long before creationists imagine the Universe even existed — an event occurred that gives the lie to the claim that their putative designer created Earth as a safe and stable planet, finely tuned for the existence of (human) life. Earth’s temperature rose by roughly 6 °C as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere increased dramatically.
The cause of this, the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), lay in the disruption of one of Earth’s major feedback systems. Plants sequester carbon through photosynthesis and lock it into their tissues, but that system was pushed out of balance until a new equilibrium eventually formed. It took some 70,000–100,000 years for the planet to recover.
The problem was that higher temperatures caused many plants to fail because they had evolved for cooler conditions, and evolution proceeds far too slowly to cope with rapid environmental change. As plant productivity collapsed, less carbon was sequestered, which in turn drove temperatures higher — a classic positive feedback loop, triggered by a relatively small initial shift.
The worrying parallel today is that the current rate of anthropogenic warming is around ten times greater than at the onset of the PETM.
How we know this — and how the PETM reshaped climate and the terrestrial biosphere — is explored in a paper by an international team of scientists, published open access (in unedited form) in Nature Communications.
Two of the authors have also written a summary of their research in The Conversation. Their article is republished here under a Creative Commons licence, with formatting adjusted for consistency.
56 million years ago, the Earth suddenly heated up – and many plants stopped working properly
Forest life in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
As we show in new research published in Nature Communications, one consequence was that many of the world’s plants could no longer thrive. As a result, they soaked up less carbon from the atmosphere, which may have contributed to another interesting thing about this prehistoric planetary heatwave: it lasted more than 100,000 years.
Today Earth is warming around ten times faster than it did 56 million years ago, which may make it even harder for modern plants to adapt.
Rewinding 56 million years
Plants can help regulate the climate through a process known as carbon sequestration. This involves capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via photosynthesis and storing it in their leaves, wood and roots.
However, abrupt global warming may temporarily impact this regulating function.
Investigating how Earth’s vegetation responded to the rapid global warming event around 56 million years ago – known formally as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (or PETM) – isn’t easy.
To do so, we developed a computer model simulating plant evolution, dispersal, and carbon cycling. We compared model outputs to fossil pollen and plant trait data from three sites to reconstruct vegetation changes such as height, leaf mass, and deciduousness across the warming event.
The three sites include: the Bighorn Basin in the United States, the North Sea and the Arctic Circle.
We focused our research on fossil pollen due to many unique properties.
First, pollen is produced in copious amounts. Second, it travels extensively via air and water currents. Third, it possesses a resilient structure that withstands decay, allowing for its excellent preservation in ancient geological formations.
56-million-year-old fossilised palm pollen from the Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, United States.
Vera Korasidis
A shift in vegetation
In the mid-latitude sites, including the Bighorn Basin – a deep and wide valley amidst the northern Rocky Mountains – evidence indicates vegetation had a reduced ability to regulate the climate.
Pollen data shows a shift to smaller plants such as palms and ferns. Leaf mass per area (a measure of leaf density and thickness) also increased as deciduous trees declined. Fossil soils indicate reduced soil organic carbon levels.
The data suggest smaller, drought-resistant plants including palms thrived in the landscape because they could keep pace with warming. They were, however, associated with a reduced capacity to store carbon in biomass and soils.
In contrast, the high-latitude Arctic site showed increased vegetation height and biomass following warming. The pollen data show replacement of conifer forests by broad-leaved swamp taxa and the persistence of some subtropical plants such as palms.
The model and data indicate high-latitude regions could adapt and even increase productivity (that is, capture and store carbon dioxide) under the warmer climate.
A glimpse into the future
The vegetation disruption during the PETM may have reduced terrestrial carbon sequestration for 70,000-100,000 years due to the reduced ability of vegetation and soils to capture and store carbon.
Our research suggests vegetation that is more able to regulate the climate took a long time to regrow, and this contributed to the length of the warming event.
Global warming of more than 4°C exceeded mid-latitude vegetation’s ability to adapt during the PETM. Human-made warming is occurring ten times faster, further limiting the time for adaptation.
What happened on Earth 56 million years ago highlights the need to understand biological systems’ capacity to keep pace with rapid climate changes and maintain efficient carbon sequestration.
Vera Korasidis, Lecturer in Environmental Geoscience, The University of Melbourne and Julian Rogger, Senior Research Associate, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
Abstract
The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) around 56 million years ago was a 5–6°C global warming event that lasted for approximately 200 kyr. A warming-induced loss and a 70–100 kyr lagged recovery of biospheric carbon stocks was suggested to have contributed to the long duration of the climate perturbation. Here, we use a trait-based, eco-evolutionary vegetation model to test whether the PETM warming exceeded the adaptation capacity of vegetation systems, impacting the efficiency of terrestrial organic carbon sequestration and silicate weathering. Combined model simulations and vegetation reconstructions using PETM palynofloras suggest that warming-induced migration and evolutionary adaptation of vegetation were insufficient to prevent a widespread loss of productivity. We conclude that global warming of the magnitude as during the PETM could exceed the response capacity of vegetation systems and cause a long-lasting decline in the efficiency of vegetation-mediated climate regulation mechanisms.
Rogger, J., Korasidis, V.A., Bowen, G.J. et al. Loss of vegetation functions during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. Nat Commun (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-66390-8
Events like the PETM expose the fragility of the systems that sustain life and demonstrate how easily they can be tipped into new and often hostile states. Far from being the work of an infallible designer fine-tuning a planet for a single favoured species, Earth’s history shows a world continually shaped by feedback loops, chance events and the slow, directionless process of evolution. When those systems are pushed too far or too fast, life suffers — and it takes tens of thousands of years for the planet to recover.
What makes the comparison with today so stark is the rate at which we are forcing change. The PETM was a natural carbon-cycle disturbance that unfolded over millennia. Our own contribution has taken place in a geological instant, yet it is already driving shifts comparable in magnitude to that ancient warming pulse. If slow change overwhelmed ecosystems then, the acceleration humanity has produced is even more concerning.
Understanding the PETM is not simply an academic exercise. It is a reminder, written in deep time, that there are limits to what living systems can endure and that “business as usual” can push Earth into states incompatible with the world we inherited. The past cannot tell us exactly what will happen next, but it does show that the consequences of inaction are neither abstract nor remote. The warning signs are etched in the rocks; whether we heed them is up to us.
One thing we know is that there is no watching sky daddy who's going to come and rescue us from our folly.
According to new open-access research just published in Nature by a team led by Arizona State University palaeoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie, ‘Lucy’ (Australopithecus afarensis) was not the only hominin living on the Ethiopian Highlands 3.4 million years ago. This was part of the vast span of human evolutionary history that occurred long before creationists believe Earth was made as a small, flat world with a dome over it somewhere in the Middle East. Living alongside ‘Lucy’ was another species, now named Australopithecus deyiremeda.
However, A. deyiremeda differed from A. afarensis in several important ways — differences that reflect how two species can coexist in the same region by adapting to distinct ecological niches. A. deyiremeda, for instance, had an opposable big toe suited to climbing, indicating a more arboreal lifestyle than A. afarensis. Isotope analysis of A. deyiremeda’s teeth also shows that it had a different diet.
The first indication that another species might be present came in 2009 with the discovery of foot bones, announced publicly in 2012. In palaeontology, it is standard practice not to name a new species based on such fragmentary remains, especially when cranial bones are absent. Although teeth were also found in the same area, there was initially insufficient evidence to link them definitively to the foot bones.
Then, in 2015, the team had enough material to announce and name the new species, though they were still unable to demonstrate that the foot bones belonged to it. Now, ten years on, they believe they finally have sufficient fossil evidence to make that connection.
This news is unlikely to trouble creationists, who already have a ready supply of scientifically baseless excuses for dismissing ‘Lucy’: that it was forged; that scientists fabricated the evidence; that it was assembled from scattered bones found six miles apart; that ‘carbon dating’ was used (despite not being applicable at that age); or that radioactive decay rates have changed in the last 6,000–10,000 years, making 6,000 years only appear to be 3.4 million.
For those with the intellectual honesty and humility to form opinions based on evidence, however, the discovery offers a fascinating example of how multiple ancient hominins coexisted — and, in evolutionary terms, how two species sharing a common ancestor can diverge to occupy different ecological niches.
Salterella in longitudinal section, showing biomineralized outer shell (blue arrow), agglutinated material (red arrow) and the boundary between the agglutinated layer and the shell near the apex (white arrows),
As though fossils from half a billion years before their mythical “Creation Week” weren’t awkward enough for creationists, this latest find slips neatly into the tree of life and closes a small but meaningful gap in our understanding of how protective shells evolved. In doing so, it undermines more creationist claims than they might care to consider.
A research team led by Prescott J. Vayda of Virginia Tech has shown that the enigmatic fossils Volborthella and Salterella, long puzzling palaeontologists, are in fact early cnidarians — members of the group that includes corals, jellyfish, and sea anemones. These organisms are united by their stinging cells, which they use to subdue prey. Even more troublesome for creationists, the structure of the earlier Volborthella shell strongly suggests a transitional relationship with the more complex shell of Salterella, hinting at an evolutionary sequence between the two.
The Cambrian period was defined by the emergence of mobility and, with it, true predation. These new ecological dynamics sparked evolutionary “arms races”, driving rapid diversification in both offensive and defensive strategies: sensory structures, spines, shells, and behaviours such as burrowing. These early cnidarians provide an important glimpse into how some of the earliest protective shells came to be.
Such evolutionary arms races also offer yet another reason to dismiss the notion of an intelligent designer. No competent designer would turn yesterday’s solution into today’s problem — yet that is precisely what we see in nature, where improvements in predators prompt improvements in prey, and vice versa. It’s exactly what one would expect from an unguided evolutionary process with no foresight, driven solely by differential survival and reproduction.
Two new papers announced today will have creationists scratching their heads as they try to decide which technique for dismissing them will meet with the most approval from their fellow cultists.
The first, in Nature, concerns yet another of those supposedly non-existent transitional fossils which, because Charles Darwin predicted they would be found, must be dismissed at all costs. It comes in the form of an 86-million-year-old dinosaur fossil from Mongolia that is intermediate between the small, fleet-footed predatory dinosaurs and the larger apex predators — the tyrannosaurs.
The usual creationist response is to declare that these intermediate fossils are “not transitional; they are fully formed, created species.” Of course, that doesn’t explain why species that are intermediate between ancestral and descendant species show a mosaic of features from both. Presumably, given their parody of evolution — in which evolution is imagined as a single event where one species suddenly turns into another — they expect an intermediate to be half one and half the other: the equivalent of the “crocoduck” or a chimpanzee with a human head. In reality, this discovery shows exactly what we would expect from the fossil record of tyrannosaur evolution 86 million years ago.
It's also important to creationism that the so-called 'missing link' stays missing. It is only ever referred to in the singular and refers to some supposed link between apes and humans, and it is definitely not one of the many archaic African hominins. But of course, every fossil is the 'link' or transitional form between its parents and its offspring because evolution is a process, not the parody event of creationism, evolving species form a continuum, and this discovery from Mongolia is no exception.
The Collision that created the Earth-Moon complex and gave us seasons and tides.
AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5)
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Artistic illustration of the early formation phase of the solar system. At the time, the young sun (in the centre) was surrounded by a pro-planetary disc - a rotating collection of gas and dust.
According to creationists who treat the Bible as both science and history, the Earth was created ex nihilo as a small, flat world beneath a dome, sitting at the centre of the universe. This happened, they claim, when a male deity with magical powers spoke some special words – in a language no one else could have known, since no other sentient beings yet existed.
And all of this supposedly took place instantaneously, just 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Creationists also like to imagine that the Earth, and indeed the whole universe, was purpose-built and fine-tuned, with a grand plan designed so that they could live comfortably here and now.
The scientific reality, however, could not be more different.
Earth formed some 4 billion years ago, condensing out of an accretion disc around a young, second- or third-generation star – our Sun – amid the chaos of the early solar system. Planets jostled for stable orbits, minor planetoids collided or were absorbed, and gravity ruled everything.
Now, two scientists at the University of Bern have shown that the Earth which first emerged was dry, barren, and stripped of the essential building blocks of life. It was only thanks to a colossal chance collision with a wandering planetoid, rich in water and volatile elements such as hydrogen, carbon, and sulphur, that Earth acquired the raw ingredients for habitability. The debris from this impact later condensed to form the Moon, while the tilted axis of Earth’s rotation – which gives us our seasons – was another by-product of that chaotic event.
None of this was inevitable. It was the result of blind chance shaped only by natural forces such as gravity, directly refuting the creationist mantra that “order cannot come from chaos.” To insist it was all preordained as part of some cosmic plan to produce humans (and, more parochially, white Americans) is to deny the fragility of existence and the extraordinary good fortune of being alive now, able to appreciate the wonder of how it all came to be.
Atheists do not live for death; they live for life.
Cross-section of an egg-shaped iron oxide stone: It holds information about the amount of organic carbon in the sea millions of years ago, much like a time capsule.
Scientists at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich have discovered evidence that may force us to rethink how Ice Ages and complex life began. By studying tiny iron oxide grains called ooides, they found that dissolved carbon dioxide in the oceans between 1000 and 541 million years ago was 90–99 percent lower than today — far too low to have triggered an Ice Age or the rise of multicellular organisms.
For creationists, this creates a dilemma. Whatever did cause these events, it happened hundreds of millions of years earlier than their literal reading of the Bible allows. Science may revise its conclusions when new evidence emerges, but it is nowhere near as wrong as the Bible’s authors—who missed the truth by billions of years.
This difference highlights the contrast between science and religion. Science asks, “What does the evidence show?” and adapts accordingly. Religion demands blind faith, treating doubt as a weakness.
Creationists boast that their “truth” never changes, but the reality is that what doesn't change is the mind of a creationist who is immune to evidence, deductive logic and analytical reasoning. Refusing to change your mind in the light of evidence is intellectual bankruptcy - the hallmark of dogma, not wisdom.
Here is yet another fossil that will give creationists a lot to think about. It’s a fossil of the earliest known lepidosaur — the group that includes lizards, snakes, and the tuatara of New Zealand. It is ∼242 million years old and was found in a sandstone deposit in Devon, in southwest Britain. It was picked up on a beach in Devon in 2015, and has been examined by a team from the University of Bristol.
At that age it is very close to the stem of the order Lepidosauria. However, it already displays some “advanced” features, and some of the assumed primitive features are already absent.
One of the primitive features often discussed is the lower temporal bar — a bony rod running between the cheek and the jaw hinge—which is present in the tuatara but absent (“open”) in modern lizards and snakes. This opening gives greater flexibility to the skull, allowing more motion for feeding. Also, many modern lizards have palatal teeth (teeth on the roof of the mouth) which help grip prey.
The fossil skull (from Agriodontosaurus helsbypetrae) has no skull hinge and no palatal teeth, but it does have an open lower temporal bar. In other words, this is a transitional species: it has a mosaic of primitive and derived traits—a pattern Darwin predicted, but which creationists generally dismiss. To creationists, fossils are often denied, mischaracterised, or claimed to be “just as they were created a few thousand years ago.” But this specimen is clear evidence of evolutionary change.
Meanwhile, the evidence of fossil ages—dating back hundreds of millions of years—refutes the idea of a young Earth (~ thousands of years), which cannot be reconciled with the geological, biological, and radiometric data.
None of that undermines the real discovery: an early lepidosaur with a mosaic of features lived in what is now Devon, UK, in the Middle Triassic, about 242 million years ago. As always, in rational enquiry, solid evidence must take priority over magical or mythological claims.
The dating of a clutch of fossil dinosaur eggs will leave creationists scrambling for excuses to dismiss the evidence and cling to the childish notion that Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old, created ex nihilo by magic, with all extant and extinct species brought into existence without ancestors just a few days later. In other words, this discovery is yet another small addition to the mountain of evidence showing that the biblical creation story was the work of ignorant Bronze Age people trying to make sense of the world around them, not the word of an omniscient creator god who would have known better.
An added problem for creationists is that the research team used a new method of dating the eggs based on measuring when the eggshell itself formed, rather than relying solely on dating the rock in which the eggs were embedded. The difficulty with the latter approach is that, while it gives the age of the surrounding rock, the mineral grains in that rock may predate the eggs and could have been transported there by water or wind.
The new technique is conceptually similar to the uranium–lead (U–Pb) method used to date zircon crystals in volcanic tuff. Tiny amounts of uranium, which readily substitute into the crystal lattice, are incorporated when the zircon forms, but lead is excluded. Over time, uranium isotopes decay into stable isotopes of lead. Thus, any lead present within a zircon crystal must have come from radioactive decay, and by measuring the ratio of uranium to lead isotopes, scientists can calculate the crystal’s age with high precision.
A very similar process occurs in the carbonate of dinosaur eggshells: uranium is incorporated during formation, but lead is excluded. Measuring uranium–lead isotope ratios in the shell carbonate therefore provides a direct and highly accurate age for the eggs themselves, leaving little room for error.
Archaeologists led by Budianto Hakim of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN) and Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution have uncovered evidence of tool-making on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi dating back 1.04 million years. The identity of the toolmakers remains unknown, as no hominin fossils have yet been found on the island. Their discovery has just been published open-access in Nature.
The most likely candidates are Homo erectus or a descendant population that adapted to Sulawesi’s distinctive environment. The island lies close to Flores, home of the diminutive ‘Hobbit’ (H. floresiensis), thought to have evolved from H. erectus through island dwarfism, a process that also produced the miniature elephants of Flores. A related discovery was made in 2019 on Luzon in the Philippines, where H. luzonensis—another likely offshoot of H. erectus—was identified. It is therefore entirely plausible that H. erectus, or one of its evolutionary branches, was present and making tools on Sulawesi more than a million years ago.
For creationists, such finds are troublesome because they align seamlessly with evolutionary theory, showing hominins branching, adapting, and diversifying in different environments, just as Darwin and Wallace first described in 1859. They also highlight the profound role of environment in shaping evolutionary outcomes.
For science, the discovery is particularly significant because it implies that an early hominin was capable of undertaking sea crossings across the formidable ‘Wallace Line’—a biogeographic boundary that long isolated the fauna of Australasia from mainland Asia by preventing the natural dispersal of terrestrial animals.
The news came from the Czech Institute of Archaeology: research by an international team led by Roman Garba, from the Institute of Nuclear Physics and the Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, has uncovered the earliest evidence of hominins in Europe at a site in Ukraine.
This is, like most discoveries in biology, archaeology, and geology, compelling evidence that the Bible’s account of creation is not only wrong, but so far removed from reality that it can’t even be rescued as metaphor or allegory. Increasingly large portions of the Bible now have to be explained away in this manner as mainstream Christianity retreats from the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy and the idea of a creator god. What’s left is a dwindling rump of die-hard creationists, clinging desperately to the wreckage of their beliefs as the tsunami of evidence sweeps them further into irrelevance.
The discovery was made at Korolevo, Ukraine, and consisted of stone tools—sadly, no bones were found. If confirmed, this pushes back the timeline of hominin migration into Eurasia by 200,000 to 300,000 years from the previous earliest known date at Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, Spain. The scale of denialism required to dismiss this discovery can be measured in the response of one such creationist on Facebook:
since the earth is less then [sic] 6,000 years old where was this skeliton [sic – it’s actually a stone tool] for the remiander [sic] of that time seeing there was no universe?
Reconstituted scenario of Monte Clérigo tracksite, generated by AI tools following the guidance, and final artworks of J.M. Galán (ChatGPT-4 was used to select the prompts, at https://openai.com/index/gpt-4/; Image Generator Pro to generate various versions, at https://imagegeneratorpro.com; DALL-E3 for the nuances and quality of the image, at https://openai.com/index/dall-e-3/; Photoshop 26.4.1 (www.adobe.com) and digital pencil of Procreate for iPad version 5.3.14, at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/procreate/id425073498, for drawing over the selected image version).
The discovery of 78,000-year-old Neanderthal footprints on a Portuguese beach is yet another blow to creationist pseudoscience. Preserved in the ancient sands of Monte Clérigo, the tracks of an adult male, a child, and a toddler walking together paint a vivid picture of Neanderthal life — not as brutish subhumans, but as highly social beings living in complex family groups, navigating diverse coastal environments long before modern humans entered Europe. Such findings are not only consistent with the evolutionary timeline but utterly irreconcilable with young-Earth creationist beliefs.
According to mainstream geological dating techniques, these footprints were made tens of thousands of years before the supposed biblical date of creation (around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, depending on interpretation). For creationists who insist that all of Earth’s history must be crammed into a few millennia, these kinds of discoveries are profoundly inconvenient. Worse still, the clarity of the evidence — physical impressions in sediment, dated using well-established methods like optically stimulated luminescence — makes them difficult to hand-wave away.
Faced with such a challenge, creationists will likely fall back on a familiar toolkit of denial strategies. Some will try to cast doubt on the dating methods, resorting to pseudoscientific critiques of OSL or claiming unknown “contamination” skewed the results. Others may assert that the footprints were made after Noah’s Flood — an idea that stretches credulity beyond breaking point given the age and geological context. And, of course, some will simply ignore the evidence altogether, pretending it doesn’t exist or insisting that Neanderthals were just humans who lived in “post-Babel dispersion” times, despite the overwhelming fossil, genetic, and archaeological data to the contrary.
