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.
It never rains but it pours for creationism. Or in this case, not pouring rain but a veritable ice storm — an ice core from the oldest Alpine glacier, holding a remarkably detailed record of the past 12,000 years, stretching back to the end of the last Ice Age.
The core, 40 metres long, was extracted from Mont Blanc’s Dôme du Goûter glacier in the French Alps.
And — surprise, surprise! — there is no sign of a cataclysmic global flood. Not even the faintest trace. In this part of the French Alps at least, the worldwide genocidal flood that creationists believe their deity unleashed upon the Earth quite simply never happened. Strangely, a flood supposedly deep enough to cover all mountains (Genesis 7:19–20) failed to reach the peaks of the European Alps.
Instead, what the ice core reveals is a continuous, uninterrupted history stretching back to at least 2,000 years before ‘Creation Week’, capturing seasonal changes, shifts in climate, volcanic eruptions, and even Saharan dust storms—each leaving a tell-tale signature now entombed in successive layers of ice.
Even more awkward for creationists is the fact that this ice-core record aligns precisely with well-documented events elsewhere, allowing scientists to calibrate and extrapolate timelines deep into European prehistory with high accuracy.
Droughts in Southeast Asia and increasingly devastating floods in Northern Australia are not random anomalies—they are predictable consequences of climate change, as revealed by a 150,000-year record of monsoon patterns preserved in tree pollen from sediment in Girraween Lagoon near Darwin. This record, meticulously analysed and correlated with evidence of past climate change and ocean currents, offers a stark warning about what lies ahead.
Not only does this research thoroughly dismantle the juvenile creationist fantasy that Earth is a mere 6,000 to 10,000 years old, it also flatly contradicts the myth of a global flood just a few thousand years ago—such a cataclysm would have obliterated the very sediment that preserved this climate history. Moreover, it challenges the simplistic notion that Earth was "finely tuned" for life, since the data show a planet subject to instability and extreme hardship, at times rendering regions locally uninhabitable due to global climatic shifts.
The study, conducted by researchers at James Cook University and Flinders University, demonstrates that shifts in Northern Australia's monsoon patterns coincide with Heinrich events—sudden surges of cold meltwater into the North Atlantic that weaken the Gulf Stream. As the Gulf Stream drives much of Western Europe’s climate by transporting warm water across the Atlantic, its disruption would have profound consequences for Europe as well.
Can you tell me more about these Heinrich events, please.
Heinrich events are dramatic climatic episodes that occurred during the last glacial period, named after marine geologist Hartmut Heinrich who first identified them in the 1980s. These events represent sudden and massive discharges of icebergs into the North Atlantic Ocean, originating primarily from the Laurentide Ice Sheet in North America.
Key Features of Heinrich Events:
Ice-Rafted Debris (IRD):
Heinrich events are identified by layers of sediment in North Atlantic marine cores that contain ice-rafted debris—fragments of rock and other materials carried by icebergs and dropped onto the seafloor as the ice melted.
Abrupt Cooling:
The influx of cold, fresh meltwater into the North Atlantic during a Heinrich event disrupted thermohaline circulation (the so-called Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC), particularly the Gulf Stream. This led to abrupt regional cooling, especially in Europe and North America.
Duration and Frequency:
These events occurred roughly every 7,000–10,000 years during the last glacial cycle (~70,000 to 10,000 years ago), though the exact timing and spacing varied. Each event may have lasted for several hundred to a few thousand years.
Global Impact:
Although triggered by North Atlantic dynamics, Heinrich events had global repercussions. Evidence shows climate responses as far afield as the Indian monsoon, tropical Africa, and South America, where rainfall patterns shifted dramatically. The study you linked to adds Northern Australia to that list, showing that these events influenced monsoons far from their origin.
Mechanism:
The most widely accepted model suggests that internal ice-sheet instability or subglacial processes triggered massive iceberg calving events. These icebergs melted in the North Atlantic, introducing vast amounts of fresh water and lowering ocean salinity. This in turn weakened or shut down deep-water formation, a key component of the global climate system.
Summary:
Heinrich events are natural examples of abrupt climate change—rapid and severe disruptions to the climate system caused by shifts in ocean circulation. They provide a powerful lesson for today: large-scale climatic systems can change quickly and globally in response to disturbances, especially involving the ocean’s role in heat and moisture distribution.
Tree pollen reveals 150,000 years of monsoon history in Northern AustraliaNorthern Australia’s annual monsoon season brings relief to drought-stricken lands and revitalises crops and livestock for farmers. But a study of 150,000 years of climate records shows that the monsoon is likely to intensify, triggering a higher risk of flooding while worsening the impact of droughts in East Asia.
Led by Professor Michael Bird, researchers at James Cook University and Flinders University have assessed sediments at Girraween Lagoon near Darwin, revealing a continuous record of monsoon rainfall patterns dating back beyond the last interglacial period.
This research published in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews offers insight into how climate change could alter monsoon patterns across East Asia and Australia.
This is the longest terrestrial record ever produced at the southern end of the Indo-Australian monsoon system, which delivers vital rainfall to millions across the Southern Hemisphere. The record also has implications for the Northern Hemisphere where tens of millions in Asia rely on monsoons for food and their livelihoods.
Our study shows how the two monsoon systems are interrelated over thousands of years and reveals what causes them to change. Our analyses shows that that rainfall in northern Australia is closely tied to sea level changes, which shift the location of the northern coastline by up to 320 km.
These shifts strongly alter local rainfall, with wetter periods occurring when the coastline is closer to the Australian landmass and the oppose effect is prolonged drought in East Asia.
Intriguingly, the research also uncovered what we consider bursts of intense monsoon activity — some lasting less than 10,000 years. These bursts align with Heinrich events — abrupt pulses of freshwater into the North Atlantic from rapidly melting ice linked to the weakening of the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean.
Professor Michael I. Bird, first author
College of Science and Engineering
James Cook University
Cairns, Queensland, Australia.
These findings carry a warning from scientists because the Gulf Stream is already weakening due to climate change, and the study suggests this could lead to increased rainfall in northern Australia while contributing to droughts in parts of East Asia.
This isn’t just ancient history. It is a window into the rainfall patterns that are emerging today. Our data suggest that the weather trends we’re witnessing like the drying in China and wetting in northern Australia could accelerate if the Gulf Stream continues to weaken, so we need to be ready for that scenario.
It’s not surprising. Decreasing rainfall in parts of the east Asian summer monsoon region has been identified in rainfall records since the 1960s, while increasing rainfall has been evident in north-western Australia since the last century, accelerating since the 1950s. Our new data suggest that further weakening of the Gulf Stream could reinforce these trends even more in the future, with consequences for both regions.
We need to put this impact into context because this region extends from China through Southeast Asia, the maritime continent, and western Indo-Pacific warm pool on the Equator, to Australia. The region is home to almost a billion people and five terrestrial Biodiversity Hotspots.
Professor Corey J. A. Bradshaw, co-author.
Global Ecology | Partuyarta Ngadluku Wardli Kuu
College of Science and Engineering
Flinders University,
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia.
150 kyr n-alkane δ2H and pollen record of monsoon strength from northern Australia.
Coastline position strongly influenced local hydroclimate.
Monsoon intensity broadly anti-phased with East Asian Summer Monsoon.
Short (∼2–10 kyr) periods of dramatically increased monsoon intensity also occur.
Short periods of increased monsoon intensity align with Heinrich events.
Abstract
Nearly two thirds of the world's population depend on monsoon rainfall, with monsoon failure and extreme precipitation affecting societies for millennia. Monsoon hydroclimate is predicted to change as the climate warms, albeit with uncertain regional trajectories. Multiple glacial-interglacial terrestrial records of east Asian monsoon variability exist, but there are no terrestrial records of equivalent length from the coupled Indo-Australian monsoon at its southern limit — Australia. We present a continuous 150,000-year lacustrine record of monsoon dynamics from the core monsoon region of northern Australia based on the proportion of dryland tree pollen in the total dryland pollen spectra and the hydrogen isotope composition of long chain n-alkanes. We show that rainfall at the site depends strongly on sea level, which changes proximity of the coast to the site by 320 km over the last glacial-interglacial cycle. Long-term trends in rainfall are broadly anti-phased with the east Asian monsoon modulated by coastal proximity. The record also contains multiple, short intervals (∼2 to < 10,000 years) of large changes in tree cover (from 5 to 95 % tree pollen over 3000 years in one instance). Changes in tree cover are frequently but not always, accompanied by synchronous large changes in the other hydroclimate proxies. While these wetter periods cannot be easily ascribed to orbitally induced changes in insolation or coastal proximity, they are correlated with most Heinrich events. This relationship implies that strong asymmetry in inter-hemispheric monsoon rainfall might be one outcome of the current weakening in the strength of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, through a reduction in oceanic heat transfer from the Southern to the Northern Hemisphere.
1. Introduction
The dominant feature of climate across most of the tropics and subtropics is a seasonal reversal of the prevailing winds across the Equator, resulting in a wetter summer season and a drier winter in each hemisphere. At an annual scale, the ‘global monsoon’, approximated hydrologically by the zone of maximum rainfall associated with the intertropical convergence zone, oscillates between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (An et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2017). This oscillation is driven by the annual cycle of maximum insolation between each hemisphere (Deininger et al., 2020), leading to anti-phased summer rainy seasons in each (Eroglu et al., 2016; Deininger et al., 2020). Agriculture and ecosystems across the tropics and subtropics depend on monsoon rainfall (An et al., 2015), and so growing populations and climate change increase vulnerability to any change in monsoon dynamics (Zhang et al., 2018; Martinez-Villalobos and Neelin, 2023). Indeed, drought associated with monsoon failure, as well as monsoon-related flooding, have driven major demographic changes in prehistory (e.g., Cook et al., 2010) and the recent past (Li et al., 2011; Qian et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2015.1).
The monsoon system that affects the largest land area and human population is the east Asian summer monsoon north of the Equator, coupled by cross-equatorial airflow to the Indo-Australian summer monsoon south of the Equator (Li and Li, 2014) (Fig. 1). This region extends from China through Southeast Asia, the maritime continent and western Indo-Pacific warm pool on the Equator, to Australia. The region is home to almost a billion people and five terrestrial biodiversity hotspots (Myers et al., 2000).
The Indo-Australian summer monsoon represents the dominant source of rainfall in northern Australia, although atmospheric teleconnections to other sources of global interannual climate variability, particularly El Niño-Southern Oscillation, contribute to rainfall variability (Sharmila and Hendon, 2020.2; Heidemann et al., 2023.2; Gallagher et al., 2024). The Indo-Australian summer monsoon in northern Australia also exhibits its own internal dynamics, due in approximately equal measure to local oceanic (sea surface temperature, evaporation, and wind) and terrestrial (land cover, soil moisture, evaporation, and wind) influences on rainfall (Yu and Notaro, 2020.3; Sekizawa et al., 2021.1; Heidemann et al., 2023.2; Sekizawa et al., 2023.3). While the east Asian summer monsoon is dominant due to the large, high-altitude Asian landmass, the internal dynamics of the Indo-Australian summer monsoon can also drive variability in east Asian winter monsoon rainfall in southern China, suggesting close linkages (Yu and Notaro, 2020.3; Sekizawa et al., 2021.1; Heidemann et al., 2023.2; Sekizawa et al., 2023.3).
Terrestrial speleothem oxygen isotope and pollen records (e.g., Ma et al., 2023.4; Chen et al., 2023.5) spanning one or more glacial-interglacial cycles have demonstrated periods of enhanced/(reduced) east Asian summer monsoon rainfall at times of higher/(lower) Northern Hemisphere insolation and distinct, weak monsoon intervals, some of which are coincident with Heinrich events (Cheng et al., 2009, 2016.1). However, equivalent long terrestrial records from the southern end of the Indo-Australian summer monsoon in northern Australia are conspicuously absent.
Proxy records of terrestrial runoff have been derived from marine records off north-western Australia and are correlated with east Asian summer monsoon records (Pei et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2020.1; Sarim et al., 2023.1) (Fig. 1). However, those records are potentially confounded by the adjacent wide continental shelf that introduces an effect of sea-level change at orbital timescales on the delivery of runoff-derived sediment to the core locations. The locations are also likely affected by the large changes in land-sea distribution in the maritime continent that modify heat and mass transfer through the Indonesian throughflow upstream of the core sites (Lee et al., 2019). On land, a discontinuous speleothem time series of oxygen isotope has been generated covering the last 40 kyr (1 kyr = 1000 years) from northern Western Australia (Denniston et al., 2017.1), a location that is under the influence of the ‘pseudo’ monsoon (Suppiah, 1992; Gallagher et al., 2024) where airflow originates in the eastern Indian Ocean, rather than from equatorial regions to the north (Fig. 1).
In the arid interior of Australia, sediments from the former Woods and Gregory ‘megalakes’ (now small, ephemeral bodies of water) show that large perennial water bodies existed, dominantly during periods in Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 3 around ∼ 50 ka ago, MIS 5 around 100 ka ago, as well as earlier (Bowler et al., 1998, 2001; Veth et al., 2009.1; Fitzsimmons et al., 2012.1). These megalakes were fed by monsoon rain falling into south-draining catchments, with drainage divides at least 300 km south of the modern north Australian coast (Fig. 1). Kati Thandi-Lake Eyre in central Southern Australia receives water from the core monsoon area (and other regions), but it also contains a record of megalake periods through MIS 5 to ∼ 116 ka ago and from 65 to 45 ka ago (Cohen et al., 2022.1).
The existence of interior megalakes, orders of magnitude larger than today's, implies past periods of higher monsoon rainfall penetrating these arid interior catchments (Wyrwoll and Valdes, 2003). Debate on the drivers of megalake-filling events has centred on the relative importance of sea level, sea surface temperatures, and Northern Hemisphere ‘push’ versus Southern Hemisphere ‘pull’ of monsoonal rain into the continental interior, as well as the role of vegetation feedbacks in augmenting moisture transfer inland (Wyrwoll and Valdes, 2003; Liu et al., 2004; Miller et al., 2005; Pitman and Hesse, 2007; Marshall and Lynch, 2008; Wyrwoll et al., 2007.1, 2012.2).
Here we present multiple, absolute-dated proxy records of sedimentological, hydroclimatic, and vegetation change over the last 150 kyr from a sediment core obtained from the core monsoon region of northern Australia, the Girraween Lagoon (Fig. 1). This record enables an assessment of the timing of variation in monsoon strength in the Indo-Australian summer monsoon domain that can be compared with records of east Asian summer monsoon strength and tropical hydroclimate. Together, this enables an assessment of the drivers of variability in the Indo-Australian summer monsoon.
The detailed sedimentary record from the Girraween Lagoon in Northern Australia, which includes evidence of Heinrich events spanning the last 150,000 years, presents a serious challenge to young Earth creationist claims. These events, triggered by massive iceberg discharges into the North Atlantic and linked to widespread climatic shifts—including monsoon disruptions in Australia—can be correlated across multiple geological archives worldwide. This implies a stable, continuous, and datable sequence of climatic change that extends far beyond the 6,000 to 10,000 years typically allowed by biblical literalists.
Creationist claims of a recent, global, catastrophic flood—often tied to the story of Noah—are also incompatible with this evidence. A flood of such scale would have scoured landscapes, disrupted or homogenised sedimentary layers, and left a very different geological signal. Instead, the sediments in Girraween Lagoon preserve a finely layered and uninterrupted record of environmental conditions, including pollen and isotopic data, spanning well over 100,000 years. Such a record simply could not survive the violent upheaval proposed by a recent global deluge.
Furthermore, the evidence of repeated, severe climatic disruptions also undermines the notion that Earth was perfectly created and "finely tuned" for life. The Heinrich events were episodes of extreme instability, during which entire regions became uninhabitable or suffered ecological collapse. This shows Earth’s climate system as dynamic and often harsh—not the static, life-friendly world one might expect from an intelligent designer. In short, the geological and climatological evidence paints a picture of an ancient, evolving Earth shaped by natural processes—one that flatly contradicts creationist dogma.
Human footprints at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, reported in 2021, show that human activity occurred in the Americas as long as 23,000 years ago – about 10,000 years earlier than previously thought. A new U of A study supports the 2021 findings.
Courtesy of David Bustos/ White Sands National Park
Fig. 3. Alkali Flat east escarpment.
(A) WHSA Locality 2 (view east) (Fig. 2B) with exposure of alluvial beds and palustrine beds along the escarpment. Stratum 1 is exposed in the foreground (comprising the eastern margin of Alkali Flat), but in this photo, it is dried out and covered with a thin sheet of eolian gypsum sand. The finely bedded sands and muds of Stratum 2A comprise the low escarpment in the middle ground, expressed by the thin, horizontal ledges formed by differential weathering of the stream beds. The trench exposing human tracks in Stratum 2A is at the left.
Fig. 1. Field area setting.
The northern Tularosa Basin showing the area of the White Sands (“Gypsum Sand Dunes”), the Alkali Fat deflation basin, modern Lake Lucero, and present-day Lost River, which drains southwest across the distal piedmont until it is buried by the gypsum dunes (see also fig. S4). The 1204-m contour line approximates the proposed extent of paleolake Otero (15). It was likely more extensive given the >4 m of lake beds at “G.” The two field areas (red dots) are as follows: “G” is the area of Gypsum Overlook, the Central study area, and WHSA Locality 2; “Loc 1” is a stratigraphic section along the west margin of Alkali Flat. The brown pattern at G is the area of exposures of deposits linked to paleolake Otero and overlain by truncated Holocene dunes (31). The inset shows the location of the White Sands and the Tularosa Basin within New Mexico [based on figure 1 in (31)].
The Bronze Age Middle Eastern authors of the Bible clearly knew little of the world beyond a few days' walk from their homes in the Canaanite Hills. The world they described — and the stories they invented to fill the vast gaps in their knowledge — contained nothing unfamiliar to them. They had no way of knowing the true age of the Earth or the Universe, which they imagined to be fixed and immobile. They knew nothing of the history of living or extinct species, nor of the compelling evidence for common ancestry stretching back hundreds of thousands, even tens of millions, of years. And they were entirely unaware of the existence of other peoples living in distant lands, across vast oceans on other continents.
It should come as no surprise, then, that they got so much wrong, and that their writings omitted nearly everything science has since revealed about human origins. We now know that Homo sapiens diversified from archaic ancestors in Africa and gradually spread across the globe—migrating over land bridges now submerged by rising sea levels and eventually reaching the Americas.
Almost all of this is well-established in modern science, with the only significant uncertainty remaining around the precise timing of the first human colonisation of the Americas from Siberia. Bible literalists attempt to sidestep this discrepancy between the scientific evidence and the biblical narrative by postulating, without any supporting evidence, that the Bible was authored by an omniscient creator god. They argue that any contradiction with scientific findings must be due to mistaken interpretation, not error in the Bible. In essence, their reasoning runs: “The Bible was written by an all-knowing god because the Bible says so—therefore, any conflicting evidence must be wrong.” Instead of critically examining the claims of Bronze Age hill farmers, they demand that science must bend to fit ancient, unsubstantiated assertions.
One striking example of the scientific evidence at odds with biblical literalism is the recent confirmation that human footprints discovered at White Sands National Park, New Mexico, are 23,000 years old—some 13,000 years older than biblical literalists believe the Earth itself to be.
These footprints were discovered in 2021 and initially dated to 23,000 years ago — 10,000 years earlier than the previously accepted earliest human presence in the Americas. While this early date was controversial, a team led by Professor Vance Holliday of the University of Arizona’s School of Anthropology and Department of Geosciences has now re-evaluated the evidence and confirmed the original finding.
