A team of researchers led by Dr. Mayukh Mondal of the Centre for Genomics, Evolution & Medicine, Institute of Genomics, University of Tartu, Estonia, have used AI-powered demographic modelling to estimate the genetic ancestry of the people of Papua New Guinea (PNG), whose origins have long been debated.
Papua New Guineans have physical features that differ noticeably from many Asian populations, and some superficial similarities to sub-Saharan Africans have led to speculation that they might descend from a very early migration out of Africa, predating most other non-African Homo sapiens. This new study strongly challenges that hypothesis: it attributes PNG’s genetic distinctiveness instead to a substantial Denisovan admixture followed by a prolonged period of isolation, a severe population bottleneck, and slower population growth.
According to the creationist mythologies, all human beings alive today descend from Adam and Eve—or, in some versions, from Noah and his family after a global flood. If that were literally true, then all living humans would share a very narrow genetic base: mitochondrial DNA (passed via the maternal line) would be limited to a very small number of variants, and all males would share essentially the same Y-chromosome (barring mutation) tracing back to the same male ancestor.
However, the observable facts are that human genetic diversity is much richer than those narratives predict. The mitochondrial DNA lineages in living people trace back to multiple distinct haplogroups with divergence times of tens to hundreds of thousands of years within Africa and beyond into archaic ancestors; similarly, Y-chromosome diversity indicates many lineages. Our human genome tells a far more complex story: long periods of evolution in isolation, multiple migrations, re-mixing, and interbreeding with related hominin species.
The same applies to other species which creationists mythology insists are the descendants of a small number of survivors of the same genocidal flood. Few living species show evidence of such a narrow genetic bottleneck, which would probably have resulted in far too much inbreeding resulting in extinction for most of them.
All non-African humans today are descended from the major “Out-of-Africa” (OOA) migration(s) of Homo sapiens. As populations moved into Eurasia, they interbred first with Neanderthals, then with Denisovans. Underlying all this, there is also the possibility of genetic contributions from even earlier human migrations (e.g. H. erectus) into the ancestors of Neanderthals, Denisovans, or earlier modern humans. Given the evidence that hominin populations often interbred when they came into contact, it would be surprising if there were no admixture between H. erectus (or similar early lineages) and the predecessors of Neanderthals and Denisovans (often thought to include H. heidelbergensis or H. antecessor).
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.
Archaeologists from Cardiff University have published the largest study of its kind into animal remains from Late Bronze Age Britain, and their findings reveal a surprisingly complex picture of feasting, farming, and far-reaching social networks. The research, published in iScience, reports on multi-isotope analysis of more than 3,500 bones from six prehistoric middens in Wiltshire and the Thames Valley. These vast heaps of discarded remains are the archaeological traces of large communal feasts held some 3,000 years ago.
The team found that the animals consumed—cattle, pigs, and sheep—were not all raised locally. Some were brought from considerable distances, suggesting both a sophisticated agricultural economy and a culture in which travel and exchange linked communities across southern Britain. Such large-scale gatherings, the researchers conclude, were central to forging alliances, maintaining social bonds, and reinforcing ritual practices in the closing centuries of the Bronze Age.
In other words, these middens are the material testimony of thriving societies in Britain whose development ran seamlessly from the Neolithic into the Bronze Age, without any trace of a catastrophic global flood. If Genesis were literal history, such sites could not exist. But they do. The Cardiff findings are therefore another piece of hard archaeological evidence that exposes the biblical flood as a myth, not a record of real events.
Far from being isolated farming villages, Late Bronze Age communities in Britain were enmeshed in a dynamic cultural landscape with trade and ritual at its heart. I have previously written about the political control and economic development in Britain being sufficient to command and supply the manpower needed to undertake massive civil engineering projects such as building Stonehenge and Silbury Hill. Silbury Hill alone took an estimates 18 million man-hours to build (i.e. 500 men working for 15 years) - a level of political and economic development which would have been impossible within the Bible's framework.
And here lies the striking problem for biblical literalism. If we take the chronology given in Genesis at face value, Noah’s Flood is supposed to have occurred around 2348 BCE. By that reckoning, all humans and animals on earth, save those aboard the Ark, were annihilated. The Late Bronze Age middens, however, date to between 1200 and 800 BCE—well after the supposed global deluge. The isotope evidence shows continuity of local herds, supplemented by long-distance transport of animals, not a sudden repopulation from a single Middle Eastern source.
Geographic location of the Nuwayrat cemetery (red dot) and the previously sequenced Third Intermediate Period individuals from Abusir el-Meleq20 (purple diamond).
Round about the time when the Bible’s timeline claims there was a global genocidal flood deep enough to cover the highest mountains, the body of a man was being interred in a large earthenware pot in a tomb in Egypt. If there had been a flood such as that described in the Bible, this burial would have been swept away or at least buried under a deep layer of sediment containing the jumbled remains of animals and plants killed in the flood — including species from disconnected landmasses, since there would have been no barriers to how far they could have been transported by the floodwaters.
Yet none of this appears to be true. Egyptian civilisation, which can trace its origins back to around 5,500 BCE, continued unbroken, with no record of a flood other than the annual Nile inundations on which their agriculture depended, until Egypt was absorbed first into the Greek Empire of Alexander and then into the Roman Empire. There is quite simply no record of a global flood in any Egyptian sources, and no evidence that the country was repopulated by people radiating out from a centre somewhere in the Middle East who could miraculously read and write in the hieroglyphics used by pre-“Flood” Egyptians.
Instead, we now have the genetic evidence of the man’s DNA, which tells a story of Egyptian origins that includes both North African and Mesopotamian ancestry.
How the remains of this pot burial were discovered and analysed is the subject of an open-access paper in Nature by an international team of archaeologists led by Dr Adeline Morez Jacobs, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padua, Italy, and a visiting lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, UK.
Dr Morez has also described the research and its significance in an open-access article in The Conversation, in the form of an interview. This article is reproduced here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
This blog post is something of a departure from my usual refutations of creationism. At times, that exercise can feel like shooting fish in a barrel, since almost every scientific paper on palaeontology, cosmology, or evolutionary biology casually refutes creationism simply by presenting the facts and evidence—something creationism singularly lacks.
This, however, is only tangentially related to creationism, in that it concerns the diversification of humans into distinct regional cultural and genetic populations. That richness and complexity is utterly incompatible with the notion that all of humanity radiated out from a single founder population of eight related individuals in the Middle East.
Instead, it is about the genetic evidence for the origins of the Slavic peoples, for whom I feel a special affinity. My youngest son is married to a Slav woman from Czechia and now lives and works there. Former Czechoslovakia also played a formative role in my political development during the 1960s, when the Prague Spring gave those of us on the left hope for a form of socialism that was democratic, open, and inclusive — rather than the totalitarian system into which Soviet Communism had degenerated. The self-sacrifice of the young idealists Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc, in response to the Soviet-led invasion that suppressed the reforms, was a profound inspiration — about which I wrote after a visit to Prague in December 2011, when a visit to their memorial in Wenceslaus Square, on the site of their self-immolation, reduced me to tears.
Since then, we have returned to Czechia several times. On our most recent trip in the summer of 2024, we visited the museum in the Moravský Krumlov castle near Brno, which currently houses a series of immense art nouveau paintings by the Czech artist Alphons Maria Mucha—perhaps better known in the West for his commercial art nouveau designs for chocolate boxes, biscuit tins, and soap packages that epitomised the 1920s and 30s. The series — a Czech national treasure I described at length soon after our return — titled The Epic of the Slavs, was pained between 1912 and 1926. It depicts the story of the Slavic peoples’ development in Eastern Europe up to the mid-1920s: a people struggling to forge an identity under political pressure from surrounding religious powers, from Eastern Orthodoxy in the south and east, to Catholicism in the west, followed later by German Protestantism. Like the Irish, the Czech people’s identity was forged in this power struggle, eventually emerging as proud and independent. Today, Czechia is one of the most atheist countries in Europe.
This article, however, is about the deeper origins of the Slavic peoples, as described in a recent open-access paper in Nature by an international team of researchers led by Joscha Gretzinger of the Department of Archaeogenetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.
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?
It is generally accepted by palaeoanthropologists that the genus Homo evolved from an Australopithecus species somewhere in East Africa, most likely in the Afar region of Ethiopia, where the famous Australopithecus afarensis specimen “Lucy” was found. However, it is now widely recognised that the hominin evolutionary tree was far from straightforward, resembling more a tangled bush with side-branches that went extinct, rather than a simple, linear progression.
Given the tendency of our ancestors to diversify and occasionally interbreed, it is entirely possible that the genus Homo emerged from a hybrid population, or even that early Homo back-bred with ancestral australopithecines — especially when two or more species lived in close proximity, as new evidence suggests they did in the Afar region.
Maps showing (left) the location of the Ledi-Geraru site within the Horn of Africa on the left, and the location of the Australopithecus and Homo teeth on the right
Images by Penn State Associate Research Professor Erin DiMaggio.
Fossils of a previously unknown Australopithecus species and of early Homo have been found in the same area, apparently coexisting. The newly discovered australopithecine is known only from teeth, and there is currently insufficient information to formally name the species. Teeth are often distinctive enough to indicate a previously unrecognised species, but palaeoanthropologists usually require additional skeletal remains — such as jaws, skulls, or postcranial bones — to confirm unique anatomical features and avoid naming a species prematurely.
Of course, because evolution operates over entire populations and across thousands of years, the distinction between the immediately ancestral Australopithecus and the descendant Homo is inherently arbitrary. It likely means far more to modern palaeoanthropologists than it ever did to the hominins themselves.
This new evidence, discovered by an international team working on The Ledi-Geraru Research Project, led by scientists at Arizona State University, indicates that both the unidentified Australopithecus and early Homo lived in the area between 2.6 and 2.8 million years ago. The age estimates were reliably established using volcanic ash layers immediately above and below the fossil-bearing strata. The team’s findings were published recently, open access, in Nature.
There is increasing evidence that the human evolutionary story is far richer and more complex than was once assumed, back when many expected a neat series of fossils showing a linear descent from a single African ancestor.
It is also becoming increasingly clear that the Bronze Age human-origin myth in the Bible has about as much historical credibility as Enid Blyton’s Noddy’s Adventures in Toyland — and at least Blyton never claimed her stories were literal truth or the basis of moral authority. Unlike creation myths, Noddy’s adventures were always meant for the nursery, not the classroom.
We now understand that hominin populations frequently split into regional varieties which diversified as more or less isolated groups, only to merge again later into a single population. This process appears to have begun even as we were diverging from the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees. For around a million years after that split, interbreeding remained possible, with chimpanzee genes entering the hominin genome and vice versa.
The interbreeding that most shaped modern, non-African Homo sapiens occurred when African H. sapiens encountered Neanderthals—or their immediate ancestors—during successive waves of migration, permitted by changes in climate and geography. These contacts culminated in the last and only successful migration between roughly 60,000 and 40,000 years ago.
The Neanderthals themselves were descended from an earlier migration that had followed H. erectus into Eurasia, later splitting into Neanderthals in western Eurasia and Denisovans in eastern and south-eastern Eurasia. Modern genomics now shows that it was the Denisovans who contributed even more to the ancestry of non-African H. sapiens than the Neanderthals did. The Denisovans—likely to be reclassified as H. longi, the name given to a skull found in China—appear to have diversified into populations adapted to environments as varied as the Tibetan Plateau and the subtropical coasts of Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Austronesia.
Buried beneath a thick layer of silt containing a chaotic mixture of fossils from both nearby and distant land masses — the expected deposit of a supposed global genocidal flood — is... nothing. Such a layer should be observable worldwide, of course, but like at the archaeological sites in the Carpathians, it simply isn’t there.
Instead, what we find is an unbroken sequence of historical deposits stretching far beyond the time when creationists claim the Earth was magicked into existence. In other words, the evidence contradicts the Bible’s timeline and strongly refutes the notion of a global flood.
Importantly, this evidence isn’t the result of an attempt to disprove the Bible. Rather, archaeologists have simply uncovered facts that are starkly different from what one would expect if the Bible were the inerrant word of a creator god. A case in point: a team from Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (CAU) investigating changes in social hierarchy associated with the introduction of agriculture in the Carpathian Basin.
According to expectations, the adoption of agriculture should have led to increased social inequality, as control of land and trade would concentrate power in the hands of a privileged elite. However, the researchers found no such evidence. Using house size as a proxy for social inequality — assuming that a ruling class would have built significantly larger dwellings — the team discovered that house sizes remained relatively uniform over the period.
Excavation at the Neumark-Nord 2 in central Germany.
Photo: Professor Wil Roebroeks, Leiden University
125,000-year-old Neanderthal ‘fat factory’ discovered in Germany - Leiden University
More evidence has emerged that Neanderthals were far from the slow-witted, lumbering brutes of popular myth. In fact, they were highly organised, culturally sophisticated, and capable of processing food on what can only be described as an industrial scale.
This latest insight comes from a team of archaeologists led by researchers from MONREPOS (Leibniz Centre for Archaeology, Germany) and Leiden University (The Netherlands), in collaboration with the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology Saxony-Anhalt (Germany). Their findings were recently published in Science Advances.
At a site known as Neumark-Nord 2 in central Germany, dating back 125,000 years, the researchers have discovered compelling evidence of a bone-processing ‘factory’. Here, Neanderthals systematically broke up the massive bones of straight-tusked elephants and other large mammals—including deer, horses, and aurochs—to extract fat from the marrow by steeping the fragments in hot water. The straight-tusked elephant, which could weigh up to 13 tonnes, would have yielded enough meat to feed 2,000 adult humans their daily caloric needs.
This site predates the arrival of modern humans in Europe by tens of thousands of years, placing it firmly within the Neanderthal era. At the time, Europe was enjoying an interglacial period with a climate comparable to today's.
A recent paper in Nature marks a landmark advance in historical linguistics and ancient human migration studies.
Properly understood, the paper devastates Bible literalist dogmas. In solving what had been something of a mystery for linguistics and anthropology, it utterly refutes basic Bible narratives such as a global genocidal flood and a resetting of the human population of Earth some 4,300 years ago, followed by a repopulation from a focal point in the Middle East.
By sequencing and analysing 180 previously unstudied ancient Siberian genomes and integrating them with over 1,300 global ancient DNA datasets spanning 11,000 years, the study robustly traces the prehistoric roots of the Uralic language family—including Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian—to Central Siberia nearly 4,500 years ago [1, 2]. In doing so, it offers scientific clarity on how languages—and by extension cultures—spread via human migrations over millennia. This extends far beyond simplistic literal interpretations of Bible genealogies, emphasising the deep time, continuous migrations and cultural dynamics that falsify any notion of sudden, static origination of peoples as posited in young‑earth creation narratives.
Likewise, the Harvard Gazette article contextualises these genetic findings for a broader audience, highlighting how interdisciplinary scholarship — particularly the work led by recent graduates under guidance from ancient DNA expert David Reich — identifies a distinct genetic signature (“Yakutia\_LNBA”) strongly associated with speakers of Uralic languages who migrated from Eastern Siberia westward over thousands of years [2]. The piece explicitly notes that language transmission is not genetically deterministic, and warns against over‑simplified correlations. By underscoring the necessity of large data, critical caution, and peer‑reviewed methodology, the article reinforces the fundamentally scientific (not scriptural) basis for understanding human prehistory.
From a Bible‑literalist creationist perspective—which often assumes humanity’s origins in specific, recent Middle Eastern events described in scripture—these studies are significant because they offer:
Robust empirical timelines: ancient DNA data covering up to 11,000 years, demonstrating population movements and admixture across Eurasia.
Clear geographic origins far from the traditional Biblical settings, with linguistic groups emerging from Central Siberian ancestries—not from post‑Flood dispersion from Babel.
Methodological transparency: ancient genomes, radiocarbon dating, linguistic phylogenies, and cultural archaeology collectively underpin conclusions, in stark contrast to dogmatic, text‑based literalism.
What is known of the Yamnaya, their migration and their impact on European society?
The Yamnaya (or Yamna) culture was a highly influential Bronze Age population that emerged on the Pontic–Caspian steppe (modern-day Ukraine and southern Russia) around 3300–2600 BCE. They are best known for their role in a major migratory event that reshaped the genetic, cultural, and linguistic landscape of Europe and parts of Asia.
Key Features of the Yamnaya Culture
Pastoralist Lifestyle: The Yamnaya were semi-nomadic herders, primarily of cattle, sheep, and horses.
Kurgan Burials: They are associated with the construction of kurgans — large burial mounds containing individual or family graves, often with grave goods, indicating social stratification.
Use of Wagons and Domesticated Horses: The Yamnaya are among the earliest groups to use wheeled transport and to domesticate horses for riding and traction, dramatically improving mobility across the steppe.
Patriarchal and Warrior-Oriented Society: Burial practices and grave goods suggest a male-dominated society with an emphasis on warfare and prestige.
Migration and Expansion
From around 3000 BCE, the Yamnaya expanded both westward into Europe and eastward into Central Asia:
Westward Migration (into Europe)
The Yamnaya migrated into Central and Northern Europe, mixing with local Neolithic farming populations.
This movement is thought to correspond with the Corded Ware culture (~2900–2300 BCE), which displays strong Yamnaya ancestry and cultural influences.
Genetic studies indicate that Yamnaya-related ancestry accounts for a significant portion (up to 75%) of the ancestry in many modern northern and central Europeans.
Eastward Expansion (into Asia)
Yamnaya groups moved into the Altai region and Central Asia, laying foundations for cultures such as the Afanasievo culture.
This eastward movement has implications for the spread of Indo-European languages deep into Asia, including links to the Tocharian branch.
Impact on European Society
The Yamnaya migration was transformative:
Genetic Legacy
Ancient DNA studies (notably by David Reich and colleagues) have shown that Yamnaya-related ancestry replaced or substantially mixed with earlier Neolithic farming populations across Europe.
Their arrival is associated with a massive genetic turnover, particularly in northern Europe.
Linguistic Impact
The Yamnaya are widely considered prime candidates for the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the reconstructed ancestral language of most modern European and many Asian languages.
Their migrations likely spread PIE or its early offshoots into Europe and Asia.
Technological and Cultural Influence
They introduced or accelerated the adoption of:
Horse riding and chariotry.
Wheeled vehicles and carts.
New burial customs and metallurgy.
These innovations had a cascading effect on social organisation, warfare, and mobility.
Social Structures
Archaeological and genetic evidence suggests the formation of patrilineal kin-based chiefdoms, with dominant Y-chromosome lineages spreading rapidly, reflecting elite male dominance in expanding societies.
Significance in Refuting Creationism
The Yamnaya's role in shaping European prehistory is incompatible with young-Earth or Biblical-literalist timelines:
Their migrations and cultural influence spanned thousands of years, beginning well before any supposed Biblical Flood (~2400 BCE) or the Tower of Babel.
The evidence for their existence and movements comes from radiocarbon dating, stratigraphy, and genomics — methods rejected or undermined by creationist models.
The Yamnaya language dispersal supports evolutionary linguistics, not the sudden emergence of multiple languages as described in Genesis 11.
In Summary
The Yamnaya were a Bronze Age steppe people whose vast migrations and cultural innovations played a pivotal role in shaping the genetics, languages, and social systems of much of Europe and Asia. Their legacy stands as a powerful testament to deep-time human history, migration, and cultural change—firmly grounded in empirical evidence and thoroughly incompatible with literalist interpretations of the Bible.
Together, the Nature paper and Harvard Gazette explanation represent not only a breakthrough in our scientific understanding of language family origins, but also a powerful rebuttal to any worldview that insists on a literal‑historical reading of Genesis to explain the diversity and dispersal of peoples.
Ancient DNA solves mystery of Hungarian, Finnish language family’s originsParent emerged over 4,000 years ago in Siberia, farther east than many thought, then rapidly spread west
Where did Europe’s distinct Uralic family of languages — which includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian — come from? New research puts their origins a lot farther east than many thought.
The analysis, led by a pair of recent graduates with oversight from ancient DNA expert David Reich, integrated genetic data on 180 newly sequenced Siberians with more than 1,000 existing samples covering many continents and about 11,000 years of human history. The results, published this month in the journal Nature, identify the prehistoric progenitors of two important language families, including Uralic, spoken today by more than 25 million people.
The study finds the ancestors of present-day Uralic speakers living about 4,500 years ago in northeastern Siberia, within an area now known as Yakutia.
Geographically, it’s closer to Alaska or Japan than to Finland.
Alexander Mee-Woong Kim, co-lead author.
Department of Genetics
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Linguists and archaeologists have been split on the origins of Uralic languages. The mainstream school of thought put their homeland in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, a range running north to south about 860 miles due east of Moscow. A minority view, noting convergences with Turkic and Mongolic languages, theorized a more easterly emergence.
Our paper helps show that the latter scenario is more likely. We can see this genetic pulse coming from the east just as Uralic languages were expanding.
Dr. Tian Chen Zeng, co-lead author
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
The discovery was made possible by Kim’s long-term effort to gather ancient DNA data from some of Siberia’s under-sampled regions. As he helped establish, many modern-day Uralic-speaking populations carry the same genetic signature that first appeared, in unmixed form, in the 4,500-year-old samples from Yakutia. People from all other ethnolinguistic groups were found, by and large, to lack this distinct ancestry.
Genetic ties to Yakutia also show up in sets of hyper-mobile forager hunter-gatherers believed to have spread Uralic languages to northern Scandinavia’s indigenous Sámi people and as far south as Hungary, now a linguistic island surrounded by German, Slovak, and other Indo-European languages.
Proto-Uralic speakers overlapped in time with the Yamnaya, the culture of horseback herders credited with transmitting Indo-European across Eurasia’s grasslands. A pair of recent papers, led by Reich and others in his Harvard-based lab, zeroed in on the Yamnaya homeland, showing it was mostly likely within the current borders of Ukraine just over 5,000 years ago.
We can see these waves going back and forth — and interacting — as these two major language families expanded. Just as we see Yakutia ancestry moving east to west, our genetic data show Indo-Europeans spreading west to east.
Professor David Reich, co-corresponding author.
Department of Human Evolutionary Biology
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
But Uralic’s influence was largely anchored in the north.
We’re talking about the taiga — the large expanse of boreal forest that goes from Scandinavia almost to the Bering Strait. This isn’t territory you can simply ride a horse through.
Alexander Mee-Woong Kim
Kim... concentrated in organismic and evolutionary biology at the College and studied archaeology at the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Archaeologists have long connected Uralic’s spread with what is called the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, or the sudden appearance around 4,000 years ago of technologically advanced bronze-casting methods across northern Eurasia.
The resulting artifacts, primarily weapons and other displays of power, have also been tied to an era of global climate changes that could have advantaged the small-scale cultures that spoke Uralic languages during and after the Seima-Turbino phenomenon.
Bronze often had a transformative effect on the cultures that used it. Bronze really catalyzed long-distance trade. To start using it, societies really needed to develop new social connections and institutions. [the need to source raw materials — largely copper and tin — from select locations.]
Dr. Tian Chen Zeng.
A picture of the genetically diverse communities who practiced Seima-Turbino techniques became clear with the advent of ancient DNA science.
Some of them had genetic ancestry from Yakutia, some of them were Iranic, some of them were Baltic hunter-gatherers from Europe. They’re all buried together at the same sites.
Professor David Reich.
The newest genetic samples, assembled by Kim with the help of other archaeologists, including third co-lead author Leonid Vyazov at Czechia’s University of Ostrava, revealed strong currents of Yakutia ancestry at a succession of ancient burial sites stretching gradually to the west, with each bearing rich reserves of Seima-Turbino objects.
This is a story about the will, the agency of populations who were not numerically dominant in any way but were able to have continental-scale effects on language and culture.
Alexander Mee-Woong Kim
Previous studies established that Finns, Estonians, and other Uralic-speaking populations today share an Eastern Eurasian genetic signature. Ancient DNA researchers ruled out the region’s best-known archaeological cultures from contributing to the Uralic expansion
That just meant we needed more data on obscure cultures, or obscure time periods where it was unclear what was happening
Dr. Tian Chen Zeng.
Today, he found, Uralic-speaking cultures vary in how much Yakutia ancestry they carry.
Estonians retain about 2 percent, Finns about 10. At the eastern end of the distribution, the Nganasan people — clustered at the northernmost tip of Russia — have close to 100 percent Yakutia ancestry. At the other extreme, modern-day Hungarians have lost nearly all of theirs.
But we know, based on ancient DNA work from the medieval conquerors of Hungary, that the people who brought the language there did carry this ancestry.
Dr. Tian Chen Zeng.
A separate finding concerns another group of Siberian-spawned languages, once widely spoken across the region. The Yeniseian language family may be contracting today, with the last survivor being central Siberia’s critically endangered Ket, now spoken by just a handful of the culture’s elders. But Yeniseian’s influence was long evident to linguists and archaeologists alike.
Just like ‘Mississippi’ and ‘Missouri’ are from Algonquian, there are Yeniseian toponyms in regions that today speak Mongolic or Turkic languages. When you consider this trace on the landscape, its influence extends far beyond where Yeniseian languages are spoken.
Alexander Mee-Woong Kim
The study locates the first speakers of the Yeniseian family some 5,400 years ago near the deep waters of Lake Baikal, its southern shores just a few hours by car from the current border with Mongolia.
The genetic findings also provide the first genetic signal — albeit a tentative one — for Western Washington University linguist Edward Vajda’s Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis, which proposed genealogical connections between Yeniseian and the Na-Dene family of North American Indigenous languages.
Abstract
The North Eurasian forest and forest-steppe zones have sustained millennia of sociocultural connections among northern peoples, but much of their history is poorly understood. In particular, the genomic formation of populations that speak Uralic and Yeniseian languages today is unknown. Here, by generating genome-wide data for 180 ancient individuals spanning this region, we show that the Early-to-Mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers harboured a continuous gradient of ancestry from fully European-related in the Baltic, to fully East Asian-related in the Transbaikal. Contemporaneous groups in Northeast Siberia were off-gradient and descended from a population that was the primary source for Native Americans, which then mixed with populations of Inland East Asia and the Amur River Basin to produce two populations whose expansion coincided with the collapse of pre-Bronze Age population structure. Ancestry from the first population, Cis-Baikal Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Cisbaikal_LNBA), is associated with Yeniseian-speaking groups and those that admixed with them, and ancestry from the second, Yakutia Late Neolithic–Bronze Age (Yakutia_LNBA), is associated with migrations of prehistoric Uralic speakers. We show that Yakutia_LNBA first dispersed westwards from the Lena River Basin around 4,000 years ago into the Altai-Sayan region and into West Siberian communities associated with Seima-Turbino metallurgy—a suite of advanced bronze casting techniques that expanded explosively from the Altai1. The 16 Seima-Turbino period individuals were diverse in their ancestry, also harbouring DNA from Indo-Iranian-associated pastoralists and from a range of hunter-gatherer groups. Thus, both cultural transmission and migration were key to the Seima-Turbino phenomenon, which was involved in the initial spread of early Uralic-speaking communities.
From around 3000 BCE, the Yamnaya began expanding westward into Europe and eastward into Central Asia. In Europe, they merged with existing Neolithic farming populations, giving rise to new archaeological cultures like the Corded Ware culture. Genetic studies show that modern Europeans, particularly in the north and centre, carry a significant proportion of Yamnaya ancestry. This migration also likely played a major role in spreading Proto-Indo-European languages, the ancestor of most modern European and many South and Central Asian languages.
The Yamnaya legacy is deeply embedded in Europe’s genetic and cultural fabric, but it also offers a direct challenge to Bible-literalist creationism. Their existence, migrations, and influence are dated to thousands of years before the supposed Biblical Flood or the Tower of Babel. Their story is reconstructed using ancient DNA, radiocarbon dating, and comparative linguistics—scientific disciplines that directly contradict young-Earth timelines. Far from originating from a single post-Flood population a few thousand years ago, European ancestry is shown to be the result of complex, prehistoric population movements over tens of thousands of years.
In short, the Yamnaya are a vivid example of how real human history, grounded in empirical evidence, diverges sharply from mythological accounts. Their migrations demonstrate the power of science to uncover the dynamic, interconnected, and ancient nature of human societies—undermining any literal reading of Genesis as a factual account of our origins.
Advertisement
What Makes You So Special? From The Big Bang To You
How did you come to be here, now? This books takes you from the Big Bang to the evolution of modern humans and the history of human cultures, showing that science is an adventure of discovery and a source of limitless wonder, giving us richer and more rewarding appreciation of the phenomenal privilege of merely being alive and able to begin to understand it all.
Ten Reasons To Lose Faith: And Why You Are Better Off Without It
This book explains why faith is a fallacy and serves no useful purpose other than providing an excuse for pretending to know things that are unknown. It also explains how losing faith liberates former sufferers from fear, delusion and the control of others, freeing them to see the world in a different light, to recognise the injustices that religions cause and to accept people for who they are, not which group they happened to be born in. A society based on atheist, Humanist principles would be a less divided, more inclusive, more peaceful society and one more appreciative of the one opportunity that life gives us to enjoy and wonder at the world we live in.
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
Amazon
All titles available in paperback, hardcover, ebook for Kindle and audio format.
Prices correct at time of publication. for current prices.
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.
Samples of ancient boar teeth unearthed at the archaeological site of Asiab in the Zagros Mountains.
Credit: Nic Vevers/ANU
Regional 87Sr/86Sr ratios were estimated using data from the Georoc database37 and measurements of modern plants from Ali Kosh29 and interpolated to the wider region using the underlying lithology (following Barakat et al.87).
A thousand years before Earth was supposedly created—according to the Bronze Age myths that creationists regard as literal history—people were already feasting in the Zagros Mountains, at a site now known as Asiab in modern-day Iran. Then, in what must have been a strangely selective miracle, around 4,300 years ago—when, according to the same myths, a global flood wiped out all life on Earth—the remains of these ancient feasts remained completely untouched. Like countless other archaeological sites, Asiab shows no trace of the thick silt layer that such a cataclysmic flood would inevitably have left behind.
Long before the advent of agriculture, when humans still lived in scattered bands of hunter-gatherers, people gathered at Asiab for a communal feast. The exact reason—whether religious ceremony, marriage, funeral, or some form of tribal leadership event—can only be guessed at. But what is clear is that guests travelled long distances over mountainous terrain, bringing with them the carcasses of wild boar. These animals, dangerous to hunt and not commonly pursued by hunter-gatherers in the region, appear to have held special significance. Their presence suggests that hunting and transporting them was a display of prowess or status, perhaps reserved for prestigious guests.
This conclusion comes from a team of palaeontologists who examined the microscopic wear and isotopic signatures on the teeth of wild boar recovered from the site. (For more on how this technique works, see the AI information side panel.)
The international team, led by Dr Petra Vaiglova of the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU), has just published their findings open access in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.
