Refuting Creationism - Ecuadorian Human Genome Refutes The Biblical Creation Myth

AI depiction of coastal hunter-gatherers in Ecuador 9,000 years ago

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Ancient Ecuadorian genomes | EurekAlert!

Ancient DNA is giving the people of South America something biblical mythology never provided: a history reconstructed from evidence. That history involves regional ancestry, movement, cultural change and communities persisting through environmental upheaval. A new study of ancient genomes from coastal Ecuador adds another piece to this picture, while also revealing a much darker aspect of life there: tuberculosis affecting an infant long before European contact.

In a paper published in PNAS Nexus, John Lindo and colleagues report four ancient human genomes from Salango, spanning approximately 2,300 to 740 years ago. Their genetic similarities suggest substantial local continuity over more than 1,500 years, despite volcanic disruption and major cultural transformations. Changing customs and social organisation need not mean that one population replaced another: communities can change their ways of life while retaining much of their ancestry.

The chronological challenge to young-Earth creationism requires a distinction. These burials are younger than the supposed biblical Flood, so their ages alone do not demonstrate survival across it. However, the researchers’ demographic modelling places the divergence of the coastal Ecuadorian lineage from other Southern Native American lineages at approximately 9,800 years ago. That estimate is model-dependent, rather than a direct date for a skeleton, but it points to population history extending beyond the entire conventional young-Earth chronology.

Claiming that the descendants of Noah migrated to the America during the last few thousand years, forgot all about the god who had caused the flood and the name of the man who had saved humanity and invented a language unrelated to that of their ancestors, while a divine trickster manipulated their genomes to make it look like they diversified thousands of years earlier, raises uncomfortable questions of anthropology and theology for creationists. Four genomes cannot settle every demographic question; they nevertheless add evidence to a history that cannot reasonably be compressed into recent dispersal from Noah’s family.

Creationism Refuted - DNA Shows Hidden Human Connections Across Europe - 20,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

AI-generated depiction of Gravettian life at the Isturitz Cave, southwest France

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Ancient human DNA reveals hidden connections across Ice Age Europe

Location of the sampled individuals and estimated dates. The map was obtained from https://mapswire.com under a CC BY 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

More than 30,000 years ago, people living in Ice Age Europe were leaving genetic evidence of connections between widely separated populations — tens of thousands of years before the world supposedly existed, according to the familiar young-Earth creationist interpretation of Genesis. Their descendants inherited traces of those encounters, and scientists can now recover those traces from ancient human remains. What emerges is a history of migration, interbreeding and survival through changing climates, on a timescale wholly incompatible with a recent creation followed by a global flood and the repopulation of Earth by Noah’s family.

The evidence comes from a study led by researchers at the University of Vienna, published in Science Advances. A woman who lived around 30,000 years ago, whose remains were found in Isturitz Cave in south-western France, carried predominantly western European ancestry, together with ancestry related to populations farther east. Assuming a single pulse of admixture, genetic modelling places that exchange approximately 32,500–31,500 years ago. This does not mean that the woman herself crossed Europe: her genome preserves evidence of connections between ancestral populations.

The researchers also recovered human nuclear DNA from an approximately 22,000-year-old sediment layer at El Mirón Cave in northern Spain, despite the absence of human bones or teeth. This supports the persistence of western European ancestry through the Last Glacial Maximum. Regional continuity and incoming ancestry could therefore coexist: populations could maintain deep local roots while also exchanging genes with other groups.

For biblical literalism, the difficulty extends beyond finding room for another inconveniently ancient date. Here are distinguishable populations, an inferred episode of interbreeding and evidence of ancestry persisting through a major climatic upheaval. These findings belong to a reconstructable human history stretching far beyond the few thousand years allowed by young-Earth chronology. Compressing that history into a post-Flood dispersal would require evidence for the compression, not simply a declaration that the biblical account must be correct.

Refuting Creationism - Early Humans Lived In The Jordan Valley - 1.9 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

A bifacial stone tool from ‘Ubeidiya

Credit: Omry Barzilai

A specialized imaging technique reveals mineral layers preserved within a fossilized Melanopsis shell (sample UB1).

Credit: Perach Nuriel

Study Finds 1.9 Million Year Out-of-Africa Migration wave leaves its mark in the Jordan Valley | EUROPEAN FRIENDS OF THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY

Long before anyone composed the biblical creation stories, early members of our genus were making stone tools and inhabiting the Jordan Valley. Research on the prehistoric site of ‘Ubeidiya, south of the Sea of Galilee, now suggests that this chapter of human history began earlier than previously thought — probably more than 1.9 million years ago. The landscape subsequently woven into biblical tradition preserves a much older history, written in sediments, fossils and archaeological remains.

The research, published in Quaternary Science Reviews brings together cosmogenic burial dating, ancient magnetic signatures and uranium–lead dating of fossil freshwater snail shells. Their combined interpretation favours an older chronology for the site, with implications for when tool-making hominins dispersed beyond Africa.

These inhabitants were not modern Homo sapiens. They were earlier members of our genus, probably associated with the Homo erectus/ergaster group, although the surviving fossils do not justify an unqualified species identification. Their presence, together with the site's Acheulean stone tools, contributes to an increasingly detailed picture of early human expansion into Eurasia.

Refuting Creationism - Refining The Details - How Did The Common Ancestor of Hominins And Chimps Climb Trees?

Speculative depiction of the last common ancestor of hominins and chimpanzees

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Researchers observed and confirmed with measurements that wild sooty mangabey monkeys in an Ivory Coast forest display foot bone flexibility that facilitates vertical climbing up skinny tree trunks to hide, forage or sleep.

Photo: W. Scott McGraw.

Last common ancestor, no matter its feet, could have been a vertical climber

One of the standard creationist tactics is to portray disagreement between scientists as evidence that the science itself is unreliable. Yet disagreement over the details of an evolutionary history is not disagreement over whether evolution occurred. On the contrary, it is often the means by which science advances: competing explanations are identified, their testable implications are examined, and evidence is gathered to determine which assumptions remain tenable.

A long-running example concerns the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, whose descendant lineages diverged some six to seven million years ago. Palaeoanthropologists agree that such an ancestor existed; the disagreement concerns what it looked like and how it moved. In particular, was its foot more like that of a modern African ape, with an ankle capable of substantial upward flexion during vertical climbing, or more like that of a monkey adapted principally to moving along branches?

That question matters because the evolution of habitual bipedalism cannot be understood without reconstructing the locomotion from which it developed. Fossilised foot and ankle bones preserve anatomical structure but not behaviour, so palaeoanthropologists must infer what their owners could do by comparing them with living primates. One influential assumption was that a primate needed a chimpanzee-like ankle to climb vertical tree trunks proficiently. A fossil with a more monkey-like foot might therefore be interpreted as evidence against frequent vertical climbing.

Luke D. Fannin, Carmen Pape and W. Scott McGraw have now tested that assumption with evidence from living animals. For their study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they recorded wild sooty mangabeys, Cercocebus atys, climbing trees in Côte d’Ivoire’s Taï Forest and measured the movements of their feet. Mangabeys lack the highly flexible ankle of a chimpanzee, yet they achieved an average of about 46 degrees of upward flexion through the middle of the foot—virtually the same range that chimpanzees achieve at the ankle.

In other words, two differently constructed feet can solve the same biomechanical problem in different ways. Chimpanzees flex chiefly at the ankle; mangabeys obtain comparable movement from the midfoot. This is a striking example of convergent evolution: similar selection pressures have produced functionally equivalent performances by modifying different parts of an inherited anatomical system.