Fossil collection sites, Seymour Island, Antarctica. Images credit: Boyang Xia et al.
Embarrassed by the wealth of fossils documenting an orderly succession of changing life over hundreds of millions of years, creationists traditionally fall back on several almost equally implausible attempts to reconcile the evidence with their preferred origin myth. According to young-Earth creationism, Earth is only 6,000–10,000 years old, while most of the fossil-bearing geological record was supposedly produced during a single, year-long global flood in which almost every terrestrial vertebrate was exterminated in an act of divine genocide, leaving only a handful of survivors aboard a wooden boat.
The principal pseudo-scientific attempt to explain the orderly fossil record is something creationists call “hydrological sorting”. This proposes that the Flood sorted organisms according to such factors as their size, density, buoyancy, habitat or ability to escape the rising water. The term therefore has a nominal meaning, but it provides no credible explanation for the observed succession of organisms in the rocks. It cannot explain why particular groups appear only after their presumed ancestors, why countless short-lived species occur in a consistent order across different continents, why terrestrial and marine ecosystems succeed one another coherently, or why the same sequence agrees with radiometric dates, palaeomagnetism, plate tectonics and independent records of environmental change.
When this supposed mechanism fails, creationists can retreat into claims that are conveniently immune to evidence: that their creator deliberately planted or manipulated the fossil record to make Earth look ancient; that Satan planted the evidence to deceive the faithful; or that generations of geologists, palaeontologists, physicists and biologists have participated in a vast conspiracy to conceal the “truth”. Each claim abandons any pretence of scientific explanation because none can be tested, falsified or distinguished from an invented excuse. They serve only to protect a predetermined conclusion from inconvenient facts.
The latest inconvenient facts come from three researchers at the China University of Geosciences (Beijing): Boyang Xia, Huaichun Wu and Quanguo Li. In a paper recently published in the open-access journal Fossil Record, they report that fossil penguin bones from Seymour Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula, preserve a geochemical record of changing environmental conditions during the Eocene.
Seymour Island contains one of the world’s richest and most nearly continuous successions of Eocene penguin fossils. Xia and colleagues examined bones from three different levels in the La Meseta and Submeseta formations: an early Eocene horizon dated to 55.3–54.1 million years ago, a younger horizon dated to 49.1–45.8 million years ago, and a middle-to-late Eocene horizon dated to 41.2–37.7 million years ago. For comparison, they also examined bones from living chinstrap and emperor penguins.
For most of its history, Earth was not a planet of trees, animals, fungi or anything else visible without a microscope. It was a microbial world. Life had existed for well over a billion years before the first clearly recognisable eukaryotic cells appeared in the fossil record, and for roughly another billion years after that, complex life remained comparatively inconspicuous.
That immense, slowly unfolding history is the subject of On the Hunt for Earth’s First Complex Life, an article in Universe Today by science journalist Bruce Dorminey, based on an interview with University of Oxford palaeontologist Associate Professor Ross Anderson. Anderson studies some of the most elusive fossils on Earth: the microscopic and usually soft-bodied remains of the organisms that preceded animals, plants and fungi.
The article is not a report of one new research paper, but an overview of an active field of research. Fortunately, several peer-reviewed studies provide the scientific background to Anderson’s comments. Together they describe not a sudden act of creation, but a long evolutionary transition from a biosphere dominated by bacteria and archaea to one containing eukaryotic cells, multicellular organisms and, eventually, animals.
From a Microbial World to Complex Life.
For most of Earth’s approximately 4.54-billion-year history, life was microscopic. The dates below represent the oldest reasonably secure evidence currently known, not necessarily the moment at which each evolutionary innovation first appeared. Any organism must have evolved before it could leave a fossil, and the earliest members of a lineage may have gone unpreserved or remain undiscovered.
Some major milestones
About 4.54 billion years ago — Earth formed. The young planet initially experienced intense volcanism, impacts and chemical evolution before stable oceans and environments capable of supporting life developed.
More than 3.5 billion years ago — microbial life was established. Ancient rocks preserve chemical and structural evidence of organisms that lacked nuclei and other membrane-bound organelles. Some proposed evidence is older, but its biological origin remains disputed.
By about 2.7–2.3 billion years ago — oxygenic photosynthesis had evolved. Cyanobacteria began using sunlight to extract electrons from water, releasing oxygen as a by-product.
About 2.4 billion years ago — the Great Oxidation Event. Oxygen began accumulating persistently in the atmosphere. This did not immediately produce complex life, but it profoundly altered ocean chemistry, mineral formation and the evolutionary opportunities available to organisms.
At least 1.75 billion years ago — recognisable eukaryotes. Organic-walled microfossils from northern Australia are among the oldest well-supported fossil eukaryotes. Their distribution indicates that they lived on or within oxygenated seabeds and probably already possessed mitochondria.
By about 1 billion years ago — multicellular eukaryotes. The fossil record contains increasingly persuasive examples of multicellular algae and other organisms in which cells were joined and organised. Multicellularity subsequently evolved independently in several eukaryotic lineages.
About 791 million years ago — diverse eukaryotes in the Svalbard sea. The Svanbergfjellet Formation preserves green algae and several enigmatic organisms with complex multicellular forms.
About 720–635 million years ago — Cryogenian global glaciations. During the “Snowball Earth” episodes, ice extended into tropical latitudes. The resulting environmental disruption probably caused extinctions while also creating new ecological opportunities after the ice retreated.
By about 574 million years ago — macroscopic Ediacaran organisms. Large, soft-bodied organisms appeared in marine ecosystems. Some may have been early animals, although the precise affinities of several famous Ediacaran forms remain debated.
From about 539 million years ago — the Cambrian radiation. Animal diversity, movement, burrowing, predation and biomineralisation expanded dramatically over millions of years. Skeletons and shells also made organisms much more likely to enter the fossil record.
How do scientists recognise a fossil eukaryote?
Finding a microscopic structure in an ancient rock does not automatically establish that it was alive, still less that it was a eukaryote. Palaeontologists first determine whether the object is genuinely biological, whether it was deposited with the surrounding sediment and whether it is as old as the rock containing it. They then examine combinations of features that are difficult to explain as mineral growths, later contamination or ordinary bacterial cells.
Size: Many early eukaryotic fossils are more than 100 micrometres across, considerably larger than typical bacteria. Size alone is not decisive, however, because some bacteria also produce exceptionally large cells.
Complex walls: Multiple wall layers, regularly arranged spines, sculptured surfaces and other elaborate structures indicate a degree of cellular control associated with eukaryotes.
Controlled openings: Some fossils have deliberately formed openings through which a cell apparently emerged from a resistant cyst. Their regular shape and position distinguish them from accidental tears or decay.
Internal structures: Preserved internal bodies, membranes or consistent patterns of cell division can support a eukaryotic interpretation, although claims that a particular structure represents a nucleus or organelle require especially strong evidence.
Multicellular organisation: Regular arrangements of connected cells, branching, differentiated regions or structures resembling holdfasts can demonstrate controlled growth rather than a chance aggregation of microorganisms.
Organic chemistry: Microscopy and spectroscopic techniques can establish that a fossil has a carbon-rich biological wall and reveal how heat, pressure and mineral reactions altered it after burial.
Geological context: Sedimentology and geochemistry reveal whether the organism lived in a coastal lagoon, on an oxygenated seabed or in deeper anoxic water. Finding the same form repeatedly within an appropriate environment strengthens its biological interpretation.
No single characteristic is necessarily conclusive. Large cells can be prokaryotic, mineral crystals can imitate biological shapes and geological alteration can create misleading structures. The strongest identifications therefore combine morphology, chemistry, repeated occurrence and environmental context.
Even when a fossil can confidently be identified as eukaryotic, its precise relationship to modern organisms may remain uncertain. Many organic-walled microfossils are consequently described by form rather than assigned prematurely to animals, plants, fungi or a particular group of protists. This caution is a strength of palaeontology, not a weakness: conclusions are calibrated to the evidence available and revised when better specimens or analytical techniques become available.
For creationists, the timescale alone is fatal. The rocks being examined are hundreds of millions to more than a billion years older than the entire Universe is supposed to be according to a literal reading of Genesis. More importantly, they preserve an ordered history of biological and environmental change that bears no resemblance to a six-day creation followed by a recent global flood.
The cellular innovation behind complex life
A eukaryotic cell is fundamentally more internally organised than a bacterial or archaeal cell. Its DNA is enclosed within a nucleus, while specialised compartments called organelles perform particular functions. Among the most important of these are mitochondria, which use oxygen to release energy from food and make energy-intensive forms of cellular organisation possible.
If the Young-Earth creationist claim that there was no death, suffering or predation before Eve’s supposed ‘sin’ were true, four fossil specimens preserved in museum collections in Colombia should not exist. They are the remains of large herbivorous mammals bearing punctures and other damage attributed to the teeth of a giant crocodylian—and they are between approximately 10.5 and 16 million years old.
In other words, these fossils are not merely the remains of animals that lived and died millions of years before there were humans to commit any biblical ‘sin’. They preserve physical evidence of animals attacking—or, at the very least, feeding upon—other animals in a functioning predator–prey ecosystem more than a thousand times older than the entire universe imagined by Young-Earth creationists.
The evidence is described by Oscar E. Wilson of the University of Helsinki and Jorge W. Moreno-Bernal in a paper recently published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. The researchers examined four specimens belonging to three species of large, now-extinct South American ungulates from the celebrated La Venta fossil assemblage of Colombia: the toxodontid Pericotoxodon platignathus and the astrapotheres Xenastrapotherium kraglievichi and Granastrapotherium snorki.
The skulls and jaws bear puncture marks and, in some cases, substantial deformation caused by a powerful bite. From the size and shape of the marks, together with the force apparently needed to produce the damage, Wilson and Moreno-Bernal identify the most likely culprit as Purussaurus neivensis, an enormous relative of modern caimans that may have reached about seven metres in length and weighed approximately 1,800 kilograms.
Middle Miocene South America contained an ecosystem unlike anything living today. The continent’s long geographical isolation had allowed native mammals—including toxodontids, astrapotheres, ground sloths and glyptodonts—to diversify independently. Around the immense tropical wetlands lived giant snakes, flightless predatory ‘terror birds’, terrestrial crocodyliforms and several kinds of aquatic crocodylian. Because large mammalian carnivores were comparatively scarce, reptiles such as Purussaurus occupied the major apex-predator niches.
Earlier studies had inferred this ecological role from the animals’ size, anatomy and the composition of the La Venta fauna. The newly reported bite marks provide direct physical evidence that giant crocodylians interacted with—and probably preyed upon—some of the ecosystem’s largest herbivorous mammals. Purussaurus may therefore have helped to regulate herbivore populations, much as large predators influence prey populations in modern ecosystems.
For creationists, the problem could hardly be clearer. These animals lived, competed, killed, fed, reproduced and became extinct millions of years before any known hominin existed, let alone the mythical couple blamed in Genesis for introducing death into the world. Even if an individual bite mark resulted from scavenging rather than an actual attack, that alternative still requires a dead animal, a flesh-eating crocodylian and an established ecological system based partly upon the consumption of carcasses. It offers no refuge for the claim that the pre-Fall world was free from death and carnivory.
One of creationism’s favourite tactics is to treat every apparent gap in the evidence as evidence of absence - although that never seems to apply to creationists' "God did it!" claims for which definitive evidence either for the god's existence or its actions are invariably absent. If archaeologists have not found something, creationists assume it never existed — or, more usually, that scientists cannot explain its absence without invoking the supernatural.
A study published in the Journal of Quaternary Science provides a neat illustration of what can really lie behind such gaps. In this case, the missing evidence was not missing at all. It consisted of thousands of small, unremarkable-looking fragments of animal bone that earlier archaeologists might easily have overlooked, discarded or left uncollected.
The study, led by Monica Mărgărit of Valahia University of Târgoviște, Romania, examined animal remains recovered from Abri 122/1200, a rock shelter in the Vârghiș Gorges of Romania’s Eastern Carpathians. The site contains an extensive Middle Palaeolithic stone-tool industry and abundant remains of animals, including bovids, goats, wolves and cave bears. Luminescence dating indicates that Middle Palaeolithic occupation extended across a long period, approximately from Marine Isotope Stage 7, about 230,000 years ago, into Marine Isotope Stage 3.
Among more than 10,000 bone fragments, the researchers identified 83 bearing combinations of impact damage, microscopic scratches, smoothing, polish and edge wear consistent with their having been used as tools. They distinguished these traces from damage caused by butchery, carnivore activity, sediment movement and other natural processes, using microscopic examination and comparisons with experimentally used bone fragments.
Some had apparently served as retouchers for shaping or sharpening stone tools. Others had been used to scrape or work softer substances such as hides or plant material, while still others had functioned as wedges, multipurpose implements or simple hammers. Most had not been laboriously carved into specialised shapes. A suitable fragment was selected, used for the task at hand and then discarded—an expedient but effective use of a readily available material.
That distinction is important. The discovery does not show that Neanderthals in Romania possessed an elaborate bone-working industry previously unknown to science. It shows something arguably more revealing about their everyday behaviour: they could recognise the useful properties of an ordinary fragment, adapt it to an immediate problem and employ materials other than stone as circumstances required. “Technologically flexible and resourceful” is therefore more accurate than the rather sensational claim that their technology was simply “more advanced”.
How Can Archaeologists Recognise an Expedient Bone Tool?
A broken animal bone is not automatically a tool. Bones can be fractured, scratched, polished or crushed by many processes, including butchery, marrow extraction, carnivore gnawing, trampling, movement through sediment and weathering. Archaeologists must therefore distinguish evidence of deliberate use from damage produced before or after burial.
This study belongs to the field of traceology, or use-wear analysis. Researchers examine the position, orientation and microscopic structure of marks on an object to reconstruct how it may have been used.
Evidence of use
No single scratch or polished patch is normally decisive. Identification depends on combinations of features occurring in places where they would be expected on a working tool:
Localised smoothing and rounding can develop where an edge or projection has repeatedly rubbed against another material.
Microscopic striations may reveal the direction in which a tool was moved. Repeated scraping tends to produce organised wear rather than randomly orientated scratches.
Polish can develop through prolonged contact with relatively soft materials, possibly including hides or plant fibres.
Pits, grooves and small impact scars can indicate that a bone was used as a retoucher to shape or resharpen the edge of a stone tool.
Crushing, flaking and battered ends may identify bones used as hammers, wedges or intermediate pieces through which force was transmitted.
These marks must be distinguished from other forms of damage. Carnivore teeth can leave pits, punctures, scores and ragged edges; trampling can produce irregular scratches; roots can etch branching patterns into a surface; and movement through sediment can abrade an entire bone. Butchery and marrow extraction also produce characteristic cut marks, impact notches and fracture patterns. Those marks demonstrate human activity, but do not necessarily show that the bone was subsequently used as a tool.
Researchers compare archaeological specimens with experimental reference collections. Modern fragments of similar bone are used for scraping, rubbing, hammering, wedging or working stone. The resulting wear is then examined microscopically and compared with that preserved on the ancient specimens. Archaeological context, fracture history and the distribution of wear across each fragment provide additional evidence.
Even then, conclusions are expressed cautiously. Use-wear may show that a bone contacted a hard or soft material and indicate the kind of movement involved, but it cannot always identify the precise task or material with certainty.
Expedient and formally manufactured tools
A formal bone tool is deliberately manufactured. Its maker selects a suitable bone, produces a blank and modifies it by cutting, scraping, grinding or polishing. The finished object may have a regular shape intended for repeated or specialised use.
An expedient bone tool requires much less preparation. Its user recognises that an existing fragment already has a suitable edge, point, weight or shape, perhaps makes a minor adjustment, uses it for an immediate task and then discards it.
This does not mean that an expedient tool was accidental or that its user lacked the ability to manufacture something more elaborate. It represents a practical decision: there is little benefit in spending time making a specialised implement when a conveniently shaped piece of bone can perform the required task immediately.
Most of the specimens from Abri 122/1200 appear to belong to this expedient category. They were not extensively shaped, but their wear indicates that Neanderthals selected and used them as retouchers, scrapers, wedges, multipurpose implements or percussive tools. Their significance lies in the flexibility with which available materials were exploited, not in elaborate craftsmanship.
How archaeological gaps are created
Expedient tools present a particular problem because they can look like ordinary fragments of food waste. Earlier excavations often concentrated on complete, identifiable or visually impressive bones. Small fragments might be placed in storage without detailed examination—or not collected at all.
Consequently, an apparent absence of bone technology can reflect collection practices, preservation and the questions earlier researchers were asking rather than the behaviour of the people who occupied a site.
The Romanian evidence illustrates why gaps in the archaeological record should not be treated as proof that something never existed. Sometimes the missing evidence is already present, awaiting the methods and research questions needed to recognise it.
No Neanderthal skeletal remains have yet been recovered from Abri 122/1200, so the attribution is indirect. It rests on the age of the deposits, their Middle Palaeolithic stone industry and their wider archaeological context. The researchers are now looking for more direct evidence, including ancient Neanderthal DNA preserved in the cave sediments. This qualification is acknowledged openly by the scientists, unlike creationism, in which uncertainty is habitually concealed beneath declarations of dogmatic certainty.
The Romanian report in Gândul therefore describes more than another addition to the Neanderthal toolkit. The research demonstrates how apparent gaps in the archaeological record can be created by preservation, sampling and the questions researchers previously thought to ask. When those methods and questions improve, the gaps become smaller—not because scientists have invented missing evidence, but because they have learnt how to recognise evidence that was hiding in plain sight.
Auto-translated from Romanian: Important discovery at a site in Romania. Neanderthals had more advanced technology than previously thoughtArchaeologists have made an extremely important discovery right on Romanian territory. Specifically, in the site called Abri 122/1200, a cave in the Vârghiș Gorges occupied in the Middle Paleolithic, approximately 230,000 to 60,000 years ago, specialists have identified things that change what was known so far about the Neanderthals who lived on Romanian territory.
Researchers have identified, in bone fragments, the first evidence that they used bone tools for activities such as scraping, sharpening, or splitting.
The new study, led by Monica Mărgărit from the University of Târgoviște, was published in the Journal of Quaternary Science and focused on animal remains intentionally modified by humans. The researchers tried to determine whether the animal bones were simply remains from food consumption or whether, given the observed modifications, they were also transformed into tools for various activities, such as leather processing.
The context is particularly interesting because the Abri 122/1200 site preserves an important lithic industry and a large amount of faunal remains. Previous research has already identified bones from large herbivores, such as representatives of the bovid family, from the genera Bos and Bison, goats, but also the cave bear (Ursus spelaeus).
The bones show a high degree of fragmentation, compatible with the activities of cutting and exploiting the carcasses. During previous archaeological campaigns, fragments of long bones were discovered that appear to have been obtained by striking, most likely in the process of extracting the marrow. Some of the fragments also showed features compatible with their use as tools, geopop.it shows.
Important discovery on Romanian territory
The new study focuses on this aspect: the animal bones were not necessarily just food scraps. Traceological analyses showed that they were intentionally exploited. Some fragments could be selected and modified for use as tools, which demonstrates that Neanderthal technology was not limited to stone.
Although these fragments were not frequently processed or adapted for a very precise purpose, their shapes and characteristics appear to have been considered useful for carrying out certain activities.
The significance of the discovery goes beyond a single artifact. The intentional use of bones demonstrates a wider range of raw materials exploited by Neanderthals and suggests that, in addition to producing stone tools, these communities may have systematically used materials obtained from animal carcasses.
Abri 122/1200 is also an important site for understanding the presence of Neanderthals in the Carpathian region. The most recent research on the chronology of the site indicates that the archaeological levels with Middle Paleolithic industry could be up to about 230,000 years old.
The discoveries at Abri 122/1200 thus contribute to shaping an increasingly complex picture of Neanderthal technology: a system in which stone represented a fundamental raw material, but in which the bones of hunted and consumed animals could also become useful materials for carrying out technological activities.
ABSTRACT
Archeological evidence has demonstrated that Neanderthals utilized mammal bone remains as tools. These findings are geographically widespread, stretching from the Altai Mountains in Central Asia to the Atlantic Ocean. Such an extensive distribution is indicative of a broad pattern of Neanderthal behavior concerning tool use and resource exploitation, although a notable lacuna exists in the archeological record within the Carpathian region that appears as a blank area on the existing map. The main purpose of our study is to address and fill this geographical gap. To this end, we focused on the site of Abri 122/1200 in Romania as a representative case study. The luminescence dating results indicate that the Middle Paleolithic occupation of the cave spans from the Middle Pleistocene (Chibanian) to the Late Pleistocene, approximately from Marine Isotope Stage 7 (MIS 7, around 230 000 years ago) to MIS 3. A crucial aspect of our investigation involved differentiating between taphonomic marks on faunal remains: those resulting from natural processes such as scavenging or environmental factors and those stemming from technological activities like tool production or usewear. Through meticulous analysis, we successfully identified and isolated a consistent set of faunal remains categorized into five distinct typological groups. Our observations reveal that technological interventions on these bones are infrequent; the majority of fragments appear to have been used in their natural state without extensive modification. Fragments show evidence of being used in activities such as the processing of lithic tools, hides, or plant materials, which indicates a more complex utilization pattern than previously assumed. The assemblage from Abri 122/1200 thus exemplifies the importance of re-evaluating other Middle Paleolithic contexts within the Carpathian region. It highlights the variability, origin, and technological significance of bone production and utilization by Neanderthals, challenging traditional perceptions of their technological capabilities and resourcefulness.
The significance of these finds does not lie in the discovery of some spectacularly sophisticated Neanderthal invention. It lies in the evidence of adaptability preserved on apparently insignificant fragments of bone. The occupants of Abri 122/1200 recognised useful shapes and properties in the remains of the animals they exploited, selected suitable pieces for particular jobs and discarded them when those jobs were finished. This was practical problem-solving—the ability to use different materials flexibly rather than depend upon a rigid repertoire of stone implements.
The study also illustrates why creationist arguments based upon gaps in the evidence are so fundamentally dishonest. The apparent absence of Neanderthal bone tools from the Carpathian region did not mean that no such tools had existed. Many were too small and insufficiently modified to attract the attention of earlier excavators. Once researchers asked a more precise question, examined every fragment microscopically and compared its wear with experimentally produced marks, some of the supposedly missing evidence emerged from material that had been present all along.
Nor can the wider archaeological context be reconciled with a young Earth or a recent global flood. Abri 122/1200 preserves Middle Palaeolithic occupations extending through a substantial portion of the Pleistocene, within an independently dated sequence spanning tens of thousands of years. Its stone artefacts, butchered animal remains and expedient bone tools record repeated human activity long before creationists believe their god created the Universe, let alone before their mythical Flood supposedly destroyed the archaeological landscape. The absence of evidence does nothing for creationism; the presence of evidence utterly refutes it.
The researchers are also explicit about the limits of their conclusions. No identifiable Neanderthal remains have yet been found at the site, so the attribution rests upon its chronology, Middle Palaeolithic stone industry and wider European context. Instead of concealing that uncertainty, the team is looking for additional evidence, including ancient DNA in the sediments. That is how science works: conclusions are proportioned to the available evidence and remain open to refinement when new evidence appears.
Creationism predicted none of these discoveries, supplied none of the methods used to recognise them and offers no coherent explanation for their age or archaeological setting. Its only contribution is to rename Neanderthals as descendants of Adam or Noah and dismiss the dating, stratigraphy, genetics and comparative anatomy that show otherwise. Far from exposing a weakness in evolutionary science, the former blank on the Carpathian map demonstrates how science closes gaps, while creationism survives by pretending that every gap must remain permanent.
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"Triassic Mothers," a life reconstruction of a group of Chiniquodon theotonicus individuals, a pregnant female (left) as well as a female (right) breastfeeding few, relatively large neonates.
A newly published study suggests that one characteristic commonly associated with modern mammals—giving birth to live young—may have appeared in the mammalian lineage far earlier than palaeontologists previously realised.
Creationists prefer to imagine the major groups of organisms appearing fully formed, equipped from the outset with complete packages of supposedly defining characteristics. Evolution, however, produces no such conveniently bundled collections of features. Characteristics arise, change and sometimes disappear at different times, producing the mosaic of inherited and modified traits documented throughout the fossil record.
Creationists also rejoice at any suggestion that scientists might have to change their minds because, in their simplistic view of science, if something is not exactly and eternally true, it's wrong; there is no concept in creationism of incomplete truths or provisional conclusions contingent on future discoveries. Unlike creationism, though, changing one’s mind when the evidence changes is the hallmark of intellectual integrity, and what give science it's reliability and great strength as a tool for discovering the truth.
So here, to sow confusion in the minds of creationists, is an example of science changing its collective mind and still refuting creationists mythology, because it happened 236 million years before the mythical 'Creation Week'. Significantly too, the authors readily conceded that their conclusion is only provisional and they identify what additional information is needed to confirm or refute it. No such reasoning is ever advanced by creationist apologists because it must never be conceded that creationism could be falsified with evidence, lest that evidence be found.
The history of Homo sapiens in Africa between 44,000 and 3,000 years ago was one of isolation, migration, interaction and replacement a shown by characteristic inner ear labyrinth morphologies.
An international team of biological anthropologists has found a novel way to reconstruct tens of thousands of years of human population history in north-eastern Africa: by examining tiny variations in the shape of the bony cavities that once contained people’s inner ears. It's not good news for creationists so it'll be just one more thing for them to ignore one way or another.
The researchers, led by Nicolas Martin and Isabelle Crevecoeur of the PACEA laboratory at the University of Bordeaux and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), have published their findings in Nature Communications.
The bony labyrinth is a complex system of cavities within the temporal bone of the skull. It surrounds the cochlea, involved in hearing, and the semicircular canals, involved in balance. Although its shape varies subtly between individuals and populations, much of that variation reflects inherited ancestry. High-resolution micro-CT scanning allows the labyrinth to be reconstructed and measured in three dimensions without damaging the remains.
This makes it especially valuable in regions such as north-eastern Africa, where heat and other environmental conditions have frequently destroyed ancient DNA. When molecular evidence is unavailable, the shape of the inner ear can preserve an anatomical record of biological relationships between ancient populations.
Martin and his colleagues analysed 194 bony labyrinths belonging to 148 individuals. Their sample included people who lived between approximately 44,000 and 3,000 years ago in the Middle Nile Valley, the Horn of Africa and Central Africa, together with comparative specimens from elsewhere in Africa, Europe and the Levant. The researchers applied three different methods of shape analysis, all of which produced the same broad patterns.
Those patterns reveal a long and complicated history of regional continuity, isolation, migration, interaction and partial population replacement. Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene hunter-fisher-foragers from the Middle Nile Valley showed broad morphological similarities both to one another and to still earlier African Homo sapiens. This is consistent with deep regional ancestry and substantial biological continuity extending across many thousands of years.
That continuity was disrupted during the Neolithic transition. Beginning about 8,000 years ago, food-producing populations with distinctly different inner-ear morphologies appeared in the Middle Nile Valley, supporting the conclusion that pastoralism and agriculture arrived with migrating people rather than being adopted solely by the region’s existing foragers.
This was not necessarily a simple or complete replacement. Individuals retaining affinities with the earlier foragers survived for several millennia in areas bordering the Nile Valley, while some remains display combinations of characteristics consistent with limited interaction or admixture between the old and new populations. Samples from the Horn of Africa and Central Africa also showed considerable morphological diversity, indicating population substructure and differing regional demographic histories.
These results independently support earlier research by Martin and many of the same colleagues, which detected a similar Neolithic population discontinuity from the internal structure of ancient teeth. A CNRS account of that earlier study explains how enamel–dentine junctions revealed population replacement and continuing interaction along the Nile and its Saharan margins. Now two independent anatomical systems—teeth and inner ears—have produced compatible reconstructions of the region’s population history.
This presents creationists with the familiar problem of evidence that should not exist if their mythology were true. According to the young-Earth version of the biblical story, the entire human population was reduced to Noah’s family only a little over 4,000 years ago. Every population on Earth must therefore have descended from that tiny group after an extraordinarily rapid dispersal from somewhere in the Middle East.
Oblique view of the lower part of the surface from the east, showing the general extent of the exposed palaeosurface. People for scale. Red arrow indicates the pit.
Artistic reconstruction of the Mullurina Mayu bowl-shaped depression during the Late Cretaceous, depicting the probable tracemakers responsible for the Calorckosauripus trackways and possibly the bowl-shaped depression.
Some 67 million years before creationists believe their god created Earth during its mythical six-day “Creation Week”, a group of enormous, long-necked dinosaurs walked across the soft mud beside a river or lake in what is now Bolivia. At least one large animal may also have stopped to scrape repeatedly at the ground, leaving a great bowl-shaped depression surrounded by grooves and possible claw marks. Whether it was preparing a nest, digging for water or mineral salts, or doing something else entirely is uncertain, but the marks it left behind provide a rare glimpse of dinosaur behaviour shortly before the end of the Cretaceous Period.
The evidence comes from the Mullurina Mayu locality in the Maragua region, about 23 kilometres west of Sucre, Bolivia. There, an exposed surface of Maastrichtian-age claystone in the Lower Member of the El Molino Formation preserves several trackways attributed to titanosaurian sauropods. The tracks have been assigned to the trace-fossil species Calorckosauripus lazari, believed to have been made by comparatively non-derived titanosaurs.
Now, in a paper published in the journal Fossil Record, Christian A. Meyer, Jose Hugo Heymann, Edwin Chuca Ibarra, Eddy Laura Flores and Lara Sciscio have described an unusual structure preserved among those trackways. It is an irregular, bowl-shaped hollow measuring approximately 4.2 by 3.2 metres and reaching about 60 centimetres in depth. Around its walls are bundles of parallel grooves, roughly one centimetre wide and up to about 30 centimetres long, together with broader marks on the floor that may have been made by claws.
A heap of ancient bones does not come with a label explaining how it was formed. When large accumulations of woolly mammoth remains are found at Upper Palaeolithic sites, archaeologists must determine whether the animals were killed by people, scavenged after natural deaths, or accumulated through entirely natural processes such as floods, landslides or animals becoming trapped in bogs.
Cut marks, deliberately broken bones and stone projectile points embedded in mammoth remains show that humans sometimes hunted and butchered these enormous animals. But such evidence is not present on every bone, leaving open the possibility that some of the great mammoth bonebeds of Eurasia resulted largely from natural mortality rather than sustained human exploitation.
Now an international team led by researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm has approached the problem from an ingenious new direction: instead of asking only what happened to the bones, they used ancient DNA to determine whether the mammoths were male or female.
As described in a newly published paper in Current Biology, the researchers analysed genome data from 521 woolly mammoths, Mammuthus primigenius, recovered across Eurasia and North America. These included 448 animals sequenced for the first time, making this one of the largest palaeogenomic studies yet undertaken on an extinct species.
The contrast was striking. Among 421 mammoths recovered as dispersed remains from natural depositional settings, 66 per cent were male and only 34 per cent female. That male bias is consistent with the behaviour of modern elephants: adult males commonly leave their natal herds and live alone, making them more likely to take risks or become caught in natural traps such as bogs, sinkholes and landslides.
However, among 100 mammoths from large bone accumulations associated with Upper Palaeolithic people, the ratio was almost exactly reversed: 70 per cent were female and only 30 per cent male. As the researchers explain, this substantial difference provides population-scale evidence that human activity, rather than natural mortality alone, was the principal force creating these bone accumulations.
That does not necessarily mean that hunters deliberately selected females simply because they were smaller than adult males. If mammoths lived like modern elephants, females and their young would have travelled in matriarchal herds capable of mounting a formidable collective defence. However, such herds may also have followed more predictable routes than solitary males, making them easier for hunter-gatherers to locate repeatedly. People may have hunted them, scavenged animals that died along those routes, or—most probably—used a combination of both strategies.
Either way, the result opens a remarkable window onto human behaviour between about 30,000 and 20,000 years ago. Mammoths supplied meat and fat for food, hides for clothing and shelter, bones for construction, and ivory for tools, ornaments and works of art. By combining genetics with archaeology and knowledge of elephant social behaviour, scientists can now reconstruct something of how Upper Palaeolithic people located and exploited this critically important resource.
And all this human ingenuity, accumulated ecological knowledge and repeated interaction with mammoth herds was taking place tens of thousands of years before creationists believe their god created Earth and everything upon it. Once again, the evidence reveals not a recently created world interrupted by a global flood, but a deep and richly documented human past—one preserved not merely in tools and bones, but in fragments of ancient DNA surviving within those bones.
It is not often that fossilised faeces take centre stage in an explanation of one of the most important episodes in evolutionary history. However, a review published in Trends in Ecology & Evolution suggests that the evolution of digestive systems—and the resulting production of faecal pellets—may have helped to transform the chemistry and ecology of the oceans during the Cambrian radiation.
In The Cambrian fecal revolution: Fueling the Cambrian Radiation, palaeontologists Julien Kimmig and Russell D.C. Bicknell bring together evidence from fossil digestive systems and coprolites—fossilised faeces—from more than 35 deposits around the world. They found that coprolites became progressively more abundant and varied during the Cambrian Period, ranging from microscopic pellets to centimetre-sized masses containing shells and fragments of other animals.
This change coincided with the evolution of increasingly sophisticated digestive systems. Early animals with blind guts had only one opening through which food entered and waste was expelled. The evolution of a through-gut, with a separate mouth and anus, permitted food to move continuously through the body. Animals could feed more frequently, process a greater variety of foods and adopt new ecological roles. Early arthropods, in particular, developed specialised foreguts and digestive glands capable of extracting nutrients from increasingly diverse prey.
According to the authors, the consequences extended far beyond the animals producing the waste. Faecal pellets packaged organic matter and nutrients—including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and iron—and transported them through the water column and into deeper environments. In modern oceans, this sinking material forms an important part of the biological pump that carries carbon and nutrients away from surface waters. Kimmig and Bicknell propose that the beginnings of a comparable process during the Cambrian helped to fertilise previously nutrient-poor environments and support more complex food webs.
Impression of a Tyrannosaurus rex attacking an Edmontosaurus annectens
AI-generated image (ChatGPT 5.6 Sol)
Tooth traces on ulna HRS10076.
A) Ulna with black boxes indicating areas with tooth traces. B-C) Magnification of corresponding boxes from Fig 7A. White arrows indicate pits and red arrows indicate parallel scores.
Last month produced the usual crop of research papers which, quite incidentally, refuted creationism simply by revealing evidence utterly incompatible with its basic dogmas. It also produced another answer to a favourite creationist conspiracy theory: that scientists are not permitted to publish anything that challenges the supposedly ‘materialist orthodoxy’ of the scientific establishment.
This allegation confuses philosophical materialism with methodological naturalism. Science confines itself to explanations that can be tested against evidence. That is a working method, not a compulsory metaphysical belief. Findings that challenge established interpretations are not prohibited; provided they are supported by evidence and survive critical scrutiny, they are an essential part of the way science advances.
Literalist creationism works in the opposite direction. It begins with the non-negotiable conclusion that scripture must be inerrant, so any contrary evidence must be denied, explained away or forced into conformity with that predetermined belief. Changing one’s mind in response to evidence is therefore treated not as intellectual honesty but as a failure of faith.
Creationists consequently try to have it both ways. When scientists agree, this is presented as evidence of a conspiracy suppressing dissent; when scientists challenge or refine an earlier interpretation, it supposedly proves that scientists are always changing their minds and that science is therefore unreliable. It is a convenient rhetorical trick in which both consistency and self-correction are declared to be evidence against science.
A modest but revealing example is a study published recently in PLOS ONE by researchers from Loma Linda University, Western University of Health Sciences, The Master’s University, Southern Adventist University and Southwestern Adventist University. Four of those five institutions are explicitly Christian: Loma Linda, Southern Adventist and Southwestern Adventist are Seventh-day Adventist universities, while The Master’s University declares a commitment to Christ and ‘biblical fidelity’. So much for the supposed exclusion of religious scientists from mainstream scientific publication.
The paper itself is not creationist research: it employs standard palaeontological methods and places the fossils within the conventional Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous. What it does show is that evidence-based research can be published and scrutinised irrespective of the religious affiliations of the institutions involved.
The researchers examined 3,013 dinosaur bones, most belonging to Edmontosaurus annectens, excavated between 1997 and 2017 from the Hanson Ranch Station bonebed in the Lance Formation of eastern Wyoming. Thirteen bones initially displayed perforations or other features that resembled tooth traces. Closer examination—including microscopy, comparison with other fossils and, in an ambiguous case, CT scanning—showed that one specimen contained normal openings in the bone, or foramina, rather than bite marks. The remaining 12 bones, just under 0.4 per cent of the total examined, preserved genuine tooth traces.
Four of those bones carried particularly diagnostic traces known as Knethichnus parallelum and Linichnus serratus. By comparing the spacing of the preserved striations and serrations with the denticles on carnivorous dinosaur teeth recovered from the same bonebed, the researchers identified Tyrannosaurus rex as the most likely culprit. Other, less diagnostic marks may have been produced by crocodilians living in the same ecosystem.
Most of the tooth traces showed no associated bone remodelling, suggesting that they were inflicted at or after the time of death. The evidence therefore points more strongly towards scavenging than successful predation, although the two cannot always be distinguished. Weathering, bioerosion and characteristic fractures in fresh bone also indicate that the carcasses remained exposed for some time before burial and were probably exploited by theropods, crocodilians or both.
