Two researchers at McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada, have uncovered evidence of an ecosystem teeming with giant marine predators some 130 million years ago. The largest of these predators could, quite literally, have eaten something the size of a modern orca as little more than a snack. This will make depressing reading for creationists, not only because it all happened deep in the long pre-“Creation Week” history of life on Earth, but because the evolutionary arms races that led to these giants are precisely what the theory of evolution by natural selection predicts.
It doesn’t get any easier for creationists. Just because it’s Christmas week doesn’t mean the awkward facts are going to go away, or that scientists are going to stop uncovering more of them. No matter what they post on social media; no matter how loudly they shout; or how fervently they gather on Sundays to collectively drown out their doubts, Santa is not going to deliver evidence that the Bronze Age creation myths in the Bible contain even a grain of historical truth. The problem is that truth remains true whether a creationist believes it or not, and regardless of whether their parents believed it. No amount of looking the other way or pretending the facts aren’t there will ever change that.
The palaeontologists reached their conclusions by reconstructing an ecosystem network for all known animal fossils from the Paja Formation in central Colombia. They used body sizes, feeding adaptations, and comparisons with modern animals, and then validated the results against one of the most detailed present-day marine ecosystem networks available: the living Caribbean ecosystem, which they used as a reference. The Paja ecosystem thrived with plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and abundant invertebrates, giving rise to one of the most intricate marine food webs known. This complexity emerged as sea levels rose and Earth’s climate warmed during the Mesozoic era, including the Cretaceous, triggering an explosion of marine biodiversity.
Photo montage of five major elements of DAN5 fossil cranium
Credit: Dr. Michael Rogers
Map showing potential migration routes of the human ancestor, Homo erectus, in Africa, Europe and Asia during the early Pleistocene. Key fossils of Homo erectus and the earlier Homo habilis species are shown, including the new face reconstruction of the DAN5 fossil from Gona, Ethiopia dated to 1.5 million years ago.
Credit: Dr. Karen L. Baab. Scans provided by National Museum of Ethiopia, National Museums of Kenya and Georgian National Museum.
Palaeontologists at the College of Graduate Studies, Glendale Campus of Midwestern University in Arizona, have reconstructed the head and face of an early Homo erectus specimen, DAN5, from Gona in the Afar region of Ethiopia on the Horn of Africa. In doing so, they have uncovered several unexpected features that should trouble any creationist who understands their significance. The research has just been published open access in Nature Communications.
Creationism requires its adherents to imagine that there are no intermediate fossils showing a transition from the common Homo/Pan ancestor to modern Homo sapiens, whom they claim were created as a single couple just a few thousand years ago with a flawless genome designed by an omniscient, omnipotent creator. The descendants of such a couple would, of course, show no genetic variation, because both the perfect genome and its replication machinery would operate flawlessly. No gene variants could ever arise.
The reality, however, is very different. Not only are there vast numbers of fossils documenting a continuum from the common Homo/Pan ancestor of around six million years ago, but there is also so much variation among them that it has become increasingly difficult to force them into a simple, linear sequence. Instead, human evolution is beginning to resemble a tangled bush rather than a neat progression.
The newly reconstructed face of the Ethiopian Homo erectus is no exception. It displays a mosaic of more primitive facial traits alongside features characteristic of the H. erectus populations believed to have spread out of Africa in the first of several waves of hominin migration into Eurasia. The most plausible explanation is that the Ethiopian population descended from an earlier expansion within Africa, became isolated in the Afar region, and retained its primitive characteristics while other populations continued to evolve towards the more derived Eurasian form.
The broader picture that has emerged in recent years—particularly since it became clear that H. sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans formed an interbreeding complex that contributed to modern non-African humans—is one of repeated expansion into new environments, evolution in isolation, and subsequent genetic remixing as populations came back into contact. DAN5 represents just one of these populations, which appears to have evolved in isolation for some 300,000 years.
Not only is this timescale utterly incompatible with the idea of the special creation of H. sapiens 6,000–10,000 years ago, but the sheer existence of this degree of variation is also irreconcilable with the notion of a flawless, designed human genome. Even allowing for old-earth creationist claims that a biblical “day” may represent an elastic number of millions of years, the problem remains: a highly variable genome must still be explained as the product of perfect design. A flawless genome created by an omniscient, omnipotent creator should, moreover, have been robust enough to withstand interference following “the Fall” — an event such a creator would necessarily have foreseen, particularly if it also created the conditions for that fall and the other creative agency involved (Isaiah 45:7).
As usual, creationists seem to prefer the conclusion that their supposed intelligent creator was incompetent—either unaware of the future, indifferent to it, or powerless to prevent it—rather than accept the far more parsimonious explanation: that modern Homo sapiens are the product of a long, complex evolutionary history from more primitive beginnings, in which no divine intervention is required.
Origins of Homo erectus
Homo erectus
Homo erectus appears in the fossil record around 1.9–2.0 million years ago, emerging from earlier African Homo populations, most likely derived from Homo habilis–like ancestors. Many researchers distinguish early African forms as Homo ergaster, reserving H. erectus sensu stricto for later Asian populations, although this is a taxonomic preference rather than a settled fact.
Key features of early H. erectus include:
A substantial increase in brain size (typically 600–900 cm³ initially, later exceeding 1,000 cm³)
A long, low cranial vault with pronounced brow ridges
A modern human–like body plan, with long legs and shorter arms
Clear association with Acheulean stone tools and likely habitual fire use (by ~1 million years ago)
Crucially, H. erectus was the first hominin to disperse widely beyond Africa, reaching:
The Caucasus (Dmanisi) by ~1.8 Ma
Southeast Asia (Java) by ~1.6 Ma
China (Zhoukoudian) by ~0.8–0.7 Ma
This makes H. erectus not a single, static species, but a long-lived, geographically structured lineage.
Homo erectus as a population complex
Rather than a uniform species, H. erectus is best understood as a metapopulation:
African populations
Western Eurasian populations
East and Southeast Asian populations
These groups experienced repeated range expansions, isolation, local adaptation, and partial gene flow, producing the mosaic anatomy seen in fossils such as DAN5.
This population structure is critical for understanding later human evolution.
Relationship to later Homo species
Neanderthal (H. neanderthalensis)
From H. erectus to H. heidelbergensis
By around 700–600 thousand years ago, some H. erectus-derived populations—probably in Africa—had evolved into forms often grouped as Homo heidelbergensis (or H. rhodesiensis for African material).
These hominins had:
Larger brains (1,100–1,300 cm³)
Reduced facial prognathism
Continued Acheulean and early Middle Stone Age technologies
They represent a transitional grade, not a sharp speciation event.
Divergence of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans
Genetic and fossil evidence indicates the following broad pattern:
~550–600 ka: A heidelbergensis-like population splits
African branch → modern Homo sapiens
Eurasian branch → Neanderthals and Denisovans
Neanderthals
Evolved primarily in western Eurasia
Adapted to cold climates
Distinctive cranial morphology
Contributed ~1–2% of DNA to all non-African modern humans
Denisovans
Known mostly from genetic data, with sparse fossils (Denisova Cave)
Closely related to Neanderthals but genetically distinct
Contributed genes to Melanesians, Aboriginal Australians, and parts of East and Southeast Asia, including variants affecting altitude adaptation (e.g. EPAS1)
Modern Homo sapiens
Emerged in Africa by ~300 ka
Retained genetic continuity with earlier African populations
Dispersed out of Africa multiple times, beginning ~70–60 ka
Interbred repeatedly with Neanderthals and Denisovans
The key point: no clean branching tree
Human evolution is reticulate, not linear:
Species boundaries were porous
Gene flow occurred repeatedly
Populations diverged, adapted, re-merged, and diverged again
Homo erectus is not a side branch that “went extinct”, but a foundational grade from which multiple later lineages emerged. DAN5 fits neatly into this framework: a locally isolated erectus population retaining ancestral traits while others continued evolving elsewhere.
Why this matters
This picture:
Explains mosaic anatomy in fossils
Accounts for genetic admixture in living humans
Makes sense of long timescales and geographic diversity
Is incompatible with any model of recent, perfect, single-pair creation
Instead, it shows that our species is the outcome of millions of years of population dynamics, not a single moment of design.
A new fossil face sheds light on early migrations of ancient human ancestorA New Fossil Face Sheds Light on Early Migrations of Ancient Human Ancestor
A 1.5-million-year-old fossil from Gona, Ethiopia reveals new details about the first hominin species to disperse from Africa.
Summary: Virtual reassembly of teeth and fossil bone fragments reveals a beautifully preserved face of a 1.5-million-year-old human ancestor—the first complete Early Pleistocene hominin cranium from the Horn of Africa. This fossil, from Gona, Ethiopia, hints at a surprisingly archaic face in the earliest human ancestors to migrate out of Africa.
A team of international scientists, led by Dr. Karen Baab, a paleoanthropologist at the College of Graduate Studies, Glendale Campus of Midwestern University in Arizona, produced a virtual reconstruction of the face of early Homo erectus. The 1.5 to 1.6 million-year-old fossil, called DAN5, was found at the site of Gona, in the Afar region of Ethiopia. This surprisingly archaic face yields new insights into the first species to spread across Africa and Eurasia. The team’s findings are being published in Nature Communications.
We already knew that the DAN5 fossil had a small brain, but this new reconstruction shows that the face is also more primitive than classic African Homo erectus of the same antiquity. One explanation is that the Gona population retained the anatomy of the population that originally migrated out of Africa approximately 300,000 years earlier.
Dr. Karen L. Baab, lead author
Department of Anatomy
Midwestern University
Glendale, AZ, USA.
Gona, Ethiopia
The Gona Paleoanthropological Research Project in the Afar of Ethiopia is co-directed by Dr. Sileshi Semaw (Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana, Spain) and Dr. Michael Rogers (Southern Connecticut State University). Gona has yielded hominin fossils that are older than 6.3 million years ago, and stone tools spanning the last 2.6 million years of human evolution. The newly presented hominin reconstruction includes a fossil brain case (previously described in 2020) and smaller fragments of the face belonging to a single individual called DAN5 dated to between 1.6 and 1.5 million years ago. The face fragments (and teeth) have now been reassembled using virtual techniques to generate the most complete skull of a fossil human from the Horn of Africa in this time period. The DAN5 fossil is assigned to Homo erectus, a long-lived species found throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe after approximately 1.8 million years ago.
How did the scientists reconstruct the DAN5 fossil?
The researchers used high-resolution micro-CT scans of the four major fragments of the face, which were recovered during the 2000 fieldwork at Gona. 3D models of the fragments were generated from the CT scans. The face fragments were then re-pieced together on a computer screen, and the teeth were fit into the upper jaw where possible. The final step was “attaching” the face to the braincase to produce a mostly complete cranium. This reconstruction took about a year and went through several iterations before arriving at the final version.
Dr. Baab, who was responsible for the reconstruction, described this as “a very complicated 3D puzzle, and one where you do not know the exact outcome in advance. Fortunately, we do know how faces fit together in general, so we were not starting from scratch.”
What did scientists conclude?
This new study shows that the Gona population 1.5 million years ago had a mix of typical Homo erectus characters concentrated in its braincase, but more ancestral features of the face and teeth normally only seen in earlier species. For example, the bridge of the nose is quite flat, and the molars are large. Scientists determined this by comparing the size and shape of the DAN5 face and teeth with other fossils of the same geological age, as well as older and younger ones. A similar combination of traits was documented previously in Eurasia, but this is the first fossil to show this combination of traits inside Africa, challenging the idea that Homo erectus evolved outside of the continent.
I'll never forget the shock I felt when Dr. Baab first showed me the reconstructed face and jaw. The oldest fossils belonging to Homo erectus are from Africa, and the new fossil reconstruction shows that transitional fossils also existed there, so it makes sense that this species emerged on the African continent,” says Dr. Baab. “But the DAN5 fossil postdates the initial exit from Africa, so other interpretations are possible.
Dr. Yousuke Kaifu, co-author
The University Museum
The University of Tokyo
Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japa.
This newly reconstructed cranium further emphasizes the anatomical diversity seen in early members of our genus, which is only likely to increase with future discoveries.
Dr. Michael J. Rogers, co-author.
Department of Anthropology
Southern Connecticut State University
New Haven, CT, USA.
It is remarkable that the DAN5 Homo erectus was making both simple Oldowan stone tools and early Acheulian handaxes, among the earliest evidence for the two stone tool traditions to be found directly associated with a hominin fossil.
Dr. Sileshi Semaw, co-author
Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH)
Burgos, Spain.
Future Research
The researchers are hoping to compare this fossil to the earliest human fossils from Europe, including fossils assigned to Homo erectus but also a distinct species, Homo antecessor, both dated to approximately one million years ago.
Comparing DAN5 to these fossils will not only deepen our understanding of facial variability within Homo erectus but also shed light on how the species adapted and evolved.
Dr. Sarah E. Freidline, co-author
Department of Anthropology
University of Central Florida
Orlando, FL, USA.
There is also potential to test alternative evolutionary scenarios, such as genetic admixture between two species, as seen in later human evolution among Neanderthals, modern humans and “Denisovans.” For example, maybe DAN5 represents the result of admixture between classic African Homo erectus and the earlier Homo habilis species.
We’re going to need several more fossils dated between one to two million years ago to sort this out.
Abstract
The African Early Pleistocene is a time of evolutionary change and techno-behavioral innovation in human prehistory that sees the advent of our own genus, Homo, from earlier australopithecine ancestors by 2.8-2.3 million years ago. This was followed by the origin and dispersal of Homo erectus sensu lato across Africa and Eurasia between ~ 2.0 and 1.1 Ma and the emergence of both large-brained (e.g., Bodo, Kabwe) and small-brained (e.g., H. naledi) lineages in the Middle Pleistocene of Africa. Here we present a newly reconstructed face of the DAN5/P1 cranium from Gona, Ethiopia (1.6-1.5 Ma) that, in conjunction with the cranial vault, is a mostly complete Early Pleistocene Homo cranium from the Horn of Africa. Morphometric analyses demonstrate a combination of H. erectus-like cranial traits and basal Homo-like facial and dental features combined with a small brain size in DAN5/P1. The presence of such a morphological mosaic contemporaneous with or postdating the emergence of the indisputable H. erectus craniodental complex around 1.6 Ma implies an intricate evolutionary transition from early Homo to H. erectus. This finding also supports a long persistence of small-brained, plesiomorphic Homo group(s) alongside other Homo groups that experienced continued encephalization through the Early to Middle Pleistocene of Africa.
Introduction
The oldest fossils assigned to our genus are ~2.8 million years old (Myr) from Ethiopia and signal a long history of Homo evolution in the Rift Valley1,2,3. There is evidence of multiple Homo lineages in Africa by 2.0–1.9 million years ago (Ma) and an archaeological and paleontological record of expansion to more temperate habitats in the Caucasus and Asia between 2.0 and 1.8 Ma4 (Fig. 1). The last appearance datum for the more archaicHomo habilis species (or “1813 group”) is ~1.67 (OH 13) or ~1.44 Ma, if KNM-ER 42703 is correctly attributed to H. habilis5, which is uncertain6. The archetypal early African Homo erectus fossils from Kenya (i.e., KNM-ER 3733, 3883; and the adolescent KNM-WT 15000) already present a suite of traits that distinguish them from early Homo taxa by 1.6–1.5 Ma, including larger brains and bodies, smaller postcanine dentition, more pronounced cranial superstructures (e.g., projecting and tall brow ridges), a relatively wide midface and nasal aperture, deep palate, and projecting nasal bridge1,6,7,8,9,10,11. The only evidence for H. erectus sensu lato in Africa before 1.8 Ma are fragmentary or juvenile fossils12,13,14, while fossils expressing both ancestral H. habilis and more derived H. erectus s.l. morphological traits are only known from Dmanisi, Georgia at 1.77 Ma15,16. Thus, H. erectus emerged from basal Homo between 2.0 and 1.6 million years ago, but when, where (Africa or Eurasia), and how it occurred remain unclear. An expanded fossil record also documents significant variation in endocranial 17,18 and craniofacial6,8 and dentognathic morphology19,20 throughout the Early Pleistocene, which extends to the Middle Pleistocene with the addition of small-brained Homo lineages to the human tree.
Fig. 1: Early Homo and Homo erectus timeline between 2.0 and 1.0 Ma and map of key sites in Africa and southern Eurasia.
The solid bars of the timeline indicate well-established first and last appearance data; the horizontal stripes indicate possible extensions of the time range based on fragmentary or juvenile fossils. Diagonal lines signal earlier archaeological presence in those regions. The question mark indicates a possible date of <1.49 Ma for the Mojokerto, Indonesia site cf.22,23,24,25. The horizontal gray bar represents the time range associated with DAN5/P1. Colors on the map indicate presence of fossils matching taxa or geographic groups of H. erectus as indicated in the timeline. Surface renderings of the best-preserved regional representatives of archaic or small-brained Homo fossils (beginning at top and continuing clockwise): D2700, KNM-ER 1813, KNM-ER 1470, KNM-ER 3733, SK 847, OH 24, KNM-WT 15000, and DAN5/P1. All surface renderings visualized at FOV 0° (parallel). Map was generated in “rnaturalearth” package68 for R.
The initial announcement of DAN5/P1 assigned it to H. erectus on the basis of derived neurocranial traits21. Subsequent analyses of neurocranial shape and endocranial morphology confirmed affinity with H. erectus but also noted similarities to early (pre-erectus) Homo fossils such as KNM-ER 181317,18. Only limited information about the partial maxilla and dentition was presented in the original description21. Yet, facial and dental traits are increasingly important in early Homo systematics, given overlap in brain size among closely related hominins6,8,22. The DAN5/P1 fossil is a rare opportunity to evaluate neurocranial, facial, and dental anatomy in a single Early Pleistocene Homo fossil and thus has significant implications for this discussion.
Here we present a new cranial reconstruction of the 1.6–1.5 Myr DAN5/P1 fossil from Gona, Ethiopia. This study demonstrates that the small-brained adult DAN5/P1 fossil (598 cm321) presents a previously undocumented combination of early Homo and H. erectus features in an African fossil.
Taken together, the evidence leaves little room for the idea that Homo erectus was a dead-end curiosity, neatly replaced by something entirely new. Instead, it represents a long-lived, widely dispersed, and internally diverse population complex that provided the evolutionary substrate from which later human lineages emerged. Its descendants were not produced by sudden leaps or special creation events, but by the ordinary, observable processes of population divergence, isolation, and adaptation acting over deep time.
Modern Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans did not arise as separate “kinds”, nor did they follow clean, branching paths. They represent regional outcomes of this erectus-derived heritage, shaped by geography, climate, and repeated episodes of contact and interbreeding. The genetic legacy of those interactions is still present in living humans today, providing independent confirmation of what the fossil record has long been indicating.
What emerges is not a ladder of progress but a dynamic, reticulated history: populations spreading, fragmenting, evolving in isolation, and reconnecting again. Fossils such as DAN5 are not anomalies to be explained away; they are exactly what we should expect from evolution operating on structured populations across continents and hundreds of thousands of years.
For creationism, this is deeply inconvenient. For evolutionary biology, it is precisely the kind of rich, internally consistent picture that arises when multiple independent lines of evidence converge on the same conclusion: humanity is the product of a long, complex evolutionary history, not a recent act of design.
An artistic reconstruction of a herd of ancient sea cows foraging on the seafloor
Alex Boersma
Fossils of Salwasiren qatarensis, a newly described 21-million-year-old ancient sea cow species found in Al Maszhabiya [AL mahz-HA-bee-yah], a fossil site in southwestern Qatar.
Scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, together with collaborators at Qatar Museums, have just announced the discovery of 20-million-year-old fossils of a sea cow that was a miniature version of living dugongs, and which almost certainly lived in the same seagrass meadows as modern dugongs.
If there is one thing that has creationists scraping the bottom of their barrel for reasons to dismiss evidence, it is news of fossils that are tens of millions of years older than they believe the universe is — simply because Bronze Age authors of their favourite source book, the Bible, said so.
In their determination to show the world that nothing can make them change their belief in the demonstrably absurd, creationists will resort to false accusations of lying against scientists, claim they are incompetent, or insist that they used dating methods they claim (incorrectly) to have been proven false, all in an attempt to preserve their beliefs. It is as though they imagine the entire global scientific community, and all the research institutions within it, exist solely to disprove the Bible in order to make creationists change their minds.
For rational people without such an egocentric view of the world, however, discoveries such as these miniature dugongs help to paint a fascinating picture of how species — and the ecosystems of which they are a part — have evolved over time. The fossils were found about 10 miles from a bay of seagrass that is prime habitat for modern dugongs.
Research led by the University of Bristol and published in the journal Nature a few days ago suggests that the transition from simple prokaryote cells to complex eukaryote cells began almost 2.9 billion years ago – nearly a billion years earlier than some previous estimates. Prokaryotes — bacteria and archaea — had been the dominant, indeed the only, life forms for the preceding 1.1 billion years, having arisen about 300 million years after Earth coalesced 4 billion years ago.
Creationists commonly forget that for the first billion or more years of life on Earth, it consisted solely of single-celled prokaryotes — bacteria and archaea. They routinely post nonsense on social media about the supposed impossibility of a complex cell spontaneously assembling from ‘non-living’ atoms — something no serious evolutionary biologist has ever proposed as an explanation for the origin of eukaryote cells.
There is now little doubt among biologists that complex eukaryote cells arose through endosymbiotic relationships between archaea and bacteria, which may have begun as parasitic or predator–prey interactions before evolving into symbioses as the endpoint of evolutionary arms races. The only questions concern when exactly eukaryote cells first began to emerge, and what triggered their evolution.
The team collected sequence data from hundreds of species and, combined with fossil evidence, reconstructed a time-resolved tree of life. They then used this framework to resolve the timing of historical events across hundreds of gene families, focusing on those that distinguish prokaryotes from eukaryotes.
One surprising finding was that mitochondria were late to the party, arising only as atmospheric oxygen levels increased for the first time — linking early evolutionary biology to Earth’s geochemical history.
Life reconstruction of Wadisuchus kassabi in Late Cretaceous Egypt, depicting an adult seizing a lungfish in a wetland while a juvenile looks on. The scene reflects the rich Quseir Formation ecosystem, complete with turtles and dense vegetation revealed by fossil evidence.
When scientists from Mansoura University, Egypt, recently announced in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society of London the discovery of an 80-million-year-old marine crocodyliform unearthed in Egypt’s Western Desert, the headlines hailed it as “the earliest known member of Dyrosauridae”, a forgotten branch of ancient crocodile-relatives adapted for coastal and marine life.
Found in mid-Campanian deposits of the Quseir Formation, Wadisuchus kassabi is represented by partial skulls and jaws from several individuals — enough to show that by this stage dyrosaurids already possessed the long, narrow snout and needle-sharp teeth suited for grabbing fish or turtles.
What makes this find so important is not merely the age — though pushing the dyrosaurid fossil record back by several million years is notable — but the evolutionary implications and what it tells us about the scientific method. The cranial anatomy of Wadisuchus exhibits a transitional mixture of primitive and derived features: reduced premaxillary alveoli, modified jaw-occlusion patterns, and dorsally positioned nostrils for surface-breathing, reflecting a transitional form on the path from earlier crocodyliforms toward specialised marine dyrosaurids. Phylogenetic analyses consistently recover Wadisuchus as the basal (earliest-diverging) dyrosaurid — pushing the origin and early diversification of the family deeper into the Cretaceous.
This discovery underscores a fundamental truth of modern science: claims are not fixed dogma, but provisional explanations always subject to revision in the light of new evidence. Just as Wadisuchus reshapes our view of when and where dyrosaurids emerged, other fossil finds have repeatedly nudged back the origins of major vertebrate lineages, re-drawn phylogenetic trees, or revealed unexpected ancestral forms. In this way the scientific method resembles nothing so much as a continual conversation with Nature — a conversation always open to challenge, refinement, or outright contradiction when the data demand it.
Unlike creationists, whom recent research has shown, believe not changing their mind is a sign of strength of character and commitment to their 'faith', scientists know that the real test of character is a willingness to accept the evidence and the humility to allow it to dictate opinion.
Incidentally, it might come as a shock to creationists that a marine fossil was found in the Sahara Desert and that Earth was not created as it just a few thousand years ago, but has changed significantly over the millions of years, including periods of 'green Sahara'. As someone who has flown in a small plane over the Egyptian desert, I can attest to the existence of dry riverbeds and feeder streams in that desert, even though today rain is almost unknown in the vicinity of Luxor.
According to new open-access research just published in Nature by a team led by Arizona State University palaeoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie, ‘Lucy’ (Australopithecus afarensis) was not the only hominin living on the Ethiopian Highlands 3.4 million years ago. This was part of the vast span of human evolutionary history that occurred long before creationists believe Earth was made as a small, flat world with a dome over it somewhere in the Middle East. Living alongside ‘Lucy’ was another species, now named Australopithecus deyiremeda.
However, A. deyiremeda differed from A. afarensis in several important ways — differences that reflect how two species can coexist in the same region by adapting to distinct ecological niches. A. deyiremeda, for instance, had an opposable big toe suited to climbing, indicating a more arboreal lifestyle than A. afarensis. Isotope analysis of A. deyiremeda’s teeth also shows that it had a different diet.
The first indication that another species might be present came in 2009 with the discovery of foot bones, announced publicly in 2012. In palaeontology, it is standard practice not to name a new species based on such fragmentary remains, especially when cranial bones are absent. Although teeth were also found in the same area, there was initially insufficient evidence to link them definitively to the foot bones.
Then, in 2015, the team had enough material to announce and name the new species, though they were still unable to demonstrate that the foot bones belonged to it. Now, ten years on, they believe they finally have sufficient fossil evidence to make that connection.
This news is unlikely to trouble creationists, who already have a ready supply of scientifically baseless excuses for dismissing ‘Lucy’: that it was forged; that scientists fabricated the evidence; that it was assembled from scattered bones found six miles apart; that ‘carbon dating’ was used (despite not being applicable at that age); or that radioactive decay rates have changed in the last 6,000–10,000 years, making 6,000 years only appear to be 3.4 million.
For those with the intellectual honesty and humility to form opinions based on evidence, however, the discovery offers a fascinating example of how multiple ancient hominins coexisted — and, in evolutionary terms, how two species sharing a common ancestor can diverge to occupy different ecological niches.
One of Yuka’s legs, illustrating the exceptional preservation of the lower part of the leg after the skin had been removed, which enabled recovery of ancient RNA molecules.
Scientists led by researchers from Stockholm University, Denmark, have just announced that they have successfully extracted RNA from 40,000-year-old mammoth remains — the oldest RNA ever obtained. This shows that not only DNA but also RNA can persist for extraordinary lengths of time under the right conditions, adding yet more to the mountain of evidence that undermines creationist claims. With preserved RNA, researchers can even reconstruct the DNA that originally served as its template, effectively giving scientists two independent avenues for recovering genetic information.
One of the joys of debunking creationism — a childish superstition when set beside the rigour of evolutionary biology — is the sheer abundance of evidence. Almost every peer-reviewed paper in biology, geology, palaeontology, cosmology, and the other natural sciences demonstrates, in one way or another, the reality of evolution and the age of the Earth, and presents verifiable results that creationism simply cannot accommodate.
Even psychology lends its weight. Not only does it support an evolutionary account of human cognition and intelligence, but it also helps explain why creationists cling so tightly to demonstrably false beliefs. For many, rejecting evidence becomes a test of loyalty or personal strength, with scientific data treated as part of a supposed conspiracy designed to shake their faith. If they can cling to their faith despite the overwhelming contrary evidence, then they must really believe it.
Adding this new discovery to the existing evidence is rather like tossing a pebble onto Mount Everest and expecting creationists to accept the mountain’s existence because a pebble lies on it. Such acceptance is impossible for the committed creationist, since that would mean yielding to the ‘evil conspiracy’ and admitting that their favourite holy book is not a perfect, divinely authored scientific text, but a compilation of Bronze Age and Early Iron Age mythology, created by people doing their best to explain a world they did not yet understand.
This is the second article in The Conversation which incidentally refutes creationism and shows us why the Bible must be dismissed as a source book for science and history on the basis that, when compared to reality, it's stories are not just wrong; they're not even close.
This one deals with essentially that same subject as my last past - the evolution of all the different dog varieties since wolves were first domesticated some 11,000 years ago. Together with all the other canids that creationists insist are all dog 'kind', including several foxes, several subspecies of wolf, coyotes, jackals, and African wild dogs, the hundreds of different recognised breeds of dog could not conceivably have arisen from a single pair and the resulting genetic bottleneck just a few thousand years ago. Moreover, we are expected to believe that in that short space of time, all the canids evolved from being vegetarian (with canine teeth, meat-cutting incisors and bone-crushing molars, apparently) to being obligate carnivores.
As well as the paper that was the subject of my last blog post, this The Conversation article mentions another paper, also published in Science by palaeontologists led by Shao-Jie Zhang from the Kunming Institute of Zoology, China. This paper draws on DNA evidence from ancient Eastern Eurasian dogs.
The article by Kylie M. Cairns, a Research Fellow in Canid and Wildlife Genomics, UNSW Sydney, Australia and Professor Melanie Fillios of the Department of Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology, University of New England, USA. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative |Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
Salterella in longitudinal section, showing biomineralized outer shell (blue arrow), agglutinated material (red arrow) and the boundary between the agglutinated layer and the shell near the apex (white arrows),
As though fossils from half a billion years before their mythical “Creation Week” weren’t awkward enough for creationists, this latest find slips neatly into the tree of life and closes a small but meaningful gap in our understanding of how protective shells evolved. In doing so, it undermines more creationist claims than they might care to consider.
A research team led by Prescott J. Vayda of Virginia Tech has shown that the enigmatic fossils Volborthella and Salterella, long puzzling palaeontologists, are in fact early cnidarians — members of the group that includes corals, jellyfish, and sea anemones. These organisms are united by their stinging cells, which they use to subdue prey. Even more troublesome for creationists, the structure of the earlier Volborthella shell strongly suggests a transitional relationship with the more complex shell of Salterella, hinting at an evolutionary sequence between the two.
The Cambrian period was defined by the emergence of mobility and, with it, true predation. These new ecological dynamics sparked evolutionary “arms races”, driving rapid diversification in both offensive and defensive strategies: sensory structures, spines, shells, and behaviours such as burrowing. These early cnidarians provide an important glimpse into how some of the earliest protective shells came to be.
Such evolutionary arms races also offer yet another reason to dismiss the notion of an intelligent designer. No competent designer would turn yesterday’s solution into today’s problem — yet that is precisely what we see in nature, where improvements in predators prompt improvements in prey, and vice versa. It’s exactly what one would expect from an unguided evolutionary process with no foresight, driven solely by differential survival and reproduction.
Fig. 1: Map of Turkana Basin with the Namorotukunan Archeological Site and timeline of currently known events in the Plio-Pleistocene.
a Geographical context of the Koobi Fora Formation (red stripes), the paleontological collection area 40 (green square), and the location of the site of Namorotukunan (black dot); [map produced Natural Earth and NOAAA ETOPO 202295]; b Stratigraphic context of the Koobi Fora Formation highlighting members and key volcanic ash marker levels, yellow bars refer to the age of archeological horizons (tephrostratigraphy after McDougall et al.96); c A chronology of key Plio-Pleistocene hominins from the East African Rift System (EARS)11,74,97,98d A chronology and key localities associated with hominin lithic technology3,6,12 (images of Nyayanga provided by E. Finestone; images of Lomekwi and BD1 based on 3D models; artifact images are for representation and not to scale) and the investigations at Namorotukunan: red arrows represent the artifact levels in the archeological excavations (photos DRB), and colored circles (lettered A-G) represent geologic sections investigated to develop a synthetic stratigraphic column (presented in Figs. 2 and 3).
The story of our origins is written in the ground of Africa. It is real, tangible, and objective — a record that doesn’t rely on belief or interpretation, but on physical evidence left behind by our ancient ancestors. A fresh chapter of that record has just been described in a new open-access paper in Nature Communications, authored by an international team of palaeoanthropologists led by Professor David R. Braun of the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology at George Washington University, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
By comparison, the origins narrative found in Genesis reflects the worldview and assumptions of people who believed the Earth was small, flat, and covered by a solid dome. It is astonishing that, even today, some treat that ancient cosmology as a more reliable account of human history than the rich and expanding fossil and archaeological record in Africa. Yet such individuals continue to seek influence over policy, law, morality, and social institutions, grounding their authority not in evidence, but in pre-scientific tradition — a worldview formed long before the wheel, let alone modern science.
A recent re-examination of museum coelacanth fossils has shown that there was more than one taxon in the Late Triassic and that, where we believed there were just four specimens, there are actually more than fifty. These fossils were hiding in plain sight, mis-identified for decades in collections across Britain. This significantly expands the known diversity of coelacanths at that time and neatly illustrates how science continually refines and improves its understanding as new evidence and careful re-analysis emerge.
Coelacanths have long been a favourite talking-point for creationists, who seized on the 1938 discovery of living Latimeria — a lineage once known only from the fossil record and thought extinct — as supposed proof that evolution had somehow stalled. Because the modern species still carries the name “coelacanth”, they leap to the assumption that the fish has remained unchanged for over 200 million years, and therefore evolution must be false. I have even seen creationists claim that if coelacanths have “not evolved” in all that time, the Earth must therefore be only a few thousand years old. It’s an extraordinary logical contortion — and one born of misunderstanding both biology and evidence.
In reality, the modern coelacanth is not the same species as the ancient Triassic forms, nor is evolutionary change required to be dramatic or constant for every lineage. Species can remain broadly similar when their ecological niche remains stable — a concept perfectly consistent with evolutionary theory. What this study demonstrates, once again, is the iterative, self-correcting nature of science: questions are never closed, evidence is always open to re-examination, and conclusions adapt as new data emerges.
Human evolution isn’t a tidy staircase; it’s a branching, tangled tree full of transitional forms. And now, cutting-edge protein analysis from two-million-year-old teeth has revealed that Paranthropus robustus — one of our distant cousins — carried mixed ancestry, adding powerful new evidence to the evolutionary story creationists work so hard to deny.
If there is anything guaranteed to send a creationist into a fit of denial — desperately trying to redefine basic terms such as “transitional”, “species”, and “evolution”, and, as a last resort, claiming palaeontologists must have faked the evidence — it is the discovery of a transitional species in human evolutionary history.
But the hominin fossil record, like the evolutionary record for most living species, is absolutely packed with transitional forms. In fact, there are so many in human palaeontology that it can be difficult to single out one that is clearly more ‘transitional’ than the rest, because they form a fairly smooth continuum from the australopiths through to the genus Homo, just as we would expect of a slow process unfolding over tens of thousands or millions of years.
However, one species, Paranthropus robustus, stands out for its mosaic of features consistent with a lineage intermediate between the common ancestor of chimpanzees and hominins and the australopiths that followed.
And this mosaic has now been expanded to include genetic-level evidence, thanks to advances in palaeoproteomics. Proteins can persist far longer than DNA, yet they retain a direct correspondence to DNA via RNA, which encodes their amino-acid sequences. Once ancient proteins have been recovered and analysed, researchers can work backwards to reconstruct the RNA, and therefore the DNA, that produced them.
Using proteins extracted from the tooth enamel of four P. robustus fossils, researchers led by the University of Copenhagen have shown that these individuals themselves had mixed ancestry — indicating interbreeding with contemporaneous relatives, just as we now know happened among later hominin species, and almost certainly among the australopiths too.
Small primitive mammals live alongside a Triceratops, pre-extinction. A softshell turtle climbs up a log, unaware that its freshwater surroundings will shelter it from the asteroid.
This, the second paper, published in 2022 that utterly refutes creationism on several different levels, reports evidence that particularly undermines their claim that an omnibenevolent god created a world fine-tuned for life.
This belief arises from a deeply ignorant, rose-tinted view of the world — one that conveniently ignores history and habitually attributes anything bad to something else: sin, free will, or other theological constructs that, by their own narrative, could only have applied after some supposed “fall”.
In reality, even a superficial understanding of Earth’s history — 99.9975 % of which took place before creationism’s legendary “Creation Week” — reveals that the planet is anything but fine-tuned for life. Life on Earth has repeatedly been subjected to mass extinctions triggered by geological and cosmological catastrophes that wreaked havoc on the environment, often at a pace too rapid for most species to adapt.
One of the most famous of these events was the meteor impact in what is now the Yucatán Peninsula, 66 million years ago. This strike plunged the planet into a “nuclear winter” as atmospheric dust blotted out the Sun. Within weeks, almost all large species were exterminated, leaving only the avian dinosaurs — likely shielded by insulating feathers — and early mammals, protected by their insulating fur.
But as this recent paper shows, the dinosaurs were thriving in a healthy, biodiverse environment in which they were the dominant species right up until the moment the meteor struck. Had they shared the creationists’ mindset, they might well have concluded that Earth was “fine-tuned” for them too.
The evidence for this comes from an international team of palaeontologists and ecologists, including researchers from University of Oulu (Finland), Universidade de Vigo (Spain), University of Washington (Seattle, USA), University College London (UK), New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science (USA), and University of Edinburgh (UK).
Two new papers announced today will have creationists scratching their heads as they try to decide which technique for dismissing them will meet with the most approval from their fellow cultists.
The first, in Nature, concerns yet another of those supposedly non-existent transitional fossils which, because Charles Darwin predicted they would be found, must be dismissed at all costs. It comes in the form of an 86-million-year-old dinosaur fossil from Mongolia that is intermediate between the small, fleet-footed predatory dinosaurs and the larger apex predators — the tyrannosaurs.
The usual creationist response is to declare that these intermediate fossils are “not transitional; they are fully formed, created species.” Of course, that doesn’t explain why species that are intermediate between ancestral and descendant species show a mosaic of features from both. Presumably, given their parody of evolution — in which evolution is imagined as a single event where one species suddenly turns into another — they expect an intermediate to be half one and half the other: the equivalent of the “crocoduck” or a chimpanzee with a human head. In reality, this discovery shows exactly what we would expect from the fossil record of tyrannosaur evolution 86 million years ago.
It's also important to creationism that the so-called 'missing link' stays missing. It is only ever referred to in the singular and refers to some supposed link between apes and humans, and it is definitely not one of the many archaic African hominins. But of course, every fossil is the 'link' or transitional form between its parents and its offspring because evolution is a process, not the parody event of creationism, evolving species form a continuum, and this discovery from Mongolia is no exception.
Details of the surface of two sheet-like colonies of the ‘Berenicea’ type: (A) In Hyporosopora dilatata, the colony surface is relatively flat, save for the slightly convex zooids and faint growth lines (Upper Callovian or Lower Oxfordian, Oxford Clay; Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire); and (B) Well-defined transverse ridges cross the colony surface in Rugosopora enstonensis (Bathonian, Hampen Marly Beds; Enstone, Oxfordshire). Scale bars are 500µm.
The discovery that a group of organisms has, contrary to “Cope’s Rule,” undergone a steady reduction in body size over the past 200 million years is a useful reminder of how science works — and why religion so often falters.
A cornerstone of the scientific method is its willingness to acknowledge error. Real intellectual strength lies not in clinging to discredited beliefs as though doing so were a test of character, but in facing up to mistakes, learning from them, and changing one’s mind. That is how knowledge advances.
Religion, by contrast, remains shackled to the dogmas of its ancient founders. To alter those fundamental beliefs is, in effect, to abandon the religion itself. This is why, while science has sent probes into deep space and placed human beings on the Moon, faith — despite lofty claims of being able to “move mountains” — has yet to lift so much as a feather a millimetre off the ground.
The new finding was just reported in the journal Palaeontology by Associate Professor MA Junye of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) and collaborators. They found that Berenicea, a genus of cyclostome bryozoans, has experienced a continuous reduction in zooid size over the past 200 million years. This runs counter to “Cope’s Rule,” which describes a tendency for body size to increase during the evolution of many lineages.
Cope’s Rule was formulated by the American palaeontologist Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897). There are, of course, well-known exceptions — such as the “island effect,” where animals isolated on small islands often evolve into miniature versions of their mainland relatives — but these are localised adaptations to particular environments. Cope’s Rule, by contrast, applies to long-term, broad-scale evolutionary trends.
A male satin bowerbird by his highly decorated avenue bower.
Photo by Daniel J. Field
Tiny fossil bone helps unlock history of the bowerbird | University of Otago
Apart from the fact that this fossil is a million years old, there is nothing in this discovery that creationists will struggle to dismiss with one of their well-worn stock phrases — “It was just a bird ‘kind’,” “It wasn’t transitional,” and so on. This is despite the fact that their Bible is remarkably vague about how many bird ‘kinds’ there were, includes bats as birds, and says absolutely nothing about anything outside a few square miles of the Middle East.
And of course, the date — like the entire fossil record — will be casually brushed aside as forged, fabricated, or “wrongly dated using proven false carbon dating” [sic].
But to anyone who actually values evidence and truth, and is not intent on proving their strength by clinging to demonstrably false beliefs in defiance of all contrary evidence, this find is genuinely fascinating. It provides strong evidence that the bowerbirds, today confined to Australia and New Guinea, were once far more widespread. This conclusion is based on the fact that the fossil was discovered in New Zealand. It is also suggested that climate change may have brought about its extinction in New Zealand and driven the bowerbirds' range back to its present distribution.
The discovery is reported in the journal Historical Biology by researchers from University of Cambridge, University of Otago, and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. A [news release from the University of Otago]() explains the significance of the find and four of the authors have also written an article about the find in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency.
In a striking example of how science, in contrast to creationism, starts from the evidence and builds understanding accordingly, a newly discovered fossil fly has led scientists to revise their view on a seemingly minor detail of insect evolution.
Creationism, by contrast, starts with the conclusion and either distorts the evidence or ignores it altogether when, as is usually the case, it contradicts what they believe. To a creationist, the belief is sacred, so facts must comply—or be disregarded.
In my last blog post, I explained how psychologists view this behaviour as a perceived test of strength: creationists see challenges to their beliefs as threats that would make them appear weak if they accepted and adapted to the evidence. They respond by setting their faces like flint against any contradiction.
Science, by contrast, sees a refusal to change one’s mind when the evidence demands it as a mark of intellectual dishonesty. A willingness to revise one’s views shows a desirable strength of character — the hallmark of a good scientist. To a scientist, facts are sacred; opinions must flow from them. In any scientific debate, facts are neutral.
The discovery in question involves a Jurassic fossil midge from Australia — Telmatomyia talbragarica, the oldest known member of the Chironomidae (non-biting midge) family in the Southern Hemisphere. The fossil shows a mechanism for attaching to rocks using suction pads on its feet. This trait was previously thought to have evolved in marine species, but this insect lived in freshwater. That detail suggests the family did not originate in Siberia, as once believed, but in Gondwana before it broke apart.
Not the most dramatic scientific breakthrough, perhaps, but this is precisely how science advances — especially evolutionary biology: one careful step at a time, with constant re-examination and revision as new evidence emerges. It’s like working on a million-piece jigsaw puzzle without a picture on the box.
Oxfordshire, where I was born and spent the first twenty-odd years of my life, is steeped in fossil history. Notably, the lower jaw of the very first named dinosaur — Megalosaurus bucklandii — was discovered in Stonesfield, in the quaintly named valley, Bag's Bottom, the centre of the former Stonesfield slate industry, just about a mile and a half from my childhood home in the hamlet of Fawler.
About 166 million years ago, in the Middle Jurassic, much of the region now known as Oxfordshire lay under a warm, shallow sea. A sandbar separated it from the open ocean, forming a tranquil lagoon. Sediment slowly accumulated, forming limestone that preserved innumerable small molluscs. Even today, you can spot their fossilised shells in the drystone walls built from that same limestone — a subtle but constant reminder of deep time.
When I was a teenager, I would take the grandsons of the renowned palaeoanthropologist and former President of the Royal Society, Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark, on fossil-hunting excursions. One disused quarry, rich in fossil mussels, coiled snails and bivalves, became a familiar haunt. But nothing we ever uncovered then compares to what has just been unearthed at Dewars Farm Quarry, between Middleton Stoney and Ardley. Dubbed the “Oxfordshire Dinosaur Highway,” this newly announced discovery appears to be the longest dinosaur trackway known in Europe, at 220 metres.
The work was conducted by a team of palaeontologists co-led by Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) and The University of Birmingham. Unsurprisingly, this find challenges certain creationist narratives and casually refuted the Bible creation myth. The announcement was recently made in an Oxford University news release.
