Creationism in Crisis - Multiple Origins of Mesopotamian People

Upper Mesopotamia, the fusion center of Neolithic cultures | Gazette Hacettepe -

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Johann Wenzel Peter (1745-1829), Vatican Museum

Upper Mesopotamia, the fusion center of Neolithic cultures | Gazette Hacettepe

My last blog post dealt with how human cultures evolved by a process which, while maybe not being identical with Darwinian evolution by natural selection, is closely analogous to it, and how it reflected diverse origins in diverse populations affected by wide environmental differences across the range of human habitation.

This is in complete contrast to the narrow culture assumed in the Bible where there is no attempt to explain human cultural origins or even any awareness that it is something to be explained, just as the origin of living creatures and even the Earth itself needed to be explained, albeit with the naïve guesses of people ignorant of science and little or no understanding of biology, geology or cosmology.

This post should disturb Creationists even further because it flies in the face of anything the Bible implies about human origins. Bible literalist Creationists must believe that all humans are derived ultimately from a single couple, magically created in a 'garden' somewhere in the Middle East.

Bible scholars traditionally place this 'Garden of Eden' somewhere in Mesopotamia, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, citing:

The LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

Genesis 2: 9-14:

The problem for Creationists is that a team of Turkish researchers from Hacettepe University and Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey have just shown that the people living in that area between 10,500 and 9,500 years ago had a genetic and cultural makeup that indicates multiple origins from across the 'Fertile Crescent' and that the area was a melting pot and fusion centre, rather than an origin. This conclusion came from an analysis of the DNA extracted from the remains of 13 individuals together with cultural artifacts excavated at Çayönü Hill in the Ergani district of Diyarbakır between 8,500-7,500 BC.

Çayönü Hill, Ergani district of Diyarbakır, Iraq.

As the Hacettepe University news release explains:

Çayönü Hill was first discovered in 1963 by Halet Çambel and Robert J. Braidwood. The excavations that Prof. Dr. Çambel started systematically in 1968 were continued with a break from time to time. During the excavations conducted under the direction of Prof. Dr. Aslı Erim Özdoğan, it was determined that the first settlement in the region started approximately 12,000 years ago and that the region was inhabited until 6,000 years ago. During this long settlement, Çayönü Hill hosted different cultures. Archaeological remains show that the region has a dynamic cultural structure and that the architectural structures have changed over time. In addition, anthropological studies revealed that early examples of various modifications applied to the body, such as artificial skull shaping and trepanation, existed in this culture.

Researchers set out to understand the genetic makeup of people with this dynamic cultural structure. It is known that DNA molecules in human remains exposed to high temperatures due to climatic conditions throughout Mesopotamia are very difficult to preserve. Therefore, in ancient DNA studies carried out to date, the region was only represented by the genome of a single individual from the Boncuklu Tarla excavation site. Dr. Lecturer Füsun Özer stated that under these conditions, Çayönü individuals had a higher level of DNA preservation than expected and continued: “We scanned 33 skeletons from Çayönü Hill, dated between 10,500 and 9,500 years ago, for DNA conservation. Of these, 13 individuals had enough DNA molecules to allow genome analysis. In this region, it was surprising for us to get close to 40 percent success from such old individuals.”

This study, carried out in Upper Mesopotamia, in the northernmost part of the Fertile Crescent, the center of domestication of plants and animals, revealed that the region was a center of attraction during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Period, and people from the surrounding geographies mingled in the region. The genetic makeup of the people of the region bears traces from the eastern and western sides of the Fertile Crescent.

The central location of Upper Mesopotamia in Southwest Asia is also reflected in the gene pool of the society. The demographic patterns of the Central Anatolian Neolithic societies in the east and west of the Fertile Crescent, represented by the Zagros Neolithic societies, appear as a mixture in this region.

Dr. Ezgi Altınışık, first-author Human-G Laboratory
Department of Anthropology
Hacettepe University, Beytepe, Ankara, Turkey.

Although genetic diversity is observed to be high, no major change is observed in the genetic structure of the population during the 1,000 years examined. Despite this, the fact that a two-year-old girl is genetically closer to the communities living on the eastern side of the Fertile Crescent reveals that people from outside came to Çayönü and could live in this village. The etching mark found on the parietal bone of this girl presents the first example of the tradition still practiced today. Prof. Dr. Yılmaz Selim Erdal, one of the research team, stated that cauterization as a treatment tool is a common practice in Anatolia, and the Çayönü example is one of the oldest examples of this practice. This specimen, with traces of infection on its inner surface, indicates that it was probably treated with a method including magical-ritual application in order to eliminate the negativities caused by the infection. Erdal stated that, together with the trepanation sample found in Çayönü, these data indicate that Mesopotamia had a very dynamic and somewhat complex cultural dynamic in the Neolithic Age.

Another important finding from the study was to determine kinship relationships in Early Neolithic communities. In the Early Neolithic Period, it was a common tradition to bury the dead in the floors of houses in and around Anatolia. The kinship analyzes [sic] revealed that the individuals buried in the same house in Çayönü were mostly close relatives. Prof. Dr. Mehmet Somel from the Department of Biological Sciences at Middle East Technical University said that they interpreted these results as the social structure of society being organized within the framework of biological kinship. It is seen that this family-centered burial tradition observed in Early Neolithic communities has changed over time, and in some settlements from the Late Neolithic period such as Çatalhöyük, social ties besides biological kinship play a role in burial in the same place.

Finally, researchers sought to analyze how Upper Mesopotamian peoples influenced surrounding communities in later periods. Archaeological studies indicated that Upper Mesopotamia culturally influenced Anatolia during the Late Neolithic period. Genetic analyzes [sic] also revealed that some of the ancestors of people who lived in Central Anatolia (Çatalhöyük) and Marmara (Barcın Höyük) 1,000 years after Çayönü came from Upper Mesopotamia. This shows that people of relatively distant geographies interact not only with the exchange of ideas from afar, but also with human movement.

Fig. 1. Spatiotemporal distribution of the samples and the population structure of Neolithic Southwest Asia.
(A) Timeline of ancient Southwest Asian individuals used in the analyses. Colored horizontal bars at the bottom represent the subperiods of the Neolithic Era in Southwest Asia. (B) The map shows EP and Neolithic populations from Southwest Asia. Shaded areas mark PPN period cultural zones (referred to as the Aceramic period in C Anatolia). (C) Çayönü building types and their approximate dates of use, considered as evidence for Çayönü’s cultural openness and ingenuity. Modified from (112). (D) The first two dimensions of the MDS plot of genetic distances. The MDS summarizes the genetic distance matrix among ancient genomes calculated as (1 − outgroup f3) values. Outgroup f3-statistics were calculated as f3(Yoruba; individual1, individual2). The labels represent the following sites: Anatolia EP: Pınarbaşı; Anatolia PPN: Boncuklu and Aşıklı Höyük; Anatolia PN: Çatalhöyük and Barcın Höyük; Levant EP: Natufian; Levant PPN: Ain’ Ghazal, Kfar HaHoresh, Motza, and Ba’ja; C Zagros N (Central Zagros Neolithic): Ganj Dareh, Tepe Abdul, and Wezmeh Cave; S Caucasus EP (South Caucasus EP): Kotias and Satsurblia. See note S5 for a definition of “Anatolia.” PPNA, Pre-pottery Neolithic A; PPNB, Pre-pottery Neolithic B; PPNC, Pre-pottery Neolithic C.

Altınışık, N. Ezgi; Kazancı, Duygu Deniz; Aydoğan, Ayça, et al. (2022)

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

Details are given in the abstract to the team's open access paper publish in Science Advances:

Abstract

Upper Mesopotamia played a key role in the Neolithic Transition in Southwest Asia through marked innovations in symbolism, technology, and diet. We present 13 ancient genomes (c. 8500 to 7500 cal BCE) from Pre-Pottery Neolithic Çayönü in the Tigris basin together with bioarchaeological and material culture data. Our findings reveal that Çayönü was a genetically diverse population, carrying mixed ancestry from western and eastern Fertile Crescent, and that the community received immigrants. Our results further suggest that the community was organized along biological family lines. We document bodily interventions such as head shaping and cauterization among the individuals examined, reflecting Çayönü’s cultural ingenuity. Last, we identify Upper Mesopotamia as the likely source of eastern gene flow into Neolithic Anatolia, in line with material culture evidence. We hypothesize that Upper Mesopotamia’s cultural dynamism during the Neolithic Transition was the product not only of its fertile lands but also of its interregional demographic connections.

Altınışık, N. Ezgi; Kazancı, Duygu Deniz; Aydoğan, Ayça, et al. (2022) A genomic snapshot of demographic and cultural dynamism in Upper Mesopotamia during the Neolithic Transition
Science Advances; 8(44), eabo3609. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo3609

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

It probably wasn't the intention of the researchers to refute the Bible so comprehensively, yet they did so, simply by revealing the truth, as is so often the case with scientific discoveries.

Not only was there never a founding couple (as though that idea ever carried any merit) but the people in the area at the time in which the tale was set had multiple origins from much earlier populations and cultures. Of course, the Bible's authors were entirely ignorant of the facts and the evolutionary history of the people about whom they wrote, and simply made up stories to explain the unknown - and of course, as with so much else, got it hopelessly wrong.

And of course, without Adam and Eve, there was no original sin, no need for salvation and redemption and no need for Jesus, and yet the hideous superstition of vicarious redemption through a human blood sacrifice, and the need to be reconciled with an irascible god to avoid eternal torture, is still used by parasitic priests and imams to control and terrorise ignorant and superstitious people and to justify their demand to be allowed to make laws governing the rest of us and run society in their interest.

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Creationism in Crisis - How Human Societies Evolved

The origins of human society are more complex than we thought

The Palaeolithic Age in India

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Neolithic Skara Brea, Orkney, Scotland

An illustration of an Early Neolithic settlement

Artist’s impression - Palaeolithic hunters

I wrote recently about how the simplistic view of a linear progress for human evolution is wrong, because the reality of the fossil and DNA record, of which there is a plentiful supply, is that it was confused, as side branches partially diverged, then re-joined and species such as the Neanderthals and Denisovans interbreed both with one another with their cousin species, Homo sapiens, and a third, as yet unidentified, species known only from DNA, and a similar process of partial or complete divergence and remerging probably occurred in Africa before H. sapiens emerged into Eurasia to meet the descendants of earlier Hominin migrations.

This, of course, is exactly what we should expect from an understanding of evolution and how it works over a large range and diverse geography.

And now, it seems the simplistic model of human cultural evolution from 'savage', through hunter-gatherer, to pastoralist and settled agriculturalist may be wrong and the reality was as confused as that of our physical evolution. This really isn't surprising, as cultural development is just as much an evolutionary process as is physical evolution.

Creationists, who must subscribe to the Bronze Age mythology in the Bible and Qur'an and so shun learning and reason, will probably find this difficult to comprehend because, while the mythmakers appreciated that they needed stories to explain theirs and other animal's origins, and even the origin of Earth itself, they were ignorant of the sociology of human cultures, other than of language.

There is the idiotic attempt to explain the origin of language with the 'Tower of Babel' myth, but cultures were simply assumed to be the primitive warring Middle Eastern tribal cultures that much of the Old Testament concerns itself with, with no attempt to explain their origins. The mythmakers knew nothing else, so assumed human culture had always been as they found it, complete with misogyny, slavery, a hierarchy of priests and irascible and vindictive, brutal ruling despots, and religious rituals to appease gods who closely resembled those ruling despots, and simply set their tales in that culture.

The view of a linear progression of human cultural development is now being challenged however, with evidence that palaeolithic cultures were as diverse as palaeolithic people.

In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative commons license with reformatting for stylistic consistency, Vivek V. Venkataraman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada argues that we need to revise our understanding of the evolution of human culture, in today's political climate of increasing inequality, political polarization, and climate change to understand what cultures are possible in the future. The original article can be read here.

The origins of human society are more complex than we thought

Published: November 2, 2022 5.14pm GMT

During the Ice Age, hunter-gatherer societies built sedentary settlements.

Credit: Shutterstock

Vivek V. Venkataraman, University of Calgary

In many popular accounts of human prehistory, civilization emerged in a linear fashion. Our ancestors started as Paleolithic hunter-gatherers living in small, nomadic and egalitarian bands. Later, they discovered farming and domesticated animals for food and service.

Before long, they progressed to complex societies and the beginnings of the modern nation-state. Social hierarchies became more complex, leading to our current state of affairs.

“We are well and truly stuck and there is really no escape from the institutional cages we’ve made for ourselves,” writes historian Yuval Noah Harari in his bestselling Sapiens.

A new book — The Dawn of Everything by late anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow — challenges this narrative. Rather than being nomadic hunter-gatherers, they argue human societies during the Palaeolithic were, in fact, quite diverse.

Today, increasing inequality, polarized political systems and climate change threaten our very existence. We need a deeper historical perspective on what kind of political world shaped us, and what kinds are possible today.

Social flexibility

In ‘The Dawn of Everything,’ Graeber and Wengrow make the claim that Palaeolithic human societies were quite diverse.

(Penguin Random House)

Ice Age hunters in Siberia constructed large circular buildings from mammoth bones. At Göbekli Tepe, a 9,000 year old site in Turkey, hunter-gatherers hoisted megaliths to construct what may be the world’s “first human-built holy place.”

In Ukraine, 4,000 year-old cities show little evidence of hierarchy or centralized control. And in modern times, hunter-gatherers shift between hierarchy and equality, depending on the season.

To Graeber and Wengrow, these examples speak to the virtually unlimited social flexibility of humans, undermining Harari’s dark assessment about the possibility for social change in the modern world.

As an evolutionary anthropologist and hunter-gatherer specialist, I believe both accounts miss the mark about the course of human prehistory. To see why, it is important to understand how anthropologists today think about nomadic egalitarian bands in the scheme of social evolution.

Human social evolution

In the 19th-century, anthropologists like Lewis Henry Morgan categorized human social evolution into three stages: savagery, barbarism and civilization. These correspond to hunting and gathering, farming and urban life, respectively. These so-called “stage models” incorrectly view social evolution as a steady march of progress toward civilized life.

Scholars do not take stage models seriously today. There is little intellectual connection between stage models and modern evolutionary approaches toward studying hunter-gatherers.

Anthropologists developed the nomadic-egalitarian band model during a 1966 conference called Man the Hunter. According to this model, humans, prior to agriculture, lived in isolated nomadic bands of approximately 25 people and subsisted entirely on hunting and gathering.

Research since Man the Hunter has updated our understanding of hunter-gatherers.

Hunter-gatherer rock art paintings in the Vumba Mountain Range in Manica, Mozambique.

Credit: Shutterstock

Hunter-gatherers and prehistory

One assumption was that small bands consist of related individuals. In fact, band societies consist of mostly unrelated individuals. And anthropologists now know that hunter-gatherer bands are not closed social units. Rather, they maintain extensive social ties across space and time and sometimes assemble in large groups.

Hunter-gatherers are profoundly diverse in modern times, and they were in the past too. This diversity helps anthropologists understand how the environment shapes the scope of social expression in human societies.

Consider nomadic egalitarian hunter-gatherers like the !Kung in the Kalahari or the Hadza in Tanzania. Being nomadic means it is difficult to store food or accumulate much material wealth, making social relations relatively egalitarian. Group members have equal decision-making power and don’t hold power over others.

On the other hand, sedentary societies tend to have more pronounced levels of social inequality and leave material evidence such as monumental architecture, prestige goods and differential burial treatment.

When these markers are not present, anthropologists can reliably infer that humans were living more politically egalitarian lives.

Palaeolithic politics

Human societies have generally become larger-scale and more complex over time. Popular accounts typically implicate farming in kick-starting the path to “civilization” and inequality. But the shift to farming was not a single event or a simple linear process. There are many paths toward social complexity and inequality.

The Dawn of Everything, along with reviews in cultural evolution and evolutionary anthropology, suggests that complex societies with institutionalized inequality emerged far before the dawn of agriculture, perhaps as far back as the Middle Stone Age (50,000 to 280,000 years ago).

This is a tantalizing possibility. But there is reason to be skeptical.

Complexity on the coastline

Social complexity emerged among hunter-gatherer populations living in resource-rich areas like southern France and the Pacific Northwest Coast of the United States and Canada.

So rich were the salmon runs of the Pacific Northwest Coast, Indigenous peoples could sustain themselves on wild foods while living a sedentary life, even evolving complex hierarchies dependent on slave labour.

Similarly, complex societies could have arisen in the Palaeolithic along rich riverine systems or on coastlines — now submerged by sea level changes — with plentiful marine resources. But there is no unambiguous evidence for sedentary settlements where marine sources are used in the Middle Stone Age.

Collective hunting

Collective hunting is another pathway toward social complexity. In North America, hunters cooperated to trap pronghorn antelope, sheep, elk and caribou. At “buffalo jumps,” ancient Indigenous hunters drove bison over cliff sides by the hundreds. This feat likely required, and fed, several hundred people.

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta was the site of a communal Indigenous hunting practice where bison were driven over a cliff.

Credit: V. Venkataraman, Author provided

But these examples represent seasonal events that did not lead to full-time sedentary life. Buffalo jumps occurred in the autumn, and success was probably sporadic. Most of the year these populations lived in dispersed bands.

Egalitarian origins

Anatomically modern humans have been around for roughly 300,000 years. There is little evidence of markers of sedentary lifestyles or institutionalized inequality going back more than 30,000 to 40,000 years.

When did we become fully human? What fossils and DNA tell us about the evolution of modern intelligence

That leaves a big gap. What kind of society did people live in for most of the history of our species?

There is still strong evidence that humans actually lived in nomadic egalitarian bands for much of that time. Complementing the archaeological evidence, genetic studies suggest that human population sizes in the Palaeolithic were quite low. And the Palaeolithic climate may have been too variable to permit long-term sedentary life, instead favouring nomadic foraging.

This does not mean that humans are naturally egalitarian. Like us, our ancestors faced complex politics and domineering individuals. Egalitarian social life needs to be maintained through active and coordinated effort.

From these origins, an astonishing variety of human societies emerged. Our politics today reflect a small and unusual slice of that diversity. Prehistory shows us that human political flexibility is far greater than we can imagine.
Vivek V. Venkataraman, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

Human culture has evolved as with other evolutionary process to suit it to particular environment conditions, and what we have today is the result, just as the genes we have today are the result of our physical evolution over time.

Religions are remnants of that cultural evolution and whilst they may had had some value in ensuring group cohesion and conformity, in modern, multicultural, multiethnic societys, they are merely divisive and destructive, just when we need to start to become more united and egalitarian if we are to survive the challenges ahead of us.

Creationism in Crisis - Human, Other Ape and Monkey Brains are Very Similar

Study shows differences between brains of primates — humans, apes and monkeys — are small but significant

Researchers analyzed genetic material from cells in the prefrontal cortex (the area shaded in each brain) from four closely-related primates to characterize subtle differences in cell type and genetics.

Ask any Creationist to list the physical differences between humans and chimpanzees, and they will usually focus on the different brain size, but how different are our brains at a fundamental level?

New research by scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison together with colleagues from Yale, has shown that the difference between the human brain and that of the other apes and monkeys are actually small, but those small differences are responsible for the qualitative difference. As explained in the University of Wisconsin-Madison News release:

When comparing a chimpanzee to a human the differences seem huge — from their physical appearances down to the capabilities of their brains. But at the cellular and genetic level, at least in the prefrontal cortex, the similarities are many and the dissimilarities sparing.

The team collected genetic information from more than 600,000 prefrontal cortex cells from tissue samples from humans, chimpanzees, macaques and marmosets. They then categorized the cells into different types and determined the differences between cells of similar type. They found the vast majority of cells were fairly comparable.

Creationism in Crisis - How Melanesia's Frogs Evolved

Gliding treefrogs, mini-males and burrowing frogs in trees: why Melanesia is the world's tropical island frog hotspot

Pinocchio frog, Litoria pinocchio

After spending several days writing about unintelligent and malevolent design, and preparing a video summarising the arguments against the intelligent design hoax (and not missing a chance to promote my book on the subject), it makes a change to be able to write about some of my favourite creatures, frogs. The frogs of Melanesia in fact, and especially why there are so many species, sometimes in a very small area.

Although 'writing' is a slight exaggeration since most of this blog is unashamedly reprinted from The Conversation. The Conversation is a free online magazine written by experts in their field and dealing with a wide range of topics. It is well worth subscribing to and supporting with a donation, if you value the truth and appreciate good writing.

This article was written by Paul Oliver, a postdoctoral Researcher in Biodiversity and Evolution, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, and Deborah Bower, a lecturer in Ecosystem Rehabilitation, University of New England, Sydney, Australia. It is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence is Trying to Increase Suffering With its Monkeypox Virus

Monkeypox mutations cause virus to spread rapidly, evade drugs and vaccines, MU study finds // University of Missouri

Monkey pox virus particles

Creationists insist that all organisms are the work of their beloved creator god, without whom nothing exists and without whom nothing can evolve because changes in the genome require its intervention. Being omniscient, of course, Creationism's creator knows exactly what its modifications to organisms such as viruses will do, and creates them for that purpose.

So, what creationists would have us believe is that their beloved creator, or divine malevolence, as it should be called, based on its long history of creating pathogens and other parasites designed to make its creation suffer – if you believe Creationists - is that, fresh from its stunning success with the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic still raging across the world, it modified another nasty little virus to increase the suffering still further.

The virus in question is the Orthopox virus that caused the outbreak of Monkeypox, currently giving cause for concern to medical authorities throughout the world.

Orthopox viruses are a family of double-stranded DNA viruses which include variola (smallpox), cowpox and vaccinia. However, it is not ancestral to nor a descendant of variola. Until recently, following its identification as a disease of West African monkeys in 1965, it had been a low-level disease in humans, endemic to West Africa and the Congo Basin, with symptoms similar to, but not as severe as, smallpox. Then is suddenly mutated, broke out of its enclave in West Africa and has now infected more than 77,000 people in more than 100 countries worldwide.

A team of researchers at the University of Missouri have identified the specific mutations in the monkeypox virus that contribute to its continued infectiousness. Or as a Creationist must believe, the specific modifications their divine malevolence made to it to make it more infectious and better able to evade antiviral drugs and vaccinations, so more people would suffer from it.

The University of Missouri news release explains the discovery and how the team made them:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Could Have Given Us a Better Immune System But Chose Not To.

Trinity team unearths potential secret to viral resistance - News & Events | Trinity College Dublin

Hepatitis C virus

A research team from Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, led by Cliona O’Farrelly, Professor of Comparative Immunology in Trinity’s School of Biochemistry and Immunology, together with colleagues in the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden and the Institut Pasteur, Paris, France, has shown that some women have an immune system that enables them to resist viral infections such as the Hep C virus.

The genetic basis for this ability remains to be explained, but the statistical evidence for it is strong.

Creationists would have us believe their putative intelligent [sic] designer not only designed viruses like the Hep C virus and the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus which caused COVID-19, but also designed our immune system to protect us from its parasitic viruses. If that were remotely true, not only would it mean their favourite deity is an incompetent fool but also a malevolent sadist, since not only did it design these viruses for the purpose of harming us, but then gave most of us an immune system which doesn't work very well through choice, having designed a better one for some people.

The Trinity College News release explains the background to the research and how the conclusion was arrived at:

Creationism in Crisis - The Origin of Modern Humans

Homo naledi (right), with Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) and Turkana Boy (Homo erectus).

Credit: John Gurche Paleo Artist

The origin of 'us': what we know so far about where we humans come from

As I have said many times before, here and elsewhere, the problem for the story of human evolution is not, as Creationists have been conditioned to believe, that there are no transitional fossils, but rather that there are too many of them.

The plethora of fossils from different times and places make it hard to determine a linear progression from archaic African hominins through to Homo sapiens, and each new discovery, such as Homo floriensis, Homo luzonensis or the 900,000 year-old hominin footprints found on a beach in Norfolk, England, seems to confuse rather than clarrify the picture.

This of course merely reflects the reality of what happened, with divergence into side-branches, hybridizations between incompletely speciated, diverging populations and, as a recent study suggest, absorbtion of one cousin species, Nanderthals, by another, Homo sapiens, when they can into contact. The picture is confusing because the actual course of events was confused and complex, and not the simple linear narrative we had come to expect.

But of course, there is no reason why it would be, given the history of divergence and re-mergence that appears to have been the pattern in the early African hominins before the expansions of H. eretectus, then H. sapiens out of Africa and into Eurasia.

However, there is a great deal we do now know about our origins, although the details are still being discovered. In this 2018 article by Bernard Wood, Professor of Human Origins, George Washington University and Michael Westaway, Senior Research Fellow, Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia, reprinted from The Conversation under a creative commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, the authors outline what we know so far. The original article can be read here. Creationists might like to contrast what we know of human origins and what their evidence-free Bronze Age superstion claims:

The origin of ‘us’: what we know so far about where we humans come from

Published: January 7, 2018 7.09pm GMT

The story of where we come from evolves almost every year.

Credit: Shutterstock/Eugenio Marongiu

Bernard Wood, George Washington University and Michael Westaway, Griffith University

The question of where we humans come from is one many people ask, and the answer is getting more complicated as new evidence is emerging all the time.

For most of recorded history humankind has been placed on a metaphorical, and sometimes literal, pedestal. Sure, modern humans were flesh and blood like other animals.

But they were regarded as being so special that in the Linnaean taxonomy that prevailed well into the second half of the 20th century they were given their own family, the Hominidae.

Ancient DNA sheds light on the origin of Europeans

This distinguished them from the Pongidae, the separate family used for the three African great apes – the common chimpanzee, bonobo and gorilla – plus the orangutan from Southeast Asia.

We now realise that modern humans are just one of the African great apes.

So when and how did this radically changed perception come about?

Early observations

In the 19th century the only evidence available for determining the closeness of the relationship between any two living animals was how similar they were in terms of what the naked eye could tell from their bones, teeth, muscles and organs.

Biologist Thomas Henry Huxley
(1825-1895)

Credit: Wikimedia/Carte de Visite Fotografie

The first person to undertake a systematic comparative review of these differences between modern humans and the apes was English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley.

In the central section of a small book he published in 1863, called Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, Huxley concluded that the differences between modern humans and African apes were less than those between African apes and orangutans.

This was the evidence the English naturalist Charles Darwin referred to in The Descent of Man in 1871.

He speculated that because African apes were morphologically closer to modern humans than the apes from Asia, then the ancestors of modern humans were more likely to be found in Africa than elsewhere.

A closer inspection

Developments in biochemistry and immunology during the first half of the 20th century enabled the search for evidence of the relationships between modern humans and the apes to shift from macroscopic morphology to the morphology of molecules.

The results of applying a new generation of analytical methods to proteins were reported by the Austrian-born French biologist Emile Zuckerkandl and American biologist Morris Goodman in the early 1960s.

Zuckerkandl used enzymes to break up the protein component of haemoglobin into its peptide components. He showed that the patterns of the peptides from modern humans, gorilla and chimpanzee were indistinguishable.

Goodman used a different method, immunodiffusion, to study albumin, a serum protein. He showed that the patterns produced by the albumins of modern humans and the chimpanzee were identical. He concluded that this was because the albumin molecules were, to all intents and purposes, identical.

Apes and humans: related

Proteins are made up of a string of amino acids and in many instances one amino acid can be substituted for another without changing the function of the protein.

In the late 1960s, the American anthropologist Vince Sarich and New Zealand biologist Allan Wilson exploited these minor differences in protein structure and concluded that modern humans and the African apes were very closely related.

They also provided the first molecular clock estimate of modern human-African ape divergence, dating the split to only around five million years ago. This date was less than half of contemporary estimates based on fossil evidence.

In 1975 the American human geneticist Mary-Claire King and Allan Wilson showed that 99% of the amino-acid sequences of chimpanzee and modern human blood proteins were identical.

Enter DNA

The discovery by James Watson and Francis Crick, with unwitting help from Rosalind Franklin, of the basic structure of DNA, and the subsequent discovery by Crick and others of the nature of the genetic code, meant that the relationships among organisms could be pursued at the level of the genome.

Nowadays technological advances mean that whole genomes can be sequenced. Over the past decade researchers have published good draft sequences of the nuclear genomes of the chimpanzee, orangutan, gorilla and the bonobo.

How close? A chimpanzee (top left), an orangutan (top right), a gorilla (bottom left) and a bonobo (bottom right).

Credit: Shutterstock/Sergey Uryadnikov/Petr Masek/Sergey Uryadnikov/Eric Gevaert

More and better data are steadily being accumulated, and in 2013 a review of ape DNA based on the genomes of 79 great apes was published.

These new ape genome sequences support the results of earlier analyses of both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA that suggested modern humans and chimpanzees are more closely related to each other than either is to the gorilla.

When DNA differences among modern humans and the great apes are calibrated using the best palaeontological evidence for the split between the apes and the old world monkeys, those differences predict that the hypothetical common ancestor of modern humans, chimpanzees and bonobos lived about 8 million years ago.

The rise of the hominins

Most researchers now recognise the modern human as hominins.

Still, the question “where do we come from” can from a scientific perspective be difficult for someone outside of the discipline to come to grips with. In part this is because the fossil record for human evolution seems to grow exponentially, with the author of each new discovery often claiming that the textbooks need to be rewritten.

The interdisciplinary nature of palaeoanthropology also means that new evidence that helps us make sense of our ancestry does not always come in the form of new fossils.

It comes from advances in a range of disciplines that include archaeology, comparative anatomy, earth sciences, evolutionary biology, genomics and primatology.

A further complicating factor is that the human fossil record does not just consist of the fossil evidence of our direct ancestors.

Many of the fossils belong to lineages that do not make it to the surface of the Tree of Life. They belong to extinct close relatives, and the task of sorting close relatives from ancestors is one with which we are only just now beginning to grapple.

There is a lineage that leads to today’s Homo sapiens, but there are also a host of side experiments that are equally important to understand. They represent some of the most interesting chapters in human evolution.

Origins of the genus Homo

Understanding the origins of our own genus Homo means establishing what fossils we recognise as being the first early humans.

Sometime before 4 million years ago we see the first evidence of the genus Australopithecus. These fossils sample the kind of creature that was most likely the ancestor to the genus Homo.

Around 2.5 million years ago we see the first fossil evidence of species in Africa that many argue belong to our own lineage. One of these, Homo habilis, almost certainly made stone tools, had a slightly larger brain than Australopithecus, stood upright and regularly walked on two legs.

Some recognise a second species, Homo rudolfensis, about which we know even less.

These possible human ancestors lived alongside close relatives that were almost certainly not our ancestors. These species are called Paranthropus or robust australopiths – they had small brains, big jaw bones, large flat faces, and huge chewing teeth.

They lasted for at least a million years, so whatever they were eating (which is still a mystery) they were successful in the sense that they lasted as long in the fossil record as the average mammal.

But some researchers think that Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis are not different enough from the australopiths that preceded them to justify being included in the genus Homo.

They claim that the size and shape of their body and the size of their teeth and jaws was little different from that of the australopiths. This means that their locomotion and diet had not shifted far enough in the direction of pre-modern Homo species such as Homo erectus to justify inclusion in Homo.

Tool making is not enough

Also, because it is becoming evident that australopiths may have been making tools earlier than Homo habilis it means that tool-making can no longer be seen as the sole prerogative of Homo.

There is a developing consensus that the relaxation of the criteria more than 50 years ago that saw the inclusion of Homo habilis into the genus Homo needs to be reconsidered.

Species that emerge slightly later from Africa, such as Homo ergaster, fit much more clearly within what we understand by the genus Homo. That species probably left Africa around 2 million years ago and migrated ultimately as far east as China and Indonesia where it evolved, eventually, into Homo erectus.

A number of further migrations out of Africa probably occurred after the initial Homo ergaster migration, one of which, Homo heidelbergensis, is considered by many palaeoanthropologists to be the ancestor of both Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and modern humans (Homo sapiens).

As far as we know, Neanderthals evolved outside of Africa, perhaps in response to the ice ages of Europe. Our ancestors remained in Africa where perhaps as early as 300,000 years ago, as revealed from recent redating of the Moroccan site of Jebel Irhoud, were well along in the process of evolving into modern humans.

So the origins of ‘us’

Once we get to the origins of our own species Homo sapiens we have the added advantage that we are able to now use next generation sequencing methods to recover ancient DNA (aDNA).

As geneticists recover ancient genomes from different extinct hominin species, they are generating insights that are not possible from comparing the anatomy of the fossils alone.

There is now fossil evidence from teeth to suggest that Homo sapiens may have been in China by 120,000 years ago and in South East Asia by 67,000 years.

The discovery of some distinctive modern human DNA within the DNA recovered from a Neanderthal fossil suggests that modest interbreeding was occurring between Neanderthals and modern humans in Central Asia by 100,000 years ago.

Modern humans have not shared the planet with another hominin species for several tens of thousands of years. But before that, in the past 300,000 years or so, there is fossil and DNA evidence of several hominin species, including the recently reported archaic hominin Homo naledi

First and foremost there was Homo neanderthalensis, whose range overlapped with modern humans in the Near East. Neanderthals most likely became extinct as a result of direct competition with the more technologically sophisticated Homo sapiens.

The evidence from DNA shows that there was interbreeding between our species and pre-modern humans, including the Neanderthals and the other enigmatic hominin referred to as the Denisovans.

We do not yet know how and when Homo erectus became extinct. It would appear that another unexpected side experiment in hominin evolution, known from the island of Flores and called Homo floresiensis most likely became extinct sometime after 60,000 years ago.

Indeed this hominin may represent something far more significant than simply an interesting side experiment, with many leading palaeoanthropologists arguing that the Hobbit may represent a pre-ergaster migration out of Africa.

A 700,000-year-old fossil find shows the Hobbits’ ancestors were even smaller

What next?

Even though thousands of hominin fossils have now been recovered and described there is still much work to be done.

Was there a hominin that successfully migrated out of Africa prior to Homo ergaster? Did most of human evolution occur in Africa? Did some important transitions occur outside of Africa?

When did Homo erectus become extinct, and was there genetic exchange between erectus, sapiens and perhaps other hominin species?

As is often the case in science, with the recovery of additional data, in this case fossils and DNA extracted from fossils, we generate more questions than answers.

But ultimately all of this new evidence will result in a far more sophisticated appreciation of not only our evolution, but also the evolution of our extinct fossil cousins.

Bernard Wood, University Professor of Human Origins, George Washington University and Michael Westaway, Senior Research Fellow, Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University

Published by The Conversation.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

Creationism in Crisis - Ancient DNA Reveals a Hidden History of Human Adaptation

Ancient DNA reveals a hidden history of human adaptation

Fig. 1: Geographic and temporal distribution of 1,162 ancient Eurasian samples used in this study
Each human symbol represents a sample, and the colours indicate different populations classified into broad groupings according to archaeological records of material culture and lifestyle (colours indicated at the bottom left-hand side; Supplementary Text 1). Sample ages are represented in the bottom panel in thousand years before present (BP). The green lines depict the generalized migration route of Anatolian EF into Europe ~8.5 ka, where they mixed with WHG (EHG refers to the contemporaneous Eastern Hunter-Gatherers) to create the European Early Farmers (EF). Similarly, the pink arrows represent the generalized movement of Steppe Pastoralists (Steppe; samples east of the Ural Mountains not shown), which resulted in admixture with LF ~5 ka, giving rise to LNBA societies.

Souilmi, Y., Tobler, R., Johar, A. et al (2022)

Modern genomics and improved extraction techniques meaning more ancient DNA becomes available for analysis is revealing more detail of our evolution as a species as we spread out of Africa and across Eurasia dnd eventually into the Americas.

As an intelligent and technologically advanced species we might have been expected to be able to isolate ourselves from the environmental selection pressures that normally drive evolution, so it's perhaps surprising and maybe a little humbling to discover that there were about 50 period in our history when selection pressures were so intense that a new mutation spread rapidly through the gene pool and quickly reach fixation, with a 'hard sweep' where a formerly rare genetic variation replaces other alleles of the same gene.

The following article by Yassine Souilmi, Genomics and Bioinformatics, Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, University of Adelaide, Christian Huber, Assistant Professor of Biology, Penn State, USA and Ray Tobler, Postdoctoral fellow, Australian National University, explains the research that discovered these intense burst of evolutionary response to environmental factors. It is reprinted under the terms of a Creative Commons lcesne, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original acn be read here:

How Science Works - Discovering the Unexpected History of the First Americans

The Alcobaça archaeological site, in which the skeletal remains of Brazil-12 (northeast Brazil) were unearthed.

Photo credit: Henry Lavalle, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
and Ana Nascimento, Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco)

FAU | Ancient DNA Analysis Unravels the Early Peopling of South America

Despite the claims of Creationist frauds, scientific papers are not, like Creationist articles on Creationist websites, vetted to ensure they simply regurgitates the approved orthodoxy. Indeed, science would stagnate just like Creationism if that were the case. Instead, science progresses by discovering the unorthodox and revealing the unknown.

Sometimes, as in the case of this paper by scientists from Florida Atlantic University in collaboration with researchers from Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA it turns what we think we know on its head and causes us to rethink things. Like deconstructing part of jigsaw puzzle and throwing the pieces into the air.

The research concerns the origins of the native people of South America. The consensus view was that modern humans crossed from Siberia when sea levels were lower, and what is now the Bering Strait, between Siberia and Alaska, known as Beringia was habitable. From there, they spread south into North America and continued down the Pacific coast, over the Central American isthmus and into South America. Previous genetic studies had seems to support this showing a connection with ancient people from the Altai region of Siberian Central Asia.

However, the genome of two ancient individuals from two different sites in Northern Brazil, at Pedra do Tubarão and Alcobaça, using powerful algorithms and genomic analyses, shows a different story. They show that, not only had there been interbreeding between the ancestors of these people and Neanderthals, but that they also discovered more Denisovan than Neanderthal ancestry in ancient Uruguay and Panama individuals. This is not inconsistent with the Beringia migration theory, of course, but it is the discovery of what happened next, and where this other hominin species DNA came from where the surprise it.

They also found a mysterious and as yet unexplained strong genetic signal linking Australasian (Australia and Papua New Guinea) to an ancient genome from Panama.

Lastly, unexpectedly, they found evidence that there was a northward migration from South America up the Atlantic coast after people had become established east of the Andes.

As the Florida Atlantic University News release explains:

Using DNA from two ancient human individuals unearthed in two different archaeological sites in northeast Brazil – Pedra do Tubarão and Alcobaça – and powerful algorithms and genomic analyses, Florida Atlantic University researchers in collaboration with Emory University have unraveled the deep demographic history of South America at the regional level with some unexpected and surprising results.

Not only do researchers provide new genetic evidence supporting existing archaeological data of the north-to-south migration toward South America, they also have discovered migrations in the opposite direction along the Atlantic coast – for the first time. The work provides the most complete genetic evidence to date for complex ancient Central and South American migration routes.

Among the key findings, researchers also have discovered evidence of Neanderthal ancestry within the genomes of ancient individuals from South America. Neanderthals are an extinct population of archaic humans that ranged across Eurasia during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic.

Results of the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. (Biological Sciences), suggest that human movements closer to the Atlantic coast eventually linked ancient Uruguay and Panama in a south-to-north migration route – 5,277 kilometers (3,270 miles) apart. This novel migration pattern is estimated to have occurred approximately 1,000 years ago based on the ages of the ancient individuals.

Findings show a distinct relationship among ancient genomes from northeast Brazil, Lagoa Santa (southeast Brazil), Uruguay and Panama. This new model reveals that the settlement of the Atlantic coast occurred only after the peopling of most of the Pacific coast and Andes.

Our study provides key genomic evidence for ancient migration events at the regional scale along South America’s Atlantic coast. These regional events likely derived from migratory waves involving the initial Indigenous peoples of South America near the Pacific coast.

Michael DeGiorgio, Ph.D., co-corresponding author
Associate professor
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
College of Engineering and Computer Science
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA

Researchers also found strong Australasian (Australia and Papua New Guinea) genetic signals in an ancient genome from Panama.

There is an entire Pacific Ocean between Australasia and the Americas, and we still don’t know how these ancestral genomic signals appeared in Central and South America without leaving traces in North America.

Andre Luiz Campelo dos Santos, Ph.D., first author
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
College of Engineering and Computer Science
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA

To further add to the existing complexity, researchers also detected greater Denisovan than Neanderthal ancestry in ancient Uruguay and Panama individuals. Denisovans are a group of extinct humans first identified from DNA sequences from the tip of finger bone discovered around 2008.

It’s phenomenal that Denisovan ancestry made it all the way to South America. The admixture must have occurred a long time before, perhaps 40,000 years ago. The fact that the Denisovan lineage persisted and its genetic signal made it into an ancient individual from Uruguay that is only 1,500 years old suggests that it was a large admixture event between a population of humans and Denisovans.

John Lindo, Ph.D., co-corresponding author
Assistant professor
Department of Anthropology
Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Previously at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil, dos Santos and colleagues uncovered the remains of the two ancient humans from northeast Brazil, which date back to at least 1,000 years before present, and sent them to Lindo for DNA extraction and subsequent genomic sequencing and analyses. Raw data were then sent to FAU for computational analysis of the whole genome sequences from northeast Brazil.

This groundbreaking research involved many different fields from archaeology to biological sciences to genomics and data science. Our scientists at Florida Atlantic University in collaboration with Emory University have helped to shed light on an important piece of the Americas puzzle, which could not have been solved without powerful genomic and computational tools and analysis.

Stella Batalama, Ph.D.
Dean, College of Engineering and Computer Science.
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, USA

Researchers compared the two newly sequenced ancient whole genomes from northeast Brazil with present-day worldwide genomes and other ancient whole genomes from the Americas. As of the publication date of the article, Lindo says that only a dozen or so ancient whole genomes from South America have been sequenced and published, in contrast to hundreds from Europe.

Apart from the occurrence of mass burials in the sites that yielded the samples from northeast Brazil, Uruguay, southeast Brazil and Panama, there is no other evidence in the archaeological record that indicate shared cultural features among them. Importantly, the analyzed ancient individuals from southeast Brazil are about 9,000 years older than those from northeast Brazil, Uruguay and Panama, enough time for expected and noticeable cultural divergence. Moreover, northeast Brazil, Uruguay and Panama, though more similar in age, are located thousands of kilometers apart from each other.

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Genetic profile at key sites (left). Migration routes (right)

This research suggests that the people who eventually made it to South America, came from a people who had interbred extensively with Neanderthals and even more so with Denisovans, but how the Australasian DNA got to Panama remains to be discovered. The intriguing thing here is that the Australasians themselves have a high proportion of Denisovan DNA and Denisovans are assumed to have been present over much of east and south-east Asia, including the Altai area of Siberia where the first Denisovan remains were found.

As for the creationist claim that only scientific orthodoxy is permitted in peer-reviewed journals, papers like this that cast considerable doubt on the consensus view and raise so many unanswered questions, give the lie to that claim, but it is typical of Creationists that they accuse others of doing what they themselves do, as though accusing others of their own dishonesty somehow absolves them of responsibility for it.

Creationists who publish through sites like Answers in Genesis, or anyone who receives funding from the ICR or the Deception Discovery Institute, must sign an oath that they will never publish anything which isn't in full accord with a literal interpretation of the Bible in general and Genesis in particular. What ‘peer-review’ there is in Creationist circles is merely checking that the oath has been kept.

The Creationist Oath

As I said at the beginning, if Creationist accusations were true, science would be as stagnant as Creationism, never moving away from the handed-down orthodoxy of cult leaders. But as anyone who knows anything about science will know, science is a dynamic, evolving and expanding body of evidence-based knowledge that is responsible for modern technologies like electricity, radio and telephone communications, computers and modern transport systems as well as medicines, modern buildings, clean water and food production.

Without religion, all we would have is some people with nothing to do on holy days and having to take responsibility for their own beliefs and attitudes with nothing to blame and no excuses to justify their antisocial behaviour; imagine life without science.

Creationism in Crisis - Genes Suggest Humans and All Other Mammals Had Insect-Eating Ancestors

Genes suggest that humans and all other mammals had insect-eating ancestors – Evolution For Skeptics

Atavistic genes and remnant pseudogenes are another major embarrassment for the Creation cult leaders, who must feel very fortunate that their dupes won't know much about them or understand their significance from the point of view of divine creation by an intelligent, omniscient designer, or from the point of view of an evolutionary biologist for that matter.

These pseudogenes are, to anyone who understands them, some of the best evidence, not only for evolution but also against any notion of intelligent design, as I explain in my book, Unintelligent Design: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax.

Atavism in Biology

To add to this embarrassment, three scientists led by Christopher A. Emerling of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA and the Institut des Sciences de l’Évolution de Montpellier (ISEM), Université de Montpellier, Montpellier, France published an open access paper in Science Advances in May 2018, in which they reported finding that mammals have remnants of one or more of five gene for digesting the chitin exoskeleton of insects, even those mammals which never eat insects, such as rhinoceroses, tigers, elephants and donkeys.

These pseudogenes are thought to be remnants of the time when the stem mammals were small, insectivores living at the time when dinosaurs were the dominant carnivores and herbivores and the early mammals were small, probably nocturnal to avoid the diurnal dinosaurs, shrew like insectivores with sharp pointed teeth, much like those of shrews and hedgehogs today.

As Christopher Emerling in his blog, Evolution For Skeptics, explains:

Religion Provides Excuses for People Who Need Excuses - Iranian Women's Protest

Iranian parliament

Photo: AP

Iran: protesters call for move to a non-religious state. What changes would that bring?

The closest things we have to the fundamentalist Christian dream of a fundamentalist theocracy, can be found in the Islamic world in states like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, where Sharia Law is little different to the Levitican Laws a Christian theocracy would impose on the rest of us. In fact, they have the same cultural roots in the tribal cultures of the Middle East, where religious superstition and the support of the priesthood was used to control and subjugate the population and, for the ruling men, the women.

Misogyny and a desire to control the females of the tribe probably originated in pre-human ancestors where biologically, there was an advantage in the males ensuring the children they supported were their own and not those of other males. Males would have been insecure in their ability to ensure fidelity, reinforced by their own tendency to 'spread their seed' as widely as possible, which required the women in the tribe to be unfaithful to their partners. The biological dynamics resulted in males being physically stronger than females and able to impose their control by force, if necessary.

Androcentric religions, such as the Abrahamic religions, evolved partly to codify this gender relationship and give it divine authority, to provide males with the excuses they needed to control and coerce females.

The Evolution of God

The insecure little men who control the Islamic Republic of Iran are continuing to use religion as their excuse for denying the women of Iran the right to choose what clothes to wear in public!

Imagine if this was reversed and women were telling men what to wear! The regime wouldn't last 5 minutes, and nor would any religion that supported it.

And yet, because their holy book, like the Bible before it, was written in a time when inadequate, insecure little men held the political and economic power, women were regarded as goods to be bought and sold, little different to slaves, the same holy book can be used as an excuse to treat women the same way today.

Just like the Catholic and most fundamentalist Protestant Christian churches, Islam is obsessed with sex. It assumes that if women are not rigidly controlled, they will go and seek out other men to have sex with, and if a women reveals more than just her eyes to any man other than her husband, it will provoke sinful sexual urges in the man which will condemn his 'soul' to an eternity of pain because the religion's god hates nothing more than a man lusting after a women to whom he isn't married.

But of course, that will be the woman's fault for tempting the man. The man can't be expected to see a woman's face, hair or legs and not want to have sex with her, and since it's her doing the tempting, anything that follows will be her fault too, consensual or not.

A couple of recent articles in The Conversation explain the importance of the women's demonstration against the compulsory wearing of the hijab in public and how fundamentalist Islam is merely the excuse for repression. They are reprinted under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.