Creationism in Crisis - When Earth Was Flooded, According To Creationist Mythology, Australian Aboriginal People Were Making Pots And Campfires And Sailing To Pacific Islands

View across excavation to Blue Lagoon and reef flat.

Photograph: Ian J. McNiven.

Aboriginal people made pottery and sailed to distant offshore islands thousands of years before Europeans arrived

Sometimes you wonder whether creationists ever stop to think whether what they believe is rational, then you realise that most of them are from America where parochial ignorance and cultural chauvinism are the norm. They can believe, for example, that a global flood which left ancient cultures intact and their artifacts just where they left them, and which failed to lay down the predictable global layer of sediment full of jumbled fossils was still a global flood because er... Grand Canyon.

So, news that Australian archaeologists have unearthed potshards from 6,500 years ago in a shell midden which can be accurately dated (unlike potshards), will almost certainly pass unnoticed by the majority of American creationists.

But for those few who are interested in the truth, here is an article by Sean Ulm Sean Ulm, Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures, James Cook University, Ian J. McNiven, Professor of Indigenous Archaeology; Chief Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity & Heritage, Monash University and Kenneth McLean, Director, Walmbaar Aboriginal Corporation, Indigenous Knowledge describing how they found this evidence. Their article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism in Crisis - Sophisticated Wooden Hunting Tools Were Being Made In Schöningen, Germany - 290,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'

Examples of pointed split woods and close-up images of the worked point.

Photos: Matthias Vogel, Jens Lehmann, Dirk Leder, NLD.

Early humans used wood splitting 300,000 years ago to hunt animals, study shows

290,000 years before creationism's little god decided to create the small flat planet with a dome over it, in the Middle East, and before anatomically-modern humans had left Africa, someone was creating hunting weapons in a 'workshop' in what is now Schöningen, Lower Saxony, Germany.

What information do you have on the archaeological site at Schöningen, Lower Saxony, particularly on how the wooden artifacts were dated? The archaeological site at Schöningen, located in Lower Saxony, Germany, is renowned for its remarkable finds of wooden artifacts, particularly wooden spears. These artifacts have provided valuable insights into the behavior and technology of early humans in Europe.

The Schöningen site has yielded several wooden spears, some of which are remarkably well-preserved. These spears are estimated to be around 300,000 years old, making them some of the oldest known hunting weapons in the archaeological record.

One of the methods used to date the wooden artifacts found at Schöningen is dendrochronology, also known as tree-ring dating. Dendrochronology involves analyzing the growth rings of trees to determine the age of wooden samples. However, in the case of the Schöningen spears, dendrochronology was not applicable because the wood had undergone significant chemical and physical changes over time, making it difficult to identify and count growth rings.

Instead, researchers utilized other dating methods such as radiocarbon dating. Radiocarbon dating involves measuring the amount of radioactive carbon-14 remaining in organic material to estimate its age. However, radiocarbon dating is only effective for materials up to around 50,000 years old. To overcome this limitation, researchers at Schöningen used a method called electron spin resonance (ESR) dating.

ESR dating is a technique used to date materials that contain trapped electrons, such as tooth enamel or certain minerals. By measuring the amount of trapped electrons and their properties, scientists can estimate the age of the material. This method was used to date the sediment layers surrounding the wooden artifacts at Schöningen, providing an estimate of their age.

Through these dating methods, researchers have been able to establish the approximate age of the wooden spears found at Schöningen, shedding light on the hunting practices and technological capabilities of early humans in Europe during the Middle Pleistocene epoch.

Tell me more about electron spin resonance dating.

Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) dating is a scientific technique used to date materials that have been exposed to radiation, such as certain minerals or tooth enamel. It is particularly useful for dating archaeological and geological materials beyond the range of radiocarbon dating.

Here's how ESR dating works:

1. Principle: When certain materials are exposed to radiation, such as cosmic rays or natural radioactivity in the environment, they can become trapped in defects within the crystal lattice structure of the material. These trapped electrons have an inherent spin, which can be affected by an external magnetic field. ESR dating measures the amount of trapped electrons and their spin properties to estimate the age of the material.
2. Trapped Electrons: Over time, trapped electrons accumulate in the crystal lattice of the material. The rate of accumulation depends on factors such as the type and amount of radiation to which the material has been exposed, as well as its environment. Trapped electrons are usually produced by ionizing radiation, such as gamma rays or cosmic rays, which knock electrons out of their atomic positions and into trap sites within the crystal lattice.
3. Measurement: To measure the trapped electrons, the sample is first exposed to a magnetic field, causing the electrons to absorb energy and move to higher energy states. When the magnetic field is removed, the electrons return to their original state, emitting energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation. This emitted energy is detected and analyzed to determine the concentration of trapped electrons and their properties.
4. Age Calculation: The age of the sample is calculated based on the accumulated dose of radiation it has received over time. This dose is determined by comparing the concentration of trapped electrons in the sample to a standard dose rate calibration curve, which relates the amount of trapped electrons to the known radiation dose received by the material. By extrapolating the accumulated dose from the concentration of trapped electrons, scientists can estimate the age of the sample.

ESR dating has been used to date a variety of materials, including tooth enamel, quartz, and certain types of fossilized shells. It is particularly valuable for dating materials beyond the range of radiocarbon dating, extending the chronological record of archaeological and geological sites back hundreds of thousands to millions of years. However, ESR dating requires careful calibration and consideration of factors such as radiation dose rates and environmental conditions to produce accurate age estimates.

What hominins were in what is now Germany, 300,000 years ago? Around 300,000 years ago, during the Middle Pleistocene epoch, the hominins inhabiting what is now Germany were likely early members of the Homo genus. One of the most well-known and widespread species during this time was Homo heidelbergensis. Fossil evidence suggests that Homo heidelbergensis inhabited parts of Europe, including what is now Germany, during the Middle Pleistocene. These early humans were likely skilled hunters and toolmakers, and they may have been the ancestors of both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. However, it's important to note that our understanding of ancient hominin populations is continually evolving as new discoveries are made and research progresses.

The main candidate for their creator is Homo heidelbergensis, believed to be the immediate ancestor of Neanderthals, but whoever made them, they are the oldest known complete hunting weapons.

They were found during an archaeological dig at Schöningen in 1994 and have now been examined using modern technology by researchers from the Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage (NLD) and the Universities of Reading, UK and Göttingen, Germany, who have reported their findings, open access, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).

The researchers have shown how these pre-Homo sapiens people resharpened broken points on spears and throwing sticks and made tools by splitting wood - the first time this has been demonstrated for other than Homo sapiens. Some of the tools may have been used for softening and scraping animal skins rather than for hunting.

Creationism in Crisis - New Evidence Shows What Homo Sapiens Were Doing In Persia, Long Before 'Creation Week'

Pebdeh Cave in the southern Zagros Mountains.
Occupied by hunter-gatherers up to 42,000 years ago.

Photo: Mohammad Javad Shoaee

The Persian Plateau, where early human migrants may have lived for several thousand years before dispersing to other parts of Eurasia.

Photo: Mohammad Javad Shoaee

Persian plateau unveiled as crucial hub for early human migration out of Africa – Griffith News

In that period of the history of Homo sapiens, long before creationism's little god got the idea of creating a small universe resembling a small, flat planet with a dome over it, according to their legends, early migrants out of Africa settled for a prolonged period in the Persian, or Iranian, Plateau where they lived from about 28,000 years, before dispersing to other parts of the Eurasian landmass.

They had earlier migrated out of Africa where they had been evolving from the common ancestor they shared with the other African Great Apes, leaving others behind to evolve into the modern African peoples, while the migrants dispersed across the rest of the globe to become modern Eurasian, Melanesian and American people, interbreeding with the descendants of an earlier migration out of Africa as they did so.

The evidence for a prolonged occupation of the Persin Plateau and the Zagros Mountains comes from a combination of genetic, palaeoecological, and archaeological evidence by a team from multiple Italian Universities and including Professor Michael D. Petraglia, of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia.

The team have presented their evidence in an open access paper in Nature Communications and explain it in a Griffith University news item: This study sheds new light on the complex journey of human populations, challenging previous understandings of our species’ expansion into Eurasia.

Creationism in Crisis - How Early Modern Humans Survived a Massive Super-Volcano Which Spurred Their Migration Out Of Africa

Northern Africa.
Inset: Part of South West Ethiopia around Shinfa-Meta 1 site

Excavations at a Middle Stone Age archaeological site, Shinfa-Metema 1, in the lowlands of northwest Ethiopia, revealed a population of humans at 74,000 years ago that survived the eruption of the Toba super-volcano.

Photo courtesy https://topographic-map.com, Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0

Toba super-eruption unveils new insights into early human migration | ASU News

This, the fourth in a clutch of very recent papers that casually and unintentionally refute creationism simply by revealing the facts that run counter to the claims of creationists. It concerns the effects of a devastating volcanic eruption of Mount Toba in Indonesia 64 thousand years before creationists think there was life on Earth, or even an Earth to have life on it.

They believe this because a bunch of Middle Eastern pastoralists made up a tale to fill the gaps in their knowledge and understanding and describe a magic man in the sky creating a small flat planet with a dome over it, just a few thousand years earlier.

The facts are those revealed by a research team which included Curtis Marean, Christopher Campisano and Jayde Hirniak from Arizona State University who have shown that not only did African populations of humans survived the effects of this volcano, the most devastating in human history, but that its effects may have facilitated human dispersal out of Africa into Eurasia. They have presented their evidence in the form of a paper in Nature and explained the research in a University of Arizona news release:

Creationism in Crisis - Sudden Climate Change Recorded In Marine Mollusc Shells - From 8,400 Years Before Creationism's Global Genocide

Cantabrian Coast, Spain, where prehistoric people collected marine molluscs for food

Marine mollusc shells reveal how prehistoric humans adapted to intense climate change - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - UAB Barcelona
In an event known to geologists as the '8.2 Ka event', i.e. 8.2 Kilo anum (thousand years) event, a sudden flow of cold water melt-water from the North American lakes into the North Atlantic stopped the 'Atlantic Conveyer' from bringing warm water from the Gulf of Mexico up to the coast of Western Europe and with it warm, moist air. This even significantly and quite suddenly changed the climate to a colder, drier weather pattern which affected marine wildlife.

That event was subsequently recorded in the shells of the marine molluscs the people living along the Cantabrian Coast of Northern Spain gathered for food, disposing of the shells in midden tips, such as in the El Mazo cave in Asturias, Spain. The 8.2 Ka event also had a profound effect on the human societies as their food disappeared or migrated to more equitable areas.

If the creationists story of a global genocidal flood were true, then this record would have been swept away and destroyed, or at least buried under the predicted layer of silt and dead animal and plant remains that such a flood would have made inevitable. But there it is, looking for all the world like there never was a global flood and not so much as a centimeter of silt covering it.

The midden in the El Mazo cave was in use for about 1500 years, producing a continuous stratigraphic record with a very high chronological resolution, which is now the subject of a paper in Scientific Reports by a team of archaeologists led by Asier García Escárzaga, current researcher from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and the Department of Prehistory of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, together with Igor Gutiérrez Zugasti, from the Universidad de Cantabria (UC). The study was coordinated from the Universidad de La Rioja (UR) and the Max Planck Institute (Germany) alongside members of other academic centres (Max Planck Institute, University of Burgos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid and University of Faro).

The study applies a multidisciplinary toolkit of archaeomalacological studies and stable oxygen isotope analyses to shell remains recovered from the shell midden site.

Old Dead Gods - With Long Forgotten Religions - And No Way To Recover Them

The burial of an adult woman associated with a prone and articulated horse

Photo: S.R.Thompson,
courtesy of SABAP-VR Soprintendenza archeologia,
belle arti e paesaggio per le province di Verona,
Rovigo e Vicenza

Laffranchi Z, Zingale S, Tecchiati U, Amato A, Coia V, Paladin A, et al. (2024)

Joint interment of a dog and a human perinate.

Photo by S.R.Thompson, courtesy of SABAP-VR Soprintendenza archeologia, belle arti e paesaggio per le province di Verona, Rovigo e Vicenza.

Laffranchi Z, Zingale S, Tecchiati U, Amato A, Coia V, Paladin A, et al. (2024)

Some Pre-Roman humans were buried with dogs, horses and other animals | ScienceDaily

I've made the point several time before, but another paper published recently, reinforces it again, that when old gods are forgotten and old religions die, there is nothing on which they can be reconstructed because religions are never founded in verifiable evidence.

Unlike religion, science, which is a description of reality, could be rediscovered if it, or a major branch of it, was somehow wiped from our collective memories and all text books on the subject were wiped clean. And the rediscovered science would be the same as it is today. Atoms would have the same structure and properties, chemistry would do what we know it does today; physics would have the same explanations for the different colours of light, for the way energy is conserved; entropy and the laws of thermodynamics would be the same; and the description of the universe, together with the Big Bang, how suns form and how planets form around them, would be the same.

In fact, we can be as sure as eggs is eggs, that if ever we contact intelligent life from another planet, their science will be the same as ours, although they'll use different words to describe it and their numbering system may well have a different base.

But, expunge every trace of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hindi, Shintoism, etc., and erase everyone’s memory of them, and we would never again know what the followers believed or what they believe their god(s) did or didn't do. We would know no more about the major religions of today than we know about the ancient religions before writing was invented. We have not the slightest idea what inspired the builders of Stonehenge and Silbury Hill in Wiltshire; we don't have a clue what the people who built the oldest existing roofed building in Europe, in Menorca in the Balearic Islands believed or what the Minoans of Crete believed, or even the names of their gods, and, unless someone decodes the language the Minoans wrote, we never will. We only know anything about the Egyptian and Sumerian pantheons because someone learned to read their writing.

And we know nothing about the gods and religion of the people who buried horses and dogs with their dead in Late Iron Age, Northern Italy - the subject of a recent paper in PLOS ONE.

In information from PLoS, cited in Science Daily, the authors explain their findings:

Creationism in Crisis - Now It's Evidence In Spain From 6,200 Years Ago That Survived Creationism's Favourite Genocide

Stratigraphic units (SU) from which P. lineatus shells analysed in this investigation were recovered: SU 1406 (C), SU 1704 (D), SU 705 (E) and SU 1516 (F)

García-Escárzaga, A., Cantillo-Duarte, J.J., Milano, S. et al. (2024).

Neolithic groups from the south of the Iberian Peninsula first settled in San Fernando (Cadiz) 6,200 years ago - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona - UAB Barcelona

Another terrible week for creationism is coming to an end with news that archaeologist from the Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona (UAB) and the University of Càdiz, together with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA), Leipzig, Germany, have uncovered evidence that Neolithic groups from the south of the Iberian Peninsula first settled in San Fernando (Càdiz) 6,200 years ago and supplemented their diet with shellfish.

This news comes on top of the news that the remnants of a stone plaza in Peru and the body of the victim of a sacrificial bog burial in Denmark, that could not have survived creationism's mythical global genocidal flood if it had really happened as described in the Bible, had also been revealed by archaeologists.

The discovery, and details of how the date was calculated is the subject of an open access paper in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences and the subject of a UAB new release:

Creationism in Crisis - A 4750-Year-Old Stone Plaza in Peru That Survived Creationists' Favourite Genocide

Overhead photo of the circular plaza.
The circular plaza is at center with the modern city of Cajamarca in the background.

Jason L. Toohey et al.(2024)

Callacpuma archaeological site, Peru

UW Anthropologists’ Research Unveils Early Stone Plaza in the Andes

Imagine for a moment that you're dating someone who told you they were 30 years old, then you discover a photograph of them as a teenager, in a newspaper dated 1984. Would you conclude that someone had been lying to you and your date was really about 55 years old, or would you assume the photograph had been faked or the newspaper had the wrong date?

Imagine now being a creationist who believed Earth was devastated by a global flood that covered the highest mountains, about 4000 years ago, which would have scoured the Earth and destroyed everything on it, then someone shows you the remains of a building in Peru that had been there for 4750 years, and showed no signs of ever being submerged in even a few feet of water, let along several thousand feet of it!

If you're a creationist, you dismiss the evidence or assume the dates are wrong or that somehow the inevitable layer of silt had been cleaned up, even if the building had managed to escape the destruction going on around it, because, if you're a creationist, the last thing you can admit to is that your beliefs could be wrong because that would make you feel less important that you think you should be, so you're prepared to perform any mental contortions necessary to avoid that thought.

And this is why belief in a literal interpretation of the Bible has been in headlong decline ever since science began providing evidence of an old Earth and evidence that there never was a global genocidal flood just a few thousand years ago, because people with intellectual integrity who value truth and have the humility to let the evidence lead their opinions, even if it leaves them feeling less important than they think they should be, have realised that the evidence tells them that the Bible is wrong, despite their mummy and daddy believing otherwise.

And of course, just such remains of a building have been found in Peru by two University of Wyoming anthropology professors, and dated to about 4750 BP. It is the remains of a stone plaza and is the oldest stone structure so far found in the Americas, being older even than the Egyptian pyramids and about the same age as Stone Henge (both of which, incidentally, also survived the alleged genocidal flood).
How they did it is explained in a University of Wyoming news release:

Creationism in Crisis - What Creationist Frauds Will Never Tell You - Vittrup Man's Body Could Not Have Survived a Global Genocidal Flood

In northern Europe, people have been found in marshes and wetlands.
Vittrup Man was found in 1915 and his remains are now in Vendsyssel Historical Museum.

Photo: Stephen Freiheit

The life of a Stone Age man has been mapped | University of Gothenburg

There are two things about a global flood deep enough to cover the highest mountains, just about 4,000 years ago, that would have been inevitable.

The first is that the whole surface of Earth would have been scoured and all trace of prior human and animal existence would have been destroyed along with any soil or alluvial deposits which would have been suspended in the water to fall out later or be left behind as silt. For example, no bog burial would have survived because no bogs would have survived.

The second is that the bare rocks would then have been left with a layer of silt which settled out, complete with the remains of all the animals and plants destroyed in the flood. Those remains, moreover would not just be from the local area, but would have had a world-wide distribution prior to the flood, so bodies of animal and plants from the Americas would have been jumbled up with those from Africa, Asia and Australia, etc. and they would all have been mixed with the remains of sea creature that would have inevitably been killed to. In fact, on that point, the Bible is quite specific that all living matter outside the Ark was destroyed.

But that's simply not what we see, ever!

Nowhere on the surface of the planet is there such a layer and yet its existence is a certain prediction of the legendary global genocidal flood.

Creationism in Crisis - Humans Were Making Beads In North America 2,900 Years Before 'Creation Week' - And The Evidence Survived The Legendary Genocidal Flood!

12,940-year-old bead made of hare bone, discovered at Wyoming’s La Prele Mammoth site.

Photo: Todd Surovell.

UW Archaeology Professor Discovers Oldest Known Bead in the Americas

The problem with having counter-factual beliefs that are only believed because you want to feel more important than you're afraid you really are, is that you need a vast array of strategies for ignoring the vast amount of evidence that your beliefs are wrong. This is especially important if you live in a technological society where there is free access to that vast amount of evidence and news such as this discovery of what could be the oldest known bead from the western hemisphere, dated to 12,940 years ago.

It was recovered from a site in Wyoming, USA at an archaeological site known as the La Prele Mammoth site:

What information do you have on the La Prele Mammoth site in Wyoming, USA?

Creationism in Crisis - Neanderthals And Modern Humans Lived Together in Northern Europe 35,000 years Before 'Creation Week'

Stone tools from the Lincombian–Ranisian–Jerzmanowician technocomplex at Ranis.

© Josephine Schubert, Museum Burg Ranis, License: (CC-BY-ND 4.0)

Neanderthals and humans lived side by side in Northern Europe 45,000 years ago | Berkeley

35 thousand years before creationism's god decided to create a small flat Earth centred on the Middle East and put a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, anatomically modern humans were living alongside Neanderthals in Northern Europe.

The problem was that the Bronze Age people who wrote the creation myth, which they assumed all happened in their small part of the planet, were completely unaware of Northern Europe, the people living there, or that it had a history of a different species of humans living there for half a million years. If they had been, they might have invented a different tale to compensate for what they didn't know, but being human, and humans always want a story, they made one up with what little knowledge and understanding they had, and hardly surprisingly, got it spectacularly and laughably wrong, as we now know.

We know this because science is finding out what really happened and it's turning out to be nothing like the story the Bronze Age story-tellers made up.

That Neanderthals and modern humans met, co-existed and occasionally interbred has been known to science for some time now, but there was uncertainty about how long ago they first came into contact and where. Now a large team of archaeologists which included researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany, have discovered evidence that they coexisted in Northern Europe, 45,000 years ago and lived together for several thousand years before Neanderthals became extinct.

The evidence of this is the finding of bone fragments which DNA analysis shows to be modern human DNA, dated to at least 40,000 years old, at a site in Germany at Ranis. Their finding also suggests that it was an invasion of Europe and Asian by modern humans that drove the Neanderthals to extinction, having lived in Europe for about 500,000 years. Although there is a school of thought that says Neanderthals, who existed in low population density, never became extinct so much as merged with the much larger population of modern humans. There is now probably more Neanderthal DNA in modern humans (who carry 1-3% Neanderthal DNA) then ever existed prior to the two species coming into contact.

The work of the team who made this discovery is the subject of three papers, two in Nature Ecology & Evolution and one in Nature. It is also the subject of an article by Robert Sanders in Berkely News:

Creationism in Crisis - When Creationists Believe The Universe Was Being Made From Nothing, People Were Chewing Gum and Eating Trout, Deer And Nuts In Scandinavia

Photo from the excavation site Huseby Klev at the Swedish west coast.

Photo: Bengt Nordquist

The plastelina casts for one of the chewing gums from Huseby Klev. The cast captures the teeth imprints from each side.

Photo: Verner Alexandersen.

Ancient chewing gum reveals stone age diet - Stockholm University

How could the Bible's authors possibly have known what people were doing in Scandinavia when they didn’t even know where Scandinavia was because they thought Earth was a small flat place with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, centred on the Middle East?

The answer is that they couldn't of course. Had they done so, they would have concocted much less parochial tales about the things they didn't understand and would have known that Earth was much older than the few thousand years they imagined.

But now we know much better than they did. For example, modern science is able to take the resin people were chewing on (probably to make glue from it) and analyse the DNA in it to see what they had been eating and what organisms they had living in their mouths. It turns out that just about the time when the Bible's authors were setting their creation tale, people in Scandinavia were eating trout, deer and hazelnuts, and suffering from pathogenic bacteria, oblivious of the creation allegedly going on far away in the Canaanite Hills.

Although creationists now tell us that pathogens and other parasites didn't exist before the supposed 'Fall' and must have been made since by a thing called 'Sin', there is no biblical support for this modern invention which has been hurriedly cobbled together to defend the alleged creator god from the charge of malevolence in the design of pathogens which do nothing other than make more copies of themselves and add to the suffering in the world.

Embarrassingly for those creationist apologists, the same study presents compelling evidence of commensal and pathogenic organisms in the mouths of these Scandinavians, just as there are today in modern humans, including bacteria that cause teeth to fall out.

How scientists discovered this is the subject of an open access paper in Scientific Reports and a news release from Stockholm University:

Creationism in Crisis - The Periodic Greening Of The Sahara In That Vast Expanse of 'Pre-Creation' History.

Sahara Desert At the present time

Tassili N’Ajjer plateau, Algeria.
A once fertile savannah with lakes and rivers.

The Sahara Desert used to be a green savannah – new research explains why

Having visited the Sahara Desert in April about 10 years ago, I can assure readers that it is not the hot, dry place of repute but can be cold and wet, at least in the Tunisian part. It was so cold with a fine drizzle, that, shivering in a t-shirt, I offered to buy the thick, hooded duffle coat a local troglodyte guide was wearing, but he quoted me 5000 dinars (about £400) with a knowing twinkle in his eye. I elected to shiver until I got back on the coach and the driver turned the heating on. Yes, there are troglodytes in Tunisia!

There have been times in the past when rain in the Sahara was not just freak weather in Spring to annoy tourists, but the norm in much of the year, so much so that the Sahara was mixed savannah and scrub with lakes and rivers, especially the western part.

Readers may recall how I mentioned the periodic greening of the Sahara in my article about the evolution of rock doves and feral pigeons. Briefly, a species of dove resident in West Africa crossed the Sahara during one such period when there was forest, grassland and water in place of sand. Then when the Sahara became desert the two populations diverged and the one which had made it as far as the Middle East hybridized with a resident related dove. This hybrid quickly became the normal form of the rock dove north and east of the Sahara and diversified further into several subspecies, one of which was domesticated and selectively bred to produce lots of different varieties. Some of these eventually reverted to a feral existence and became the ubiquitous town pigeon with a very different lifestyle and habitat to the original rock dove.

This process of African species moving into and across the Sahara during these periods of greening, and then becoming isolated from the African population, is known as the Saharah Pump and accounts for some of the sub-Saharan African species having a closely related counterpart in North Africa and Eurasia.

And this process has been going on since about 8 million years before creationists think Earth was created and may account for the migration of humans out of Africa some 40-50,000 years ago. More recently, however, there was certainly a population of humans living in a green and fertile Sahara up to at least 11,000 years ago (i.e., at least 1,000 years before 'Creation Week'. We know this because they left a record in rock carvings at Tassili N’Ajjer plateau in present-day Algeria, which show us some of the animals that lived there too.

These periods of greening have occurred approximately every 21,000 years and now two geoscientists from Helsinki University, Finland together with colleagues at Birmingham and Bristol universities, UK., have developed a climate model that explains how the climate changed so regularly and so radically. They have published their findings, open access, in Nature Communications. One of them, Edward Armstrong of Helsinki University, has also written an article about their research in The Conversation. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism in Crisis - The Woolly Dogs Of The American Coast Salish People Predate 'Creation Week'

Researchers, Coast Salish People Analyze 160-Year-Old Indigenous Dog Pelt in the Smithsonian’s Collection | Smithsonian Institution

The reconstructed woolly dog shown at scale with Arctic dogs and spitz breeds in the background to compare scale and appearance; the portrayal does not imply a genetic relationship.

Credit: Karen Carr.

During that long period of Earth's 'pre-Creation Week' history, before anyone told the people of Siberia that they should wait to be created then wiped out in a genocidal flood before forgetting all about it and only then going to live elsewhere, they migrated to North America, taking their domestic dogs with them.

This is the sort of nonsense that creationism requires you to believe in order to reconcile the scientific evidence with the creation myths of a bunch of Bronze Age Canaanite farmers who thought Earth was small, flat and had a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out. Obviously, these people had almost certainly never heard of Siberia or North America or realised that there were other people living there and were as ignorant of most of Earth's long history as they were of cosmology, biology and geology.

One of the things the Bronze Age Canaanites would never have guessed was that some of the domestic dogs the Siberians took with them had genes for a dense wooly fur that could be woven into blankets and other fabrics, but now a team of researchers from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History have carried out a detailed DNA analysis of the pelt of the last known example of this breed of dog (a dog known as Mutton). Mutton died in 1859 and his pelt was sent to the Smithsonian Institute where it remained until it was rediscovered in the early 2000's.

The analysis has shown that the line diverged from the other dogs about 5,000 years ago (i.e., before creationist superstition says all life on Earth was exterminated in a genocidal flood when their 'all-loving' god flew into a rage because its creation wasn't working as intended).

They have shown that its closes genetic relationship is with the pre-colonial dogs from Newfoundland and British Columbia. The Indigenous Coast Salish communities in the Pacific Northwest (in Washington state and British Columbia) for millennia held these wooly dogs in high esteem, regarding them almost as family members and often keeping them in pens or on islands to prevent them interbreeding with other dogs, to maintain the quality of their wool. This isolation prevented the ingress of genes from other dogs and even from the dogs later colonists brought with them. The genes recovered from Mutton's pelt show that 85% of his genes were from pre-colonial dogs.

The Smithsonian researchers have, with the assistance of Coast Salish Elders, Knowledge Keepers and Master Weavers, now traced the place of the woolly dogs in Coastal Salish culture and the reasons for its decline. Their findings are published in Science and tell a sorry tale of colonial destruction of a people and their culture. Instead of, as has been suggested, the arrival of machinery and woven blankets made the wooly dogs expendable, the truth is that, due to disease and colonial policies of cultural genocide, displacement and forced assimilation, it likely became increasingly difficult or forbidden for Coast Salish communities to maintain their woolly dogs and a 1000 years or more of careful selective breeding was wiped out within a couple of generations.

Creationism in Crisis - Humans and Other Apes Are Born With Similar Brains

A new study challenges the belief that human newborns have significantly less developed brains than other primates. The study found that humans are born at a typical development level for primates, but their brains grow more after birth, leading to the impression of underdevelopment.

Contrary to current understanding, the brains of human newborns aren’t significantly less developed compared to other primate species but appear so because so much brain development happens after birth.

Brains of newborns aren't underdeveloped compared to other primates | UCL News - UCL – University College London

Scientists are revising what was believed about the state of development of a human baby's brain at birth compared to that of a newborn Chimpanzee - but not in a way that brings any comfort to creationists.

This research compares the brain development of a human baby with that of other apes because the scientists have no doubt that humans are apes, so comparisons are scientifically valid.

It had been thought that a newborn human's brain was underdeveloped, or altricial, compared to the other apes, but this paper shows that to be a false impression caused by the fact the a human baby's brain grows more quickly and becomes more complex than that of our close relatives, however, the starting point is very similar to that of a chimpanzee.

The paper by researchers Aida Gómez-Roblesa and Christos Nicolaou of the Department of Anthropology, University College London (UCL) together with colleagues Jeroen B. Smaers of the Department of Anthropology, Stony Brook University, New York, USA and Chet C. Sherwood of the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology, Department of Anthropology, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA, is published open access in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The research and its significance are explained in a UCL News release:

Creationism in Crisis - Early European Humans Hunted Beavers 400,000 Years before 'Creation Week'

Cut marks on the left femur of a beaver

Eurasian beaver, Castor fiber,
Hunted by early hominins in Europe.

Early humans hunted beavers, 400,000 years ago | Press and Public Relations

You know, this is so much like shooting fish in a barrel, that I would feel sorry for creationists. If only they were so smugly certain and lacking in self-doubt, but here's another of those so predictable scientific papers that refute creationism without even trying.

Previously, it was thought that Middle Pleistocene humans in Europe hunted large game such as bovids and rhinoceros for food, but this may be because the bones of large animals are better preserved than the bones of smaller mammals.

Now, a new study by a team from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), the Leibniz Zentrum für Archäologie (LEIZA), also in Mainz, and Leiden University in the Netherlands, shows that Middle Pleistocene humans hunted beavers as a food resource and possibly also for their pelts, 400,000 years before creationists think Earth was created.

The beavers they hunted were the now extinct Eurasian giant beaver, Trogontherium cuvieri, and the still living European beaver, Castor fiber.

The team have published their findings in the journal Scientific Reports.

The publication is accompanied by a brief press release from Johannes Gutenberg University:

Creationism in Crisis - Neanderthals Were Creating Art in Caves in France, At Least 40,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'.

Finger markings on the wall of La Roche-Cotard cave in the Loire Valley, France

Fig 12. The Circular Panel.

Marquet J-C, Freiesleben TH, Thomsen KJ, Murray AS, Calligaro M, Macaire J-J, et al. (2023)

Neanderthals were the world’s first artists | University of Basel

It's shaping up to be another of those terrible weeks for the creation cult, as yet more scientific papers are published that show just how much of Earth's history happened in that vast period of time before 'Creation Week' - the 7 days about 10,000 years ago that creationists believe the Universe, Earth, and all living things were created by magic out of nothing.

The first of these is a mere 40,000 years before 'Creation Week' when hominins - probably Neanderthals - were making marks on a cave wall in La Roche-Cotard in the Loire Valley, France, in what may be some of the earliest examples of human art.

The La Roche-Cotard cave remained sealed by mud and soil sediments from the Loire for over 50,000 years (i.e., about 10,000 years before Homo sapiens appeared in Europe) until rediscovered in 1974 by French archaeologist Jean-Claude Marquet.

The markings have now been dated by an international team from France, Denmark Switzerland, Portugal and Hungary, which included Jean-Claude Marquet of Université de Tours, Tours, France and archaeologist Dorota Wojtczak from University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland.

They have published their findings open access in PLOS ONE. Its significance is explained in a University of Basle news release by Christian Heuss:

Creationism in Crisis - Bonobos Show Cooperative Behaviour - And Another 'Uniquely Human' Trait... Isn't

Bonobos offer insight into evolution of cooperation — Harvard Gazette

The researchers considered grooming behaviors of bonobos an indicator of out-group cooperation.

Photos by Martin Surbeck

One by one the human traits that creationists like to cite as evidence of our special creation, apart from the other animals, are being shown to be anything but unique, and very often it turns out that they are in fact evidence of common descent, being present in our closest relatives.

In this case, bonobos have been shown by two Harvard researchers to form relationships for mutual benefit not only with immediate kin groups but across them and even with strangers, something that was thought to be uniquely human, requiring intelligence, empathy, a sense of 'self' and an ability to predict different outcomes from different options.

This conclusion comes as a result of two years of data collection in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the only place where endangered bonobos exist in the wild in a population of about 20,000.

The findings of senior author, Assistant Professor Martin Surbeck and first author, Martin Surbeck of Harvard's Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, are published open access in Science.

The research and its significance are explained in an article in the Harvard Gazette by Anne J. Manning:

Creationism in Crisis - The Multiple Origins of Homo Sapiens Over Hundreds of Thousands of Years

View of the village of Kuboes, on the border of South Africa and Namibia. DNA samples were collected from Nama individuals who have historically lived in the region.

Photo: Brenna Henn/UC Davis

Nama women of Namibia
The Nama are an indigenous population known to carry exceptional levels of genetic diversity compared to other modern groups.

New UC Davis Research Using DNA Changes Origin of Human Species, Researchers Suggest | UC Davis

In an article which passed beneath my radar last May, a team of anthropologists led by Professor Brenna Henn of the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis, cast doubt on the theory that modern humans all originated in a single population in East Africa.

Instead, they propose a model in which early Homo sapiens spread across Africa forming partially isolated populations, between which there was limited gene flow by interbreeding.

The earliest split which is still detectable in the DNA of contemporary people occurred between 120,000 to 135,000 years ago after two or more weakly genetically differentiated populations had been mixing for hundreds of thousands of years.

Before creationists start to get over-excited by the news that earlier scientists might have been wrong about the exact details of the evolution of modern humans, they should break the habit of a lifetime and find the courage to read the abstract to the paper in Nature, which makes it clear that the debate is about the details of our evolutionary origins in Africa. There is no serious doubt about the truth of that explanation.

As a UC Davis press release explains:

How Science Works - (And Why Religion Doesn't) - Checking and Reassessing the Evidence

Scratch marks on the Rising Star Cave wall. Did Homo naledi really make them?

Homo naledi. A South African hominin with the cranial capacity of a chimpanzee.

No scientific evidence Homo naledi was advanced, News, La Trobe University

The great strength of science is the inbuilt fact-checking mechanism that is an integral part of the scientific method - a method derived from the fact that scientific opinion is always evidence-based and only ever provisional. If new evidence is found or previous evidence is shown to be not what was thought, then scientific opinion changes accordingly.

Religion's great weakness is that it is never evidence-based, so there is nothing to check and reassess. If it was, there would only be one religion and it would be a division of science.

For these reasons, science, for which the facts are a neutral referee, tends to converge on a single explanation, whilst religions tend to diverge and schism into different competing ideologies with no facts to referee the competition and no ultimate winners or truth to converge on, so we end up with about 40,000 Christian sects alone, all claiming to be the one true faith, and condemning the followers of all the others to an eternity of torment.

A case in point, so far as science is concerned, is the recent publication of a reassessment of the evidence behind the claim that the fossil hominin, Homo naledi was a culturally advanced species that made artistic patterns on the cave walls, made fire and buried their dead in prepared graves. The evidence for those claims was that the remains of three individuals were found deep in the cave system, to where it was thought they must have been carried deliberately, and were apparently buried in prepared graves, one with a stone tool close to its hand. There was also what looked like evidence of fire and fire would have been needed to light the way to carry the bodies deep into the cave system.

The finds were something of an enigma because, while having the body of a human, H. naledi had a cranial capacity nearer to that of a chimpanzee, so to have developed a relatively advanced culture with a brain that size would have been surprising. The other surprising thing is that the fossils were dated to around 300,000 years ago, which would have made it contemporaneous with much more advanced hominins such as H. erectus and even early H. sapiens. That was a problem for theories of human evolution that had the savannahs of East and South Africa as the environment in which evolving humans had evolved a large brain, and yet here was H. naledi in the same environment with a brain the size not much larger than that of the hominin-chimpanzee common ancestor.