F Rosa Rubicondior: History
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts

Wednesday 27 March 2024

Old Dead Gods - What Does The Cerne Abbas Giant Depict And When Was It Created?


The Cerne Abbas Giant, Cerne Abbas, Dorset, England.

Photo: Ray Gaffney. © National Trust.
Uncovering the mystery of Dorset’s Cerne Giant

The thing about most of the ancient monuments and hill markings like the Uffington White Horse after whom the district of Oxfordshire I live in was named, is that no-one knows what religion the people who made them believed in or how, if indeed it did, their religion inspired (or required) them to create these monuments. I have written extensively about monuments such as Stonehenge, Durrington Walls, Silbury Hill, Avebury Stone Circle and West Kennet Long Barrow as example of how little we know about these ancient people and their religion(s) because these ancient monuments stand as testament to the transient and ephemeral nature of gods and religions on the scale of human history.

Unlike science, which, if some disaster befell humankind and all memory of a major science were expunged from memory, could be reconstructed from basic principles because it describes reality, religions, once lost and forgotten are lost forever because there is nothing substantial upon which to found a rediscovery. The entire edifice of religion is unsupported and insubstantial, being nothing more than collective imaginings and handed-down stories and myths, dependent entirely on faith to sustain them in the absence of evidence.

Tuesday 26 March 2024

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


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.
Pebdeh Cave excavation in the southern Zagros Mountains. Pebdeh was occupied by hunter-gatherers as early as 42,000 years ago.

Photo: Mohammad Javad Shoaee
The study, published in Nature Communications, highlights a period between 70,000 to 45,000 years ago when human populations did not uniformly spread across Eurasia, leaving a gap in our understanding of their whereabouts during this time frame.

Key findings from the research include:
  • The Persian plateau as a hub for early human settlement: Using a novel genetic approach combined with palaeoecological modelling, the study revealed the Persian plateau as the region where from population waves that settled all of Eurasia originated.
  • This region emerged as a suitable habitat capable of supporting a larger population compared with other areas in West Asia.
  • Genetic resemblance in ancient and modern populations: The genetic component identified in populations from the Persian plateau underlines its long-lasting differentiation in the area, compatible with the hub nature of the region, and is ancestral to the genetic components already known to have inhabited the plateau.
  • Such a genetic signature was detected thanks to a new approach that disentangles 40,000 years of admixture and other confounding events. This genetic connection underscores the plateau’s significance as a pivotal location for early human settlement and subsequent migrations.
Study co-author Professor Michael Petraglia, Director of Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, said the findings painted a much clearer picture of these early human movements.

Riverine landscape in the southern Zagros region providing fresh water resources for Homo sapiens populations.

Photo: Mohammad Javad Shoaee

Our multidisciplinary study provides a more coherent view of the ancient past, offering insights into the critical period between the Out of Africa expansion and the differentiation of Eurasian populations. The Persian plateau emerges as a key region, underlining the need for further archaeological explorations.

Professor Michael D. Petraglia, co-author
Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

The discovery elucidates a 20,000-year-long portion of the history of Homo sapiens outside of Africa, a timeframe during which we interacted with Neanderthal populations, and sheds light on the relationships between various Eurasian populations, providing crucial clues for understanding the demographic history of our species across Europe, East Asia, and Oceania.

Leonardo Vallini, fist author
Department of Biology
University of Padova, Padova, Italy.

The revelation of the Persian plateau as a hub for early human migration opens new doors for archaeological exploration, enriching our understanding of our species’ journey across continents and highlighting this region’s pivotal role in shaping human history.

Professor Luca Pagani, senior author
Department of Biology
University of Padova, Padova, Italy.
The study ‘The Persian Plateau served as Hub for Homo sapiens after the main Out of Africa dispersal’ has been published in Nature Communications.
Abstract

A combination of evidence, based on genetic, fossil and archaeological findings, indicates that Homo sapiens spread out of Africa between ~70-60 thousand years ago (kya). However, it appears that once outside of Africa, human populations did not expand across all of Eurasia until ~45 kya. The geographic whereabouts of these early settlers in the timeframe between ~70-60 to 45 kya has been difficult to reconcile. Here we combine genetic evidence and palaeoecological models to infer the geographic location that acted as the Hub for our species during the early phases of colonisation of Eurasia. Leveraging on available genomic evidence we show that populations from the Persian Plateau carry an ancestry component that closely matches the population that settled the Hub outside Africa. With the paleoclimatic data available to date, we built ecological models showing that the Persian Plateau was suitable for human occupation and that it could sustain a larger population compared to other West Asian regions, strengthening this claim.

Introduction

A growing body of evidence indicates that the colonisation of Eurasia by Homo sapiens was not a simple process, as fossil and archaeological findings support a model of multiple migrations Out of Africa from the late Middle Pleistocene and across the Late Pleistocene1,2,3,4,5,6. Traces of these early dispersals are also evidenced in the genome of our Neanderthal relatives, which illustrate interbreeding events as humans moved into Eurasia7,8,9,10. Early dispersals of our species were likely accompanied by population contractions and extinctions, though succeeded by a subsequent, large-scale wave at ~70–60 kya11,12,13,14,15, from which all modern-day non-Africans descend16,17.

The geographically widespread and stable colonisation of Eurasia appears to have occurred at ~45 kya through multiple population expansions associated with a variety of stone tool technologies18,19. Earlier incursions into Europe have been recorded20,21,22,23, however, they failed to leave a significant contribution to later populations. A chronological gap of ~20 ky between the Out of Africa migration (~70–60 kya) and the stable colonisation (~45 kya) of West and East Eurasia can be identified, for which the geographic location and genetic features of this population are poorly known. On the basis of genetic and archaeological evidence, it has been suggested that the Eurasian population that formed the first stable deme outside Africa after ~70–60 kya can be characterised as a Hub population18, from which multiple population waves emanated to colonise Eurasia, which would have had distinct chronological, genetic and cultural characteristics. It has also been surmised that the Hub population cannot be seen as simply the stem from which East and West Eurasians diverged. Instead, this was a more complex scenario, encompassing multiple expansions and local extinctions18. Previous studies, however, have failed to delve into the potential geographic location of this Hub population24, the overall scarcity of fossil evidence of Homo sapiens between 60 and 45 kya anywhere across Eurasia.

The aforementioned scenario was grounded in evidence stemming from ancient genomes from West and Central Eurasia25,26 and China27, indicating that the ancestors of present-day East Eurasians emerged from the Hub at ~45 kya (Fig. 1A, red branch). These emergent groups subsequently colonised most of Eurasia and Oceania, though these populations became largely extinct and were assimilated in West Eurasia28 by a more recent expansion that took place by ~38 kya (Fig. 1A, blue branch). The first of these two expansions, whose associated ancestry we name here the East Eurasian Core (EEC), left descendants in Bacho Kiro, Tianyuan, and most present-day East Asians and Oceanians. The second expansion, which we name the West Eurasian Core (WEC), left descendants in Kostenki14, Sunghir, and subsequent West Eurasians, and in the genome of palaeolithic Siberians29. Crucially, the Hub population accumulated some drift together with the WEC in the millennia that elapsed between the EEC and the WEC expansions (Fig. 1A, grey area). Despite its key role during the peopling of Eurasia, the geographic location and the genetic characteristics of the Hub population, remain obscure24. The outlined scenario is complicated by the need to account for the Basal Eurasian population (Fig. 1A, green), a group30 that split from other Eurasians soon after the main Out of Africa expansion, hence also before the split between East and West Eurasians. This population was isolated from other Eurasians and later on, starting from at least ~25 kya31,32, admixed with populations from the Middle East. Their ancestry was subsequently carried by the population expansions associated with the Neolithic revolution to all of West Eurasia.
Fig. 1: Relationship and legacy of the West and East Eurasian Core populations.
Summary of the major population events (A) and schematic representation of our reference space and expected position of admixed and unadmixed populations (B – note that this panel is a rotation of the blue and red portion of A); derived allele sharing of each ancient or modern individual/population with Kostenki14 and Tianyuan (C); East Asians in red, Oceanians in orange, Native Americans in pink, South Asians in yellow, Northern South Asians in green, West Eurasians in blue, Levantines in cornflowerblue, ancient samples in black (N stands for Neolithic, WHG for Western Hunter Gatherers). A graph with all populations analysed, and individual population names are in Supplementary Fig. 1, Source Data in Supplementary Data 3.
Given the current impossibility of directly inferring the homeland of the Hub population from fossil remains, here we combine available genetic evidence (including both ancient and present-day genomes) and palaeoecological models to infer the geographic region that acted as a Hub for the ancestors of all present-day non-Africans during the initial colonisation of Eurasia. With our work, we show that populations from the Persian Plateau carry an ancestry component that closely matches the population that settled the Hub outside Africa, therefore pointing to the Persian Plateau as suitable for human occupation throughout 60–40 kya, indirectly shedding light on the early interactions and admixture of our species with Neanderthals33 and the relationships between the main Eurasian and the elusive Basal Eurasian human population30 as well as informing on where future archaeological investigations should be focused.
The Persian Plateau, immediately to the east of Mesopotamia, from whence the authors of Genesis plagiarized a lot of their origin myths, would have been known to the Mesopotamians, but it seems no knowledge of it was transmitted to the Canaanite Hills where the Bronze Age authors of Genesis were making up their origin myths, or they might have incorporated the knowledge into their tales. But even the Mesopotamian written records don't go back to between 45,000 and 70,000 years ago so probably that knowledge had passed out of human memory by the time the Babylonians were writing about Gilgamesh and their pantheon of gods.

So the authors of Genesis had to make do with virtually no information about world or human history, and nothing at all about evolution in Africa and migration out into Eurasia via the Persian Plateau. Had they done so, they might have produced stories with at least a modicum of truth, but alas, all they could manage were the childish fairy tales that got incorporated into the Bible and declared to be the inerrant word of a god - making that god look more and more like either a massive liar or an ignoramus as science discovers more and more of the truth about human origins and the history of the planet.

Saturday 23 March 2024

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


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:

Thursday 14 March 2024

Creationism in Crisis - Dinosaur Footprints In Alaska from 100 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'!


A theropod track lies in rock near the west bank of the Kukpowruk River.

Photo: Anthony Fiorillo
Alaska dinosaur tracks reveal a lush, wet environment | Geophysical Institute

About 100 million yearsd before creationism's god decided to create a small flat planet with a dome over it to keep the water about its sky out, there were dinosaurs living in what is now northern Alaska. The problem for creationists is that the people who wrote their favourite creation myths were ignorant both of dinosaurs and Alaska so had no idea their tales needed to include something about them, which is why everything they wrote about either happened within a day or two's walk if the Canaanite Hills or were plagiarized from nearby cultures.

Now a team of paleontologists and archaeologists have discovered fossilised dinosaur footprints and the remains of plants in the Nanushuk Formation that show the climate there was warmer and wetter than today, at a time when species were migrating over the landbridge between Siberia in Asia and North America.

Unlike the Paluxy hoax, which had creationists fooled for the best part of a decade, there were no human footprints (hand-carved or otherwise) associated with these dinosaur tracks.

Because creationists will try to falsify the aging of the Nanshuk Formation, claiming the method must have been flawed to such an extent that if made 10,000 years or less look like 100 million years, here is actually how the dating was done - it’s; those dreaded zircons in volcanic deposits again, plus stratigraphy based on index fossils found in rocks of known age:
Do you have any information on the Nanushuk Formation in northern Alaska and how its age was estimated? The Nanushuk Formation is a geological formation located in northern Alaska, particularly in the North Slope region. It is primarily composed of sandstone, siltstone, and shale, and it contains significant oil and gas reserves. The formation is of great interest to geologists and petroleum geologists due to its hydrocarbon potential.

The age of the Nanushuk Formation has been estimated through various methods, including biostratigraphy and radiometric dating of volcanic ash layers within the formation. Biostratigraphy involves the study of fossil assemblages found within the rocks to determine their relative ages. By comparing the fossils present in the Nanushuk Formation to those found in other formations with well-established ages, geologists can infer the approximate age of the Nanushuk Formation.

Additionally, radiometric dating techniques, such as radiocarbon dating or uranium-lead dating, can be used to determine the absolute ages of specific minerals or volcanic ash layers within the formation. These methods rely on the decay of radioactive isotopes within the rocks to estimate the time since their formation.

Through a combination of these techniques, geologists have estimated that the Nanushuk Formation was deposited during the Late Cretaceous period, approximately 70 to 80 million years ago. However, the precise age estimates may vary depending on the specific location within the formation and the methods used for dating.
The team, led by Dr. Anthony R. Fiorillo of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science, Albuquerque, USA and including Professor Paul McCarthy of University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) College of Natural Science and Mathematics, have published their findings open access in the journal Geosciences. It is explained in a UAF news item:

Wednesday 6 March 2024

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


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.

Monday 19 February 2024

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


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:

Saturday 17 February 2024

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)

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


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:

Tuesday 13 February 2024

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


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?

Friday 2 February 2024

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


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:

Sunday 21 January 2024

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


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:

Friday 19 January 2024

Creationism in Crisis - The Travels Of An Alaskan Mammoth 4,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'


Mammoths lived in interior and Arctic Alaska up until about 13,000 years ago. By analyzing the tusk of a mammoth, we can learn about where it lived throughout different times of its life.

Art by Mauricio Anton
Woolly mammoth movements tied to earliest Alaska hunting camps | UAF news and information

Readers may remember a blog post from last November which described how scientists had tracked the lifetime movements of a male Alaskan mammoth that lived 17,100 years ago, by analysing the isotope record in its tusks.

This is possible because mammoth tusks, like those of elephants, grow continually throughout their lifetime and contain a record of the stable isotopes of strontium (87Sr and 86Sr) in their food, deposited in annual growth rings similar to those of trees, which is dependent on the ratios of those isotopes in the soil the plants grew in. By comparing the record in their tusks with known isotope maps, their movement can be mapped.

Creationists should note that these are naturally-occurring, stable, i.e., not radioactive, isotopes of strontium, so they do not decay to other elements over time, nor do the ratios change significantly over time, so modern maps of these isotope ratios in the soil are valid for tens of thousands of years ago.

Now the same team who used this technique to work out the travels of a male Alaskan mammoth, 17,100 years ago, have repeated used it to map the travels of a female which lived 3,000 years late, and have shown that humans had established encampments close to the routes these mammoths used. The mammoth tusk used was excavated from the Swan Point archaeological site along with the remains of two juvenile mammoths and signs of a campfire, stone tools and the butchered remains of other animals.

The account of the discovery is published, open access in Science Advances and is explained in a news release from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks:

Tuesday 16 January 2024

Creationism in Crisis - How Human Skin Colour Evolved in Africa Long Before 'Creation Week'


1996 map of the major ethnolinguistic groups of Africa, by the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division (substantially based on G.P. Murdock, Africa, its peoples and their cultural history, 1959).

Source: Wikipedia
A molecular look at the mechanisms behind pigmentation variation | Penn Today

While creationism's god was creating a small flat Earth with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out, the people of Africa were evolving and diversifying according to local conditions and gene flow between populations that has resulted in a whole range of skin tones and a genetic variance that is greater in a small population of Africans than in the whole of the extra-African population of the world, reflecting the genetic bottleneck of a small band of migrants moving out of Africa into Eurasia.

Africans had of course had several hundred thousand years to diversify prior to the mythical 'Creation Week' when creationists believe a magic man made of nothing came from nowhere and magicked a universe out of nothing with some magic words, spoken in a language that no-one understood because there was no-one to understand it.

Friday 12 January 2024

Unintelligent Design - Neurodegenerative Diseases Such As MS & Alzheimer's Traced Back To Early North European Farmers - 24,000 Years Before 'Creation Week'


Life in Bronze Age Britain (artist's impression)
Ancient DNA reveals reason for high MS and Alzheimer's rates in Europe

Researchers have just completed a massive gene bank for ancient humans who lived in Eurasia up to 34,000 years ago (i.e., up to 24,000 years before creationist dogma says the universe and everything in it was magicked out of nothing by a god made of nothing who self-assembled out of nothing before there was time and space to self-assemble in.

The gene bank has enabled researchers to trace the historical and geographical spread of genes and diseases, producing four papers published in Nature. This article deals with just one of them; others will follow.

The results should disturb any creationists who has the courage to read about them because, not only did it all occur long before the mythical 'Creation Week' that is central to their superstition, but is shows that any designer either could not have been omniscient, or must have been malevolent, because it shows how the genes for Multiple Sclerosis (MS) arose in North Europe, probably as a side-effect of evolving genes to increase resistance to the diseases carried by domestic animals. An omniscient designer who deigned them should have been aware of what they would also cause, so either isn't omniscience and didn't know what its design would do, or created MS deliberately.

As the University of Cambridge News release explains:

Wednesday 10 January 2024

Creationism in Crisis - People Were Creating Art On Rocks in Australia 5,000 years Before 'Creation Week'!


New analysis unlocks the hidden meaning of 15,000-year-old rock art in Arnhem Land

What the authors of Genesis didn't know was that, not only is Earth a spheroid, but there are people living on the land masses on the far side of it; people moreover who had lived there for about 40,000 years and had been leaving a record in the form of drawings and paintings on rocks for about 10,000 years. Had they done so, they would have written about a spheroid earth that was at least 40,000 years old instead of a flat one that was only about 7,000 years old when they wrote about it being magicked out of nothing at the same time as the sun and stars.

One of my favourite quotes that, for some reason, theologians rarely talk about, is by the 'father of modern theology, St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE), who was canonized for his 'divinely-inspired' wisdom, on the 'controversy' of the shape of Earth:

But as to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth, where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours that is on no ground credible. And, indeed, it is not affirmed that this has been learned by historical knowledge, but by scientific conjecture, on the ground that the earth is suspended within the concavity of the sky, and that it has as much room on the one side of it as on the other: hence they say that the part that is beneath must also be inhabited. But they do not remark that, although it be supposed or scientifically demonstrated that the world is of a round and spherical form, yet it does not follow that the other side of the earth is bare of water; nor even, though it be bare, does it immediately follow that it is peopled.

It is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man. [My emphasis]



Source: De Civitate Dei, Book XVI, Chapter 9 — Whether We are to Believe in the Antipodes,
translated by Rev. Marcus Dods, D.D.; from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library at Calvin College.
So, from reading the faulty accounts in the Bible, the hapless St Augustine concluded that there couldn't be people living in the 'Antipodes' because there wouldn't have been enough time for the m to get there if they were descended from 'that one first man' (Adam). Perhaps he forgot that we are all allegedly descended from Noah, not Adam, so there would have been even less time for people to get to the 'Antipodes'!

But People got to the 'Antipodes' thousands of years even before Adam was supposedly magicked into existence, let alone when Noah lived. So, by St Augustin's logic either Earth is lot older than even he thought from reading his Bible, or there never was a 'first man'. Either way, it is clear that the 'Father of Modern Theology' was misled by the Bible, which has turned out to be neither history nor science!

It's mistakes like that that tell us not only was Genesis not written by an omniscience creator but that the authors were parochial and ignorant in the extreme. They thought two of each species of all known animals, who all lived a few days walk from Noah's house, could fit on a wooden boat, that a local flood covered the entire flat Earth and the magic man who made it all lived just about the dome over it all, straight up from where everyone lived.

Tuesday 26 December 2023

60 Years Ago Today - Remembering the Big Freeze - From My Book, 'In The Blink Of An Eye: Growing Up In Rural Oxfordshire'


The winter of 1962–63 was something else. It deserves a special mention. It came almost as a punctuation mark for me as my life was about to change when I left school and entered the working class in Oxford.

I was the village’s provider of Sunday newspapers! I felt I had an important job to do because without me, no–one would have anything to read on Sunday mornings! It was my sacred duty to get the Sunday newspapers delivered!

So, on Sunday, 30th December 1962 I got up as usual to go to Charlbury to buy my 60 newspapers for which I charged a penny each for delivery. I noticed there had been some snow and, unusually, the snow on the lower window frame on the back door seemed to be three or four inches up the glass.

The winter had actually started a few days earlier with snow on Boxing Day, the next best thing to a white Christmas, but it was nothing more than the usual few inches which everyone assumed would be gone in a few days. How wrong we were, as I was about to find out!

I opened the door to go to the outside toilet. A pile of snow fell into the kitchen. The back yard was full of snow, literally. It wasn't just piled up on the edges of the windowpanes, but against the door itself.

I went out of the front door to find the world had changed beyond recognition! The Lane was full of snow! A snowdrift came straight off our garage roof, across the front garden, over the garden wall and up to the wall of the house opposite. It was deeper by far than my, by now, 5 feet 10 inches.

And the snow was still falling thick and fast, driven by a gale-force wind! Southern England was in the grip of a major blizzard not seen since 1947 and probably much earlier. Bitterly cold Arctic winds drove the dry, powdery snow into every hollow and piled it up until the hollow was full, then moved on to fill the next, deeper hollow, until the countryside was a smooth as plastered wall.

But the newspapers had to get through!

So, donning wellies with two pairs of thick socks, jumpers, overcoat, scarves – one over my head and over my mouth, another round my neck twice – a balaclava helmet and two pairs of gloves, I slung my paper bag, made out of an old hessian corn sack, over my shoulder and set out. It was a strange landscape, but Main Road wasn’t too deeply covered. There were no car tracks!

I trudged up through the village to just beyond the Finstock turn, marveling at the deepening drifts, and even stopping to help a man trying to get his car out of his drive. He wasn't going to get very far. It was there I met our neighbour’s son-in-law walking over from Charlbury to check on her.

“You goin’ to get yer papers?” he asked incredulously.

“Well, Dad can’t drive me so I’m walkin’!” I explained.

“Well, turn round and go ‘ome” he said. “No–one’s goin’ to get their papers today!”

“Is it that bad?”

“Corse it is! Even the trains ent runnin! Nothin’s movin’ anywhere.”

So, I turned round and walked ‘ome with him, and had a cup of hot soup made out of the remains of the Christmas goose. The village was totally shut off! For the first time on my watch, the Sunday newspapers had not been delivered.

We dug out the lane down to The Green so people could get to Wally Scarrot's shop, but the shop couldn’t get supplies in and was beginning to run down as a village shop anyway, as people got cars and could shop at the new supermarkets in Witney and Chipping Norton. The bakery had ceased to operate several years earlier. It was a time for community action!

Tuesday 19 December 2023

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


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:

Sunday 17 December 2023

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.

Thursday 7 December 2023

Creationism in Crisis - A 15 Million-Year-Old Former Lake in Southern Germany Is Drowning Creationism With Facts


Drill core from borehole taken in 1981 from the Nördlinger Ries. There are distinctive layers of light-coloured dolomite between fine-layered dark sediments of the former crater lake.
Photo: Gernot Arp, Göttingen University
Information for the Media - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

15 million years before 'Creation Week', when creationists think Earth was magically created out of nothing, a meteorite struck in what is now southern Germany, just north of the Danube, creating a circular crater that filled with water to form a lake, in an area surrounded by the hills known as the Nördlinger Ries.

Now the sedimentary rocks formed on the lakebed are revealing their locked-up record of the geological and biological changes in the intervening 15 million years of Earth's 'pre-Creation' history.

They are also providing useful information about what any signs of life in Martian craters might look like.

First, a little AI information about Nördlinger Ries:

Wednesday 29 November 2023

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


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:
Web Analytics