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

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:

Monday 27 November 2023

Creationism in Crisis - The Daily Life of a North American Mammoth - 7,100 Years Before 'Creation Week'


Study takes unprecedented peek into life of 17,000-year-old mammoth | uOttawa
A view of the excavation site of the mammoth tusk from north of the Brooks Range in Alaska.

Photo by Pam Groves, University of Alaska Fairbanks

According to creationist superstition, a magic man made of nothing created the entire Universe, Earth, and all life on Earth, out of nothing, using magic words spoken in a language that no-one else spoke, and, using the rotation period of a planet that didn't exist, completed it all in 6 days during what creationists call 'Creation Week'.

7,000 years before that, mammoths were living their daily lives in what is now Alaska, and leaving tusks that carried a daily record of where they were living and consuming vegetation, in the form of 'signature' ratios of isotopes of strontium.

Strontium finds its way into the plants that animals eat from the underlying rocks where the ratio of the different stable isotopes of strontium (87Sr and 86Sr) in it changes very little over millions of years, giving a characteristic 'signature' that can be used to identify where the food plants were growing. This signature strontium was deposited in the growth layers of mammoth tusks, starting at the tip when the mammoth was born, and ending in the root when the mammoth died. In between the two is a complete record of where the mammoth roamed.

But first, scientists need to build a strontium isotope map so they can match up the record in the tusks with the geographical location in which the food grew that day. And this is where voles come in. Voles also eat the strontium-containing grasses that mammoths eat and so build up a record in their teeth. However, voles are mostly very sedentary in their habits so have a very restricted range and because the strontium in the rocks changes little, even present-day voles can be used to build up a strontium isotope map.

Using that knowledge, an international research team led by Clément Bataille, an assistant professor and researcher in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences in the Faculty of Science, Ottawa University, Canada have analysed the strontium content of a mammoth tusk found on Alaska’s North Slope above the Arctic Circle, to build up a picture of its daily life and travels.

The study is explained in a press release from Ottawa University:

Friday 24 November 2023

Creationism in Crisis - Hippos Were Living Near Rome About Half a Million Years Before 'Creation Week'


Modern Hippopotamus, Hippopotamus amphibius, present in Europe in the Pleistocene
Earliest known European common hippopotamus fossil reveals their Middle Pleistocene dispersal | EurekAlert!

One of the easiest predictions to make is that, in the next few days there will be more science papers casually refuting creationism, without the slightest intention of doing so on the part of the authors.

This is inevitable, of course, because creationism is so profoundly counter-factual that just about every fact is inconsistent with creationism, so, by merely revealing the facts, scientists refute creationism.

And today's example is the revelation that there were hippos living around Rome during the Pleistocene, about half a million years before creationist superstition says Earth was magicked up out of nothing in 'Creation week'. The amazing thing isn't that there were Hippos living near Rome half a million years ago, but the fact that there are grown adults who believe the creationist superstition of a 'Creation Week' 10,000 years ago, before which, there was nothing and nowhere for anything to happen in.

This news comes in the form of an open access paper in PLOS ONE by Beniamino Mecozzi of the Sapienza University of Rome, and colleagues, and a press release from PLoS:

Saturday 18 November 2023

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


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:
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