The Amazon basin isn’t all a lush tropical forest. In large portions of western Amazonian wet seasonally flooded grasslands--not trees--are the norm. The upper branches of the Amazon River wind themselves across massive flood plains like snakes writhing across a sandy surface. One feature of these nearly featureless flat plains that has long puzzled... Continue Reading →
Ken Ham recently tweeted about a baby born with a "tail." I agree with his assessment that these are not cases of bony tails, homologous to tails in almost all vertebrate species, but then I wondered, can young-earth creationists be sure that Adam and Eve did not have true bony tails as adults? After all,... Continue Reading →
When the Creation Museum in Kentucky opens back up on June 8 they will have a new exhibit on great ape origins. There you will be able to learn how all gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees and all species of fossil apes including australopiths share a common ancestor no more than 4500 years ago. Ken Ham has... Continue Reading →
The lost world of North America? A Great Lakes Doggerland? Ancient hunting grounds beneath Lake Huron? Yes, people once lived and moved about on land which is today submerged 120 feet under Lake Huron. In 2014 O'Shea and colleagues reported the results of their studies confirming this Atlantian-like history underneath the Great Lake Huron.  The... Continue Reading →
I recently discussed how the catastrophic Toba super-eruption in Indonesia is a serious challenge to the young-earth model of earth's history (The Toba Super Eruption: A Global Catastrophe that Creationists Ignore). Briefly, Â I explained that the Toba volcano caldera produced the largest eruption in the past 100,000 years releasing an estimated 2800 cubic kilometers of... Continue Reading →
Baby sea turtles emerge from their sandy nest and quickly make their way down the beach and into the sea. As they do so they leave tiny footprints in the sand, but the tracks are short-lived. Blown away or destroyed by the next large wave, they are lost forever. Imagine the footprints you leave during... Continue Reading →
The satire site, The Babylon Bee, published a fiction piece earlier this year in which Ken Ham claimed that Mike Trout's amazing baseball abilities are the best evidence we have of intelligent design. The Bee’s clever satire got me thinking about the nature of God’s contingent actions in the world which have traditionally been identified... Continue Reading →
Can human footprints made in wet sand dunes be preserved as fossils? The discovery of up to thirty-five human (1) footprints on the roof of a small coastal cave says “yes.” Footprints on the roof of a cave? How does that happen? I wondered that too when I first heard about this remarkable discovery. The... Continue Reading →
If a global Flood destroyed all humans except Noah and his family just 4350 years ago, where are all the human fossils? This is a question that any young-earth apologist must be prepared to answer. It’s a perfectly natural and appropriate question. After all, according to young-earth creationists (YECs), nearly all fossil remains of dinosaurs,... Continue Reading →
During the last Ice Age when the oceans were up to 300 feet lower than they are today an extensive cave system on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico was exposed above sea level allowing it to be inhabited by land animals. Â When the great ice sheets melted from the Earth's surface causing the oceans to... Continue Reading →
Young-earth creationists (YECs) are at odds with each other about whether a large collection of  fossils found deep in a South African cave should be categorized as humans (Homo naledi) or apes.  But what about other hominin fossils that the scientific community have generally considered the remains of distant relatives of humans?  What about... Continue Reading →
Thousands of bone fragments have now been reported from chambers deep in the same cave system in South Africa. They belong to what has been described as a new hominid species;Â Homo naledi. When the first set of bones and the context in which they were recovered were revealed, young-earth creationists (YECs) scrambled to set the... Continue Reading →
So how long can DNA or even cells survive in the environment once an organism dies?  This has been a topic of considerable debate in the scientific literature since the advent of high-throughput DNA sequencing techniques.  This growing field of scientific inquiry is fascinating to me and promises to shed new light on old questions.  I have... Continue Reading →
News is starting to leak out about what appears to be the imminent announcement of new discoveries and analyses of the perplexing bones found deep in a cave in South Africa. In addition to providing a much younger date for the fossils than expected and the revelation that there is a second chamber with additional specimens,... Continue Reading →
The pace of discovery of ancient human activities continues unabated. That alone should tell us that that there is much yet to discover and learn. The latest revelation come from deep—more than 1000 feet—inside a French cave.  In the blackness of a large opening there are peculiar "structures" constructed from fragments of stalagmites. Found many... Continue Reading →
Naturalis Historia 