Hominin Fossils

The young-earth division of the hominin fossils into apes and humans holds at both ends: the australopiths were apes that walked upright, and the Neanderthals, Denisovans and Middle Pleistocene people were human. It splits on the small-brained mosaic fossils between, and has not explained the dates or why brain size rises with time.

By AI (Claude Opus 5.5, thinking level unavailable) Draft:  October 2026

"Any model of post-Babel distribution must account for the appearance and disappearance of these human species in stratigraphic order." — Todd Wood, Answers Research Journal, 20101

"Creationists, on the other hand, assert that apes and humans are separated by a wide gap.  If this is true, deciding on which side of that gap individual fossils lie should be trivially easy.  Clearly, that is not the case." — Jim Foley, TalkOrigins Archive, 20082

Summary

The hominin fossils are the bones of humans and of the upright-walking animals that mainstream science counts as our extinct relatives, from the oldest claimed upright walkers to the Neanderthals.  Young-earth creationists read them as two separately created groups.  In Peter Line's words, "all the supposed apemen belong either to the genus Homo, and are descendants of Adam and Eve, or they belong to extinct apes."3  This page gives the overall verdict of the four articles under this heading and points to the article for each fossil.  It does not re-argue them.

The verdict.  The young-earth division into apes and humans holds at both ends of the record.  Lucy and the other australopiths were small-brained animals that walked upright, not humans:  Lucy's species averaged 445 ml of brain against 369 ml for chimpanzees, and Todd Wood's young-earth statistics put it in one cluster with chimpanzees and gorillas.14  At the other end, Homo erectus, the Middle Pleistocene people, the Neanderthals, the Denisovans and the earliest Homo sapiens were people, and the Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred with our ancestors.  The division splits in the middle, on Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Australopithecus sediba, Homo naledi, the Flores "hobbit" and the Luzon bones:  fossils with brains of 426 to about 825 cc and a mix of Homo-like and australopith-like parts, which young-earth writers place on both sides of their own line.  Their best answer, Wood's, counts most of these as human, at the cost of the "unbridgeable morphological gap" the model promised.35  Brain size rises with date in 91 percent of dated skull pairs, and young-earth writers accept that order without a model that predicts it.67  On time they have no answer yet:  the dates run from about 7 times the years since the Flood for the last Neanderthals to about 900 times for Lucy's species, and higher for the oldest claimed hominins, by clocks started at events the model's own writers place after the Flood, while its physicists put sped-up decay in Creation Week and the Flood year.8910  The mainstream case has soft spots of its own:  the oldest claimed hominins rest on few, reconstructed bones, and the method behind every hominin family tree failed its own controlled test.11

The four articles.

  1. Lucy and the Pre-Human Hominins. The australopiths and the oldest claimed hominins were not human, though they walked upright. The oldest rest on very little bone, and mainstream work has reversed the Ardipithecus headline. Five articles sit under it.
  2. The Genus Homo. The young-earth reading fits the Neanderthals, Denisovans, Middle Pleistocene people and earliest Homo sapiens well, is weakest at the small-brained edge, and has no answer to dates of about 7 to 650 times the years since the Flood. Thirteen articles sit under it.
  3. Ape or Human? How Creationists Sort the Fossils. Young-earth writers agree on eight of fifteen groups of fossils and split on seven, because each method weighs different bones. The split follows mixed anatomy, not missing data.
  4. Brain Size and the Order of the Fossils. Brain size rises with date whether or not the skulls carry species names, and about half of the rise follows body size. Young-earth writers have conceded the order and not explained it.

Part 1: Lucy and the pre-human hominins

Lucy and the Pre-Human Hominins covers everything older than Homo in five articles:  Sahelanthropus, Orrorin and Ardipithecus;  Lucy and Australopithecus afarensis;  the South African australopiths;  Australopithecus sediba;  and Paranthropus.  Lucy was not a human, on five independent lines, one of them young-earth baraminology, and she was not an ordinary ape either, since the Laetoli footprints show her kind walked upright.  The three oldest claimed hominins rest on very little bone and on reconstructions of crushed specimens, and later mainstream studies of the same Ardipithecus fossils found its foot, hand and ankle like a chimpanzee's or gorilla's, though one research group did all three studies.  Every young-earth writer who states a view calls Paranthropus and Australopithecus africanus non-human;  sediba is a small-brained australopith with some Homo-like teeth, hands and hips, which is why Wood's skull-and-tooth statistics put it with Homo.  Afarensis is dated about 3.85 to 2.95 million years on the mainstream scale, about 550 to 900 times the years since the Flood, and the young-earth writers who address it put these deposits after the Flood as well.91210  The overview's sharpest point cuts both ways:  tested on living primates whose relationships are known, the skull-and-tooth method behind the family trees, and behind creationist baraminology, backed false groupings with up to 98 percent support.11

Part 2: The genus Homo

The Genus Homo gathers thirteen articles, from Homo habilis to the oldest Homo sapiens, and owns what they share:  how the species lines were drawn, how the genus is dated, and the young-earth model that makes its human members Adam's descendants spreading out after the Flood.  Marvin Lubenow's definition sets the terms:  "there are no creatures past or present who would qualify for the genus Homo, or “true humans,” other than descendants of Adam."13  On what these people were, the model does well.  The Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred with our ancestors and carried our fused chromosome 2, the Middle Pleistocene people made spears and joined timbers, and erectus made fire and crossed the sea.  It does worst at the small-brained edge, where its own writers place the same skulls on both sides of the line.  On time, every species is dated at about 7 to 650 times the years since the Flood by methods that agree where they meet, and Marcus Ross, Peter Brummel and Todd Wood concede that "none of the dating methods have a widely accepted method of recalibrating to a creationist timescale."9

Part 3: Ape or human? How creationists sort the fossils

Ape or Human? How Creationists Sort the Fossils puts the placements of nine young-earth writers and groups, across fifteen groups of fossils, in one table.  Eight rows are unanimous among the writers who place them, and two writers who both place a fossil agree about seven times in ten.  The seven split rows are the mosaic fossils, and on habilis alone eight writers give four answers;  the writers have changed their minds at least eight times since 2005.  The split follows the bones weighed:  skull-and-tooth statistics put habilis, rudolfensis, sediba and naledi with the humans, while the skeleton below the neck pulls sediba back out and blurs the rest.  Missing data does not explain it, because naledi, known from at least 15 individuals and 1,550 specimens, is disputed while thinner taxa are not.  The mainstream argues over the same fossils, but over a genus name on a tree everyone accepts;  the young-earth writers argue over whether one skeleton is an ape or a descendant of Adam, which is Jim Foley's point.2

Part 4: Brain size and the order of the fossils

Brain Size and the Order of the Fossils tests the pattern across all the dated skulls.  In Andrew Du and colleagues' table of 94 dated skulls, brain volume rises by a factor of about 1.5 every million years with no species names used, and the younger skull is larger in 91 percent of the 3,428 pairs whose date ranges do not overlap.67  It is a rising ceiling, not a rising floor:  small brains go on late, in naledi and the hobbit, while large brains are missing early except for one skull, Yunxian 2, redated in 2026 to about 1.77 million years.14  About half of the rise follows body size.  Wood, Ross, Brummel and Wood, Christopher Rupe and John Sanford, and Line all read the order as a sequence in post-Flood history, and none of their proposals predicts it.  Priced, brain growth inside one human kind needs selection as strong as laboratory breeding of mice, sustained in every population, and the alternative needs large-brained people to have been at most about one in seven of the early dead.

Part 5: Which article to read

Fossil or question Article
Sahelanthropus, Orrorin, Ardipithecus and "Ardi" Sahelanthropus, Orrorin, and Ardipithecus
Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, the Laetoli footprints, Rupe's "Lucy was human" Lucy and Australopithecus afarensis
The Taung child, Australopithecus africanus, Little Foot, the cave dates The South African Australopiths
Australopithecus sediba from Malapa Australopithecus sediba
The robust australopiths Paranthropus
The rank of the ape-human gap, how reliable hominin family trees are Lucy and the Pre-Human Hominins
Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, skull KNM-ER 1470, the KBS Tuff Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis
Homo erectus, the Turkana Boy, Dmanisi, Java and Peking Homo erectus
Homo heidelbergensis, Kabwe, Sima de los Huesos, Harbin and the other Middle Pleistocene people The Middle Pleistocene Muddle, with its children on the dates and the creationist literature
Homo naledi from Rising Star Homo naledi and the Rising Star Claims, Homo naledi: The Date, Homo naledi: Burial, Engravings, and Fire
The Flores "hobbit" and Homo luzonensis Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis, The Disease Proposals, Island Dwarfing and the Small Brain
Neanderthals, Denisovans, interbreeding Neanderthals, Denisovans, Archaic Admixture
Jebel Irhoud, Omo, Misliya, Herto The Oldest Homo sapiens
How the genus Homo is dated, and the young-earth model of dispersal after the Flood and Babel The Genus Homo
How young-earth writers decide which fossils were human, and baraminology Ape or Human? How Creationists Sort the Fossils
Why brains get larger as the fossils get younger Brain Size and the Order of the Fossils

Objections and responses

  1. "Creationists cannot agree which fossils are human, so their gap is imaginary." The disagreement is real and it is confined to one band. At both ends every young-earth writer who states a view agrees, and Wood's statistics find clusters with a gap between them. But the gap falls lower than most creationists expected, it moves when the skeleton is scored, and the writers have not narrowed their disagreement as better fossils were found. The skeptic is right about the middle and wrong about the ends.
  2. "The mainstream disagrees about the same fossils, so the disagreement proves nothing." It disagrees about the same fossils, and some leading workers would move habilis and rudolfensis out of Homo. But that dispute is over a genus name on a tree both sides of it accept. The young-earth dispute is over a line its model says is wide, and that is a heavier cost.
  3. "The dates are wrong, so the order and the compression do not matter." No young-earth source found here names a faulty input to any of the measurements, and Ross, Brummel and Wood say no method has an accepted creationist recalibration.9 The order of the fossils in the rock needs no clock at all. Wood wrote in 2010 that any post-Babel model "must account for" it,1 and none yet does.
  4. "The australopiths were only apes, so nothing here bears on human evolution." They were apes in brain and much of the body, and they walked upright. On both the mainstream and Wood's accounts the gap between them and Homo is genus-level inside one family, the rank at which creationists accept common ancestry for cats and dogs. The young-earth case has to rest on what changes across that gap, a brain roughly three times larger and a reshaped hand, shoulder and foot, not on its rank.
  5. "Brain size only rises because fossils were named Homo for their brains." Brain size was one of the working criteria for Homo. But the rise shows up with every species name removed, so the naming does not make the order.

Issues and unanswered questions

  1. No young-earth writer has published a model that predicts the order of the fossils in the rock, or a proposal for sped-up decay after the Flood that would let the dates fit.
  2. No young-earth writer has applied one stated rule, by trait list, brain against body, or cluster, to all fifteen groups of fossils. Until someone does, the rule-based placements cannot be checked.
  3. Yunxian 2's 2026 date, if it holds, is the first large brain early in the record. More finds like it would be the evidence the young-earth "variation, not progress" reading needs.
  4. Where the Flood boundary falls in these rocks is not settled among young-earth geologists. Jake Hebert puts it "high or higher than the Mid-Pleistocene," which would make many hominin layers Flood deposits, against the writers who put every hominin after the Flood, as The Genus Homo reports.15
  5. The mainstream's oldest hominins are known from few bones, and its family trees rest on a method that failed a controlled test. New skeletons, not new trees, would settle the bottom of the record.

Verdict

The young-earth model is right about what the ends of the hominin record were.  The australopiths, Lucy among them, were small-brained apes that walked upright, and young-earth baraminology agrees with mainstream anatomy that they were not human.  Erectus, the Middle Pleistocene people, the Neanderthals, the Denisovans and the earliest Homo sapiens were people, and the genetic evidence of interbreeding supports the young-earth reading where it can be tested.

Between them lies a band of mosaic fossils, habilis, rudolfensis, sediba, naledi, the hobbit and the Luzon bones, which young-earth writers place on both sides of their line.  That is the skeptic's strongest point in this section.  The best young-earth answer is Wood's:  a human kind more varied than creationists had said, including people with brains near 500 cc and australopith-like bodies.  It is coherent, and it gives up the promised "unbridgeable morphological gap."

The young-earth model has no answer yet on time or order.  The dates run from about 7 to about 900 times the years since the Flood, and higher for the oldest forms, and brain size rises with date across the record.  Its own best writers concede both problems.  The honest young-earth position is that these were apes and humans, the humans were more varied than expected, and their dates and their order in the rock are unsolved.

Sources

  1. 1.

    Wood, Todd Charles.  “Baraminological Analysis Places Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Australopithecus sediba in the Human Holobaramin.”  Answers Research Journal 3:71–90.  May 5, 2010.  The founding paper of hominin statistical baraminology, by the young-earth biologist who developed the method.  Wood re-analysed eight published skull-and-tooth character tables, compiled by mainstream researchers, and found habilis, rudolfensis and sediba grouped with Homo and apart from the other australopiths and the apes.  It also surveys earlier creationist placements and lists its own weaknesses.

    1. 1a.

      Section Abstract:  The analysis divides hominins into as many as four holobaramins:  genus Homo including Australopithecus sediba; genus Paranthropus; Australopithecus africanus; and a fourth group consisting of Gorilla, Pan, Australopithecus afarensis and Australopithecus garhi.  Wood says the results.  “tentatively confirm the common creationist claim that fossil hominids can be divided into human and non-human categories”.  and that, in contrast to many creationist claims, H. habilis, H. rudolfensis and.  “most surprisingly”.  Au. sediba belong in the human holobaramin. ↩

    2. 1b.

      Page 86:  “Third, the dispersal of the human population from Babel would presumably have been led by H. habilis and H. rudolfensis, specimens of which appear stratigraphically lower than any other human species.”  “Global distribution was achieved only by Homo sapiens, the stratigraphically-highest of the major human species”.  “Any model of post-Babel distribution must account for the appearance and disappearance of these human species in stratigraphic order.” ↩ ↩

  2. 2.

    Foley, Jim.  “Comparison of all skulls.”  TalkOrigins Archive, Fossil Hominids FAQ.  Oct 28, 2008.  The standard skeptic's statement of the argument this article tests.  Foley, who ran the Fossil Hominids FAQ, tabulated how a dozen creationist sources from 1976 to 2005 classified six well-known skulls (KNM-ER 1813, Java Man, Peking Man, KNM-ER 1470, KNM-ER 3733 and the Turkana Boy) and found at least one dissent on every skull.  Mirror:  Archive.org

    1. 2a.

      Section text below the table:  “It could be pointed out that evolutionists also disagree on how fossils should be classified, which species they belong to, etc.  True enough.  But according to evolutionary thinking, these fossils come from a number of closely related species intermediate between apes and humans.  If this is so, we would expect to find that some of them are hard to classify, and we do.”  “Creationists, on the other hand, assert that apes and humans are separated by a wide gap.  If this is true, deciding on which side of that gap individual fossils lie should be trivially easy.  Clearly, that is not the case.” ↩ ↩

  3. 3.

    Line, Peter.  “Fossil evidence for alleged apemen—Part 1:  the genus Homo.”  Journal of Creation 19(1):22–32.  Apr 2005.  A survey of every fossil species placed in Homo, by Creation Ministries International's principal writer on human fossils.  It sorts each into human or extinct ape, calls habilis an invalid taxon, and puts 1470 on the human side, a view Line reversed in 2013.

    1. 3a.

      Page 22:  “Therefore, all the supposed apemen belong either to the genus Homo, and are descendants of Adam and Eve, or they belong to extinct apes.”  Page 22, abstract:  “The differences in morphological features of the fossil species included in Homo, excluding the invalid taxon Homo habilis, are believed to represent, among other factors, genetic variation within the one human kind.” ↩

    2. 3b.

      Page 24:  “Using the rule of logic, if fossils attributed to erectus were not those of ‘apemen’, but fully human, then the case for human evolution essentially collapses, as there is an unbridgeable morphological gap between the australopithecine apes and erectus humans, with no missing links in between.” ↩

  4. 4.

    Gunz, Philipp et al.  “Australopithecus afarensis endocasts suggest ape-like brain organization and prolonged brain growth.”  Science Advances 6(14):eaaz4729.  2020.  A study of eight fossil skulls of Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy's species, scanned with conventional and synchrotron CT (X-ray scanning that builds a three-dimensional picture).  The authors read brain organisation from the imprints that the brain's folds leave on the inside of the skull, and estimated brain growth by combining new volume estimates with age estimates for two infants.  The method is synchrotron imaging plus geometric-morphometric reconstruction, which is why these figures supersede earlier estimates.  It finds ape-like brain organisation with no features derived toward humans, and protracted brain growth.  The article uses it for the best endocranial volumes available and for its finding on brain organisation.

    1. 4a.

      Measured endocranial volumes.  A.L. 288-1 (Lucy):  mean 388 ml, range 365–417.  A.L. 822-1:  382 ml.  A.L. 333-45:  488 ml.  A.L. 444-2:  522 ml.  Adult A. afarensis average:  445 ml, SD 60 (standard deviation, a measure of spread), range 365–526.  DIK-1-1 (Selam), infant:  275 ml corrected, 237 ml unreconstructed.  Comparative sample:  Pan troglodytes adults, N = 240, mean 369 ml, SD 37.  Excluding the geologically younger A.L. 444-2 drops the adult afarensis average to 420 ml. ↩

  5. 5.

    Wood, Todd Charles.  “An Evaluation of Homo naledi and "Early" Homo from a Young-Age Creationist Perspective.”  Journal of Creation Theology and Science Series B:  Life Sciences 6:14–30.  2016.  Wood's second hominin analysis, on a larger skull-and-tooth table that includes naledi.  It repeats the 2010 result, places naledi with Homo, and concludes that creationists had underestimated how variable the human kind was.

    1. 5a.

      Page 21:  “The present results show the same correlations, including Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis.”  Page 22:  “Consequently, if the present study is correct in its conclusions, young-age creationists have seriously underestimated the variability of the human holobaramin.” ↩

  6. 6.

    Du, Andrew et al.  “Pattern and process in hominin brain size evolution are scale-dependent.”  Proceedings of the Royal Society B 285:20172738.  Feb 21, 2018.  A statistical study of 94 dated fossil skulls from 3.2 to 0.5 million years, from Bernard Wood's group at George Washington University.  It fits six models of change to brain size over time, finds steady increase the best, and splits the increase into change inside lineages and change from species appearing and dying out.  Its per-skull table, with every published volume and the source of each date, is the main data set of this article.  Mirror:  PMC ↩ ↩ ↩

  7. 7.

    Calculated in Brain Size and the Order of the Fossils from Du and colleagues' Table S1 of 94 skulls,6 taking each skull's volume as the mean of its published estimates and its date as the published mean or the midpoint of its range.  Least-squares fit:  log10 volume = 3.117 − 0.175 × age in millions of years, r² = 0.770.  Since 10^0.175 = 1.50, volume rises by about half every million years.  Of the 3,428 pairs of skulls whose date ranges do not overlap, the younger skull has the larger brain in 3,129, which is 91.3 percent. ↩ ↩

  8. 8.

    Baumgardner, John R.  101 Questions and Answers Concerning Catastrophic Plate Tectonics.  Self-published.  Apr 2012.  The author of catastrophic plate tectonics answers questions put by reviewers of young-earth Flood models.  This article uses only his split of radioactive decay between Creation Week and the Flood.

    1. 8a.

      Section Q76:  “This first episode accounts for up to as much as roughly 3.7 billion years' worth (at presently observed rates) of nuclear decay products in the earth's pre-Flood rocks.”  “Among the lines of evidence for up to about 600 million years' worth of nuclear decay (at presently observed rates) during the Flood cataclysm, are the presence of abundant radiohalos, both from uranium and polonium, as well as high concentrations of fission tracks in crystals in volcanic tuffs and in granitic rocks”. ↩

  9. 9.

    Ross, Marcus R. et al.  “Human History from Adam to Abraham:  Integrating Paleoanthropology with a Young-Age Creation Perspective.”  Proceedings of the International Conference on Creationism 9:66–87.  2023.  The fullest recent young-earth treatment of the human fossil record, presented at the movement's main technical conference by three young-earth scientists including Todd Wood of Core Academy of Science.  It sorts fossils into human and non-human by signs of advanced behaviour and places all of them after the Flood.

    1. 9a.

      Page 75:  “Such ephemeral remains would not survive the cataclysm of a global Flood.  These general considerations strongly suggest that all hominin remains are post-Flood.”  The remains meant are "hearths, stone tool manufacturing sites, animal bone deposits, deliberate stone arrangements," named in the sentence before. ↩ ↩ ↩

    2. 9b.

      Page 75:  “as young-age creationists, we believe that conventional dating methods that reveal tens of thousands or millions of years are interpreted incorrectly as absolute dates. … Other radiometric methods are still under investigation, and none of the dating methods have a widely accepted method of recalibrating to a creationist timescale.” ↩ ↩

  10. 10.

    Hardy and Carter put the Flood "certainly between 3386 bc and 2256 bc",16 which is 3,386 + 2,026 − 1 = 5,411 and 2,256 + 2,026 − 1 = 4,281 years before 2026, since there is no year zero.  Each range divides the youngest age for a group by 5,411 and the oldest by 4,281.  Australopithecus afarensis, 3.85 to 2.95 million years:12  2,950,000 ÷ 5,411 = 545 and 3,850,000 ÷ 4,281 = 899, about 550 to 900.  The genus Homo is worked the same way in The Genus Homo:  its lowest figure is a radiocarbon age for the last Neanderthals, 39,260 ÷ 5,411 = 7.3, and its highest the oldest jaw put in Homo, 2,800,000 ÷ 4,281 = 654.  The oldest claimed hominins, older than Lucy's species, give higher factors still.  These are the least compression a young-earth reading needs, because its writers place all of these people and animals after the Flood.9  The child articles' own figures differ a little where they divide by 4,350 or 4,500 years. ↩ ↩

  11. 11.

    Collard, Mark, and Bernard Wood.  “How reliable are human phylogenetic hypotheses?”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97(9):5003–5006.  2000.  A genuine controlled experiment that tests craniodental cladistics, the method that sorts species into family-tree groups (clades) by shared features and is the standard method for placing fossil hominins.  That method had never been externally validated, because for fossils there is no independent answer to check against, so the authors applied identical methods to equivalent craniodental data from two groups of living higher primates, the hominoids (apes) and papionins (baboons, mangabeys and macaques), whose molecular phylogenies are known and robust.  The article uses it because it shows that skull-based trees can give strong support to relationships that the molecular trees reject.

    1. 11a.

      Measured results.  The hominoid analysis correctly placed Hylobates as the earliest-branching hominoid, but grouped Homo with Pongo in one clade and Pan with Gorilla in the other, and the false Pan–Gorilla clade was supported by four more putative synapomorphies (shared features treated as evidence of common descent) than the true Pan–Homo clade.  In the bootstrap tests, a resampling check of how firmly each clade is supported, none of the clades supported at 70% or above was compatible with the molecular cladograms: a false (Gorilla, Pan, Pongo) clade at 95%; a false (Gorilla, Pongo) clade at 73%; in the papionins a false (Cercocebus, Macaca, baboon) clade at 98%; and from the hominoid qualitative data a clade incorrectly linking Gorilla and Pan at 92%. ↩ ↩

  12. 12.

    Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Human Origins Program.  Human Origins species pages.  2026.  Retrieved Aug 3, 2026.  Section Sahelanthropus tchadensis species page:  “The first (and, so far, only) fossils of Sahelanthropus are nine cranial specimens from northern Chad.”  An online species database from a museum that summarizes the fossils of each species.  It is a secondary source, and the article uses it only for specimen counts, which are the kind of claim such a database is built to carry.

    1. 12a.

      Section Australopithecus afarensis species page:  “paleoanthropologists have uncovered remains from more than 300 individuals”.  The page says these remains span about 3.85 to 2.95 million years on the mainstream scale.  Sites named: Hadar, Dikika, Laetoli, and additionally Woranso-Mille, Maka, Fejej, Belohdelie and Koobi Fora. ↩ ↩

  13. 13.

    Lubenow, Marvin L.  Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils.  Baker Books, Grand Rapids.  Revised edition.  2004.  The most-read young-earth book on human fossils, first published in 1992 and revised in 2004.  It sorts the fossils into australopiths, which it calls extinct primates, and true humans, from erectus to the Neanderthals, and it calls habilis a mixture of the two.

    1. 13a.

      Page 30:  “Homo. Humans are the only living forms in the genus Homo. Biblically, there are no creatures past or present who would qualify for the genus Homo, or “true humans,” other than descendants of Adam.”  From the book's opening account of how humans are classified. ↩

  14. 14.

    Tu, Hua et al.  “The oldest in situ Homo erectus crania in eastern Asia:  The Yunxian site dates to ~1.77 Ma.”  Science Advances 12(8):eady2270.  Feb 20, 2026.  A cosmogenic aluminium-beryllium burial dating study of the gravels in the layer that yielded the Yunxian skulls in central China.  Nine of ten quartz clasts fall on one line and give about 1.77 million years, against the 0.8 to 1.1 million years of earlier palaeomagnetic and tooth dates.  If it holds, the large Yunxian 2 skull is the oldest large brain known.  Mirror:  PMC

    1. 14a.

      Section Results:  “For the sample set C3, 9 of the 10 26Al and 10Be concentrations yield an isochron age of 1.77 ± 0.08 Ma”.  Section Discussion:  “The set C3 was taken from the layer where the hominin crania were unearthed”.  Section Introduction:  “Given this range of dates, Yunxian has been widely cited as 0.8 to 1.0 Ma”.  The total uncertainty is ±0.11 million years;  the dated section lies about 75 m from where the first two skulls were found. ↩

  15. 15.

    Hebert, Jake.  “Late Pleistocene body size reduction:  evidence of a post-Flood decline in longevity?”  Journal of Creation 38(1):60–66.  Mar 2024 (edition of 2025).  A young-earth paper arguing that animals and people shrank after the Flood as lifespans fell.  It is cited here only for where its author puts the boundary between Flood and post-Flood rocks.

    1. 15a.

      “There is very strong evidence for a 'high' Flood/post-Flood boundary in the rocks; generally speaking, high or higher than the Mid-Pleistocene.”  “For this reason, this study confines itself primarily to evidence of body size reduction that occurred, by evolutionary reckoning, in the Late Pleistocene or Holocene.” ↩

  16. 16.

    Hardy, Chris, and Robert Carter.  “The biblical minimum and maximum age of the earth.”  Journal of Creation 28(2):89–96.  2014.  A young-earth paper in Creation Ministries International's journal that works out the earliest and latest dates the biblical numbers allow for creation and the Flood, across the Masoretic, Samaritan and Septuagint texts and a long or short sojourn in Egypt.

    1. 16a.

      Page 96:  “The Flood probably occurred between 2600 bc and 2300 bc, but certainly between 3386 bc and 2256 bc (table 5).” ↩