The Genus Homo

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. 1a.

   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. ↩ ↩

2. 1b.

   Page 151:  “In spite of one hundred years of being considered 'animals' and 'missing links,' the Tasmanians continually passed the one and only valid test proving that they were fully human—the test of interfertility with other humans.”  The passage is about the Tasmanians.  The article applies the same test to Neanderthals. ↩

3. 1c.

   Page 299:  “The fossil taxon known as Homo habilis is simply a gang of australopithecines in disguise.”  The chapter section that follows is headed "Homo habilis: The Little Man Who Isn't There." ↩

4. 1d.

   Page 120:  “Homo habilis is a flawed taxon because it is a mixture of some fossils that might be human (KNM-ER 1470, 1481, and 1590) and other fossils that are definitely not human.” ↩

5. 1e.

   Page 127:  “My own conclusion is that Homo erectus and Neandertal are actually the same:  Homo erectus is on the lower end, with regard to size, of a continuum that includes Homo erectus, early Homo sapiens, and Neandertal.” ↩

6. 1f.

   Page 18:  “Although the literature speaks of the human fossils as being hundreds of thousands or even millions of years old, as a young-earth creationist, I do not accept those dates.  In fact, I will demonstrate that they are nothing but science fiction.”  The scanned text reads a symbol for "I" in the second sentence. ↩

7. 1g.

   Page 176:  “In contrast, all of the premises of the African Eve Model are falsified by the fossil record except the second one, which is falsified by the Genesis record.  Humans did not first appear in Africa.  After the Genesis flood, the first humans appeared in Turkey or Armenia.” ↩

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. 2a.

   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. 2b.

   Page 81:  “Most surprising, three controversial taxa appear to be unequivocally grouped with the homininans: Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Australopithecus sediba.”  “Despite these contradictory opinions, the present results strongly support the classification of all three species in the human holobaramin.” ↩

3. 2c.

   Page 83:  “Though the present research unequivocally groups H. habilis, H. rudolfensis, and “Au.” sediba with other species of Homo, this should certainly not be considered definitive.”  Page 84:  “It is possible that inclusion of postcranial characters in future baraminological analyses might support the separation of H. habilis and “Au.” sediba from the human holobaramin.” ↩

4. 2d.

   Section Discussion, Biblical and Cultural Context:  “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. Specimens of both of these species (and of “Au.” sediba) are known only from Africa, whereas the erectus-like species (H. erectus sensu stricto, H. ergaster, and the Dmanisi hominids) are the next stratigraphically and the first human species to disperse across the Old World.” ↩ ↩

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. 3a.

   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.” ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 3b.

   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. ↩ ↩

3. 3c.

   Page 66, section Abstract:  “The historical setting of these remains is post-Flood on the basis of geological indicators, evidence of in situ habitation, and the provenance of source rocks employed as tools.  Furthermore, given the universal perspective presented in Genesis 11, the dispersal of humans most likely occurs post-Babel.”  “provisional human status to “Early Homo” (H. habilis and H. rudolfensis), and uncertain status to Au. sediba.” ↩ ↩

4. 3d.

   Page 76:  “One possibility is that the Tower of Babel may be a later innovation that took place only in Mesopotamia and involved only H. sapiens.”  “A second possible explanation is that all globally-distributed hominin remains are indeed post-Babel”. ↩

5. 3e.

   Page 77:  “our model implies that all of these other human forms, including widespread Neandertals and H. erectus, emerged after the Flood, dispersed after Babel, and were replaced by H. sapiens prior to the time of Abraham.” ↩

6. 3f.

   Page 76:  “The disadvantage of this model is that it gives no account for either the late appearance of H. sapiens in the fossil record or the voluminous genetic and cultural evidence of H. sapiens coming to dominate and replace all other contemporaneous human forms.”  Said of the second explanation, a remote Babel with every hominin after it, which the authors go on to prefer. ↩ ↩ ↩

7. 3g.

   Page 77:  “the oddness of H. floresiensis and its location on Flores Island may well be explained in part by inbreeding”. ↩

8. 3h.

   Page 74:  “If the fossils included under this name do represent a single hominin form, then the baraminology clustering studies have never failed to include them among the humans. If, as some creationists contend, H. habilis represents a mix of Australopithecus and Homo remains, their status is less clear. To resolve these questions, a careful examination of the fossils (preferably the originals or high-resolution scans) ought to be made and studies of baraminology with artificially mixed taxa ought to be undertaken. This work also should entail skull KNM ER 1470 and associated remains (referred to H. rudolfensis). Skeletal remains of H. habilis are associated with only Oldowan tools, giving limited support from cultural artifacts.” ↩

Hartwig-Scherer, Sigrid.  “Apes or Ancestors?  Interpretations of the Hominid Fossil Record Within Evolutionary & Basic Type Biology.”  Mere Creation:  Science, Faith & Intelligent Design, 212–235.  InterVarsity Press.  Edited by William A. Dembski.  1998.  A chapter in an intelligent-design collection by a German creationist anthropologist.  It treats the hominins as members of created "basic types", defined by the ability to hybridise, and judges fossils by anatomy because hybridisation cannot be tested on them.

1. 4a.

   Page 216:  “A given set of species belong to a basic type if they are connected directly or indirectly through hybridization. Hybridization data are available only for limited cases. In other cases supplementary membership criteria, such as morphological, behavioral or ontogenetic evidence, have to be used. For fossils, the morphological data base is the only evidence available.” ↩

Wood, Bernard, and Mark Collard.  “The human genus.”  Science 284(5411):65–71.  Apr 2, 1999.  A review by two leading palaeoanthropologists of how fossils are assigned to Homo.  It lists the working criteria, brain size among them, rejects each as unsatisfactory, and proposes moving habilis and rudolfensis to Australopithecus.  It is the mainstream source for the charge that brain size was used to define the genus.

1. 5a.

   Page 66:  “Regardless of any formal definitions, in practice fossil hominin species are assigned to Homo on the basis of one or more out of four criteria. The first is an absolute brain size of 600 cm3 (10).”  “It is now evident, however, that none of these criteria is satisfactory. The Cerebral Rubicon is problematic because absolute cranial capacity is of questionable biological significance (11).” ↩

Roksandic, Mirjana et al.  “Resolving the "muddle in the middle":  The case for Homo bodoensis sp. nov.”  Evolutionary Anthropology 31(1):20–29.  2022.  The naming proposal, published online in October 2021.  It asks that Homo heidelbergensis and Homo rhodesiensis be dropped and a new species founded on the Bodo cranium;  no new fossil or new analysis is reported.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 6a.

   Page 22:  “When it comes to Middle Pleistocene hominin evolution, we identify two main options, with the understanding that other possibilities may exist:  (1) we could consider entire Pleistocene Homo fossils as a single lineage of H. sapiens with separate subspecies and/or chronospecies, or (2) we could consider the observed morphological variation as taxonomically meaningful within the “practical” species concept, without assuming that they were biological species and therefore not interfertile.”  Option 1 is footnoted to Wolpoff, Thorne, Jelínek and Zhang's "The case for sinking Homo erectus" (1994), to Wolpoff's Paleoanthropology (1999), and to Hawks (2013).  The paper goes on with option 2 and gives no argument against option 1. ↩

2. 6b.

   Page 26, section Discussion and conclusions:  “While not a true species in the strict biological sense (since there is strong and growing evidence of migrations as well as gene flow between these diverged groups) this newly defined taxon cuts through the obfuscating and inconsistent use of improperly named and defined Middle Pleistocene hominins in Europe and Africa”. ↩

Stringer, Chris.  “The status of Homo heidelbergensis (Schoetensack 1908).”  Evolutionary Anthropology 21(3):101–107.  2012.  The standard statement of the case for keeping Homo heidelbergensis, by the Natural History Museum's palaeoanthropologist, and the paper that asked for the Sima de los Huesos fossils to be taken out of it.  Table 2 lists his hypodigm:  Mauer, Petralona, Arago, Vértesszöllös, Broken Hill, Bodo, Elandsfontein, Ndutu and Kapthurin, with queried entries including Ceprano, Dali, Jinniushan and Yunxian.

1. 7a.

   Page 105:  “Such gene flow is bound to raise serious issues about the validity of specific distinctions between heidelbergensis and its daughter species, particularly as such hybridization events may even have occurred in Africa.  Nevertheless, on morphological grounds, I believe that a pragmatic case can still be made for such species distinctions, especially bearing in mind the extensive evidence for interspecific hybridization even in living primates.” ↩

Arsuaga, J. L. et al.  “Neandertal roots:  Cranial and chronological evidence from Sima de los Huesos.”  Science 344(6190):1358–1363.  Jun 20, 2014.  The "2014 skulls paper" by the excavating team, thirty authors.  Seventeen crania, seven of them new, from one layer;  mean capacity 1,232 cm³ for fifteen;  a re-dating to about 430 ka;  and the formal proposal to remove the sample from Homo heidelbergensis.  The dating section also reports a bear tooth at 261 +26/-25 ka, read as a minimum, and two ESR ages on quartz of 0.9 to 1.5 Ma, read as maxima.  Mirror:  Cnrs.hal.science

1. 8a.

   Page 1362:  “We argue that the SH p-deme is sufficiently different from that of H. neanderthalensis so as to be considered a separate taxon.  Whether this difference should be recognized on the specific or subspecific level is currently an open question.”  A p-deme is a palaeo-deme, a local breeding population recognised in the fossil record. ↩

Green, Richard E. et al.  “A draft sequence of the Neandertal genome.”  Science 328(5979):710–722.  May 7, 2010.  A genome paper that sequenced a draft Neanderthal genome of more than 4 billion nucleotides from three bones from Vindija Cave in Croatia.  Its model fit gave the estimate of 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal DNA in people outside Africa, and it counted 78 changes to protein-coding genes that became fixed in modern humans but not in Neanderthals.  The article cites it for those two findings and for the draft genome itself.

1. 9a.

   Section Implications for modern human origins:  “The data suggest that between 1 and 4% of the genomes of people in Eurasia are derived from Neandertals.”  The estimate assumes gene flow 50,000 to 80,000 years ago. ↩

Line, Peter.  “Ancient Chinese skull.”  Creation 46(1):46–47.  Jan 2024.  A magazine piece on the Hualongdong skull HLD 6.

1. 10a.

   Paragraph 4:  “However, this does not suggest that more branches (or species) need to be added to the false evolutionary human family tree.  Rather, it indicates that the ‘archaic’ humans (e.g., Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus) and ‘modern’ humans were interbreeding with each other.  Thus, by definition they were the same biological species.”  The piece has no subheadings.  The paragraph count leaves out the two indented quotations. ↩

Lordkipanidze, David et al.  “A Complete Skull from Dmanisi, Georgia, and the Evolutionary Biology of Early Homo.”  Science 342(6156):326–331.  Oct 18, 2013.  A research paper that describes Skull 5 (D4500/D2600), the smallest of the five skulls found at Dmanisi in Georgia, with a braincase of 546 cubic centimeters.  The authors argue that the variation among these early Homo fossils lies within one lineage, which they name H. erectus.  The article uses it for the small brain and for the excavators' own case about variation.

1. 11a.

   Page 330:  “Evidence from skull 5 and the other four Dmanisi specimens indicates that cranial shape variation within early Homo paleodemes was similar in mode and range to that seen within modern Pan demes.” ↩

2. 11b.

   Page 330:  “morphological diversity in the African fossil Homo record around 1.8 Ma probably reflects variation between demes of a single evolving lineage, which is appropriately named H. erectus.” ↩

3. 11c.

   Page 327:  “The ECV of skull 5 (546 cm3) represents the smallest of the Dmanisi sample (skulls 1 to 4: 601 to 730 cm3), and it is at the lower end of variation of the H. habilis hypodigm [509 to 687 cm3].” ↩ ↩

Schwartz, Jeffrey H. et al.  “Comment on 'A Complete Skull from Dmanisi, Georgia, and the Evolutionary Biology of Early Homo'.”  Science 344(6182):360a.  Apr 24, 2014.  A short comment in Science by three critics of the Dmanisi paper.  They argue that the five Dmanisi skulls show more than one species, and that the teeth, jaw and skull validate an earlier name, H. georgicus.  The article uses it to show that the lumping claim was challenged in Science and is still disputed.

1. 12a.

   Section Abstract:  “However, dental, mandibular, and cranial morphologies all suggest taxic diversity and, in particular, validate the previously named H. georgicus.” ↩

Meyer, Matthias et al.  “Nuclear DNA sequences from the Middle Pleistocene Sima de los Huesos hominins.”  Nature 531(7595):504–507.  2016.  Nuclear DNA from two Sima specimens, which places the population on the Neanderthal side, confirming the 2014 skull-based reassignment.

1. 13a.

   Page 504, section Abstract:  “Here we recover nuclear DNA sequences from two specimens, which show that the Sima de los Huesos hominins were related to Neanderthals rather than to Denisovans, indicating that the population divergence between Neanderthals and Denisovans predates 430,000 years ago.  A mitochondrial DNA recovered from one of the specimens shares the previously described relationship to Denisovan mitochondrial DNAs, suggesting, among other possibilities, that the mitochondrial DNA gene pool of Neanderthals turned over later in their history.” ↩

Welker, Frido et al.  “The dental proteome of Homo antecessor.”  Nature 580(7802):235–238.  Apr 9, 2020.  Mass spectrometry of enamel from one Homo antecessor molar fragment, ATD6-92, by a Copenhagen-led team with the Atapuerca excavators.  Seven proteins, 22 percent of sites, one substitution unique to the specimen;  the last authors are Bermúdez de Castro, Willerslev and Cappellini.  Quotations are located by section.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 14a.

   Page 235, section Abstract:  “We demonstrate that Homo antecessor is a close sister lineage to subsequent Middle and Late Pleistocene hominins such as modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans.  This placement implies that the modernlike face of Homo antecessor may have a considerably deep ancestry in the genus Homo, and that the Neanderthal cranial morphology represents a derived form.”  Section Main text:  “In these trees, the Homo antecessor sequence represents a sister taxon closely related to, but not part of, the group composed of Late Pleistocene hominins for which molecular data is available”. ↩

Fu, Qiaomei et al.  “Denisovan mitochondrial DNA from dental calculus of the >146,000-year-old Harbin cranium.”  Cell 188(15):3919–3926.e9.  Jul 24, 2025.  Mitochondrial DNA recovered from tartar on the Harbin skull's teeth, after a tooth and the petrous bone yielded none.  Pääbo's laboratory.  The paper states its own limit:  a small amount of mitochondrial DNA and no nuclear DNA.  Mirror:  Hdl.handle.net

1. 15a.

   Page 3919, section Summary:  “Although no DNA could be retrieved from a tooth or the petrous bone, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) could be isolated from dental calculus.  The mtDNA falls within Denisovan mtDNA variation and is related to an mtDNA branch carried by early Denisovan individuals in southern Siberia, previously observed in Denisova Cave.” ↩

Zollikofer, Christoph P. E. et al.  “Dental evidence for extended growth in early Homo from Dmanisi.”  Nature 635:906–911.  Nov 13, 2024.  A Nature research paper that used synchrotron imaging (a very bright X-ray source) to count the daily growth lines in the teeth of one subadult early Homo from Dmanisi, Georgia, who died at 11.4 years.  The teeth grew at rates like those of great apes, but the back teeth formed later than the front ones, as in humans, so the schedule mixes ape and human features.  Because it measures one child, its figures describe that individual, and the article uses it for the claim that early Homo's dental growth was not human.

1. 16a.

   Section Discussion:  “the predicted age of dental maturity (around 12.0–13.5 years) is more similar to chimpanzees and other great apes (11–13 years) than to modern humans (18–22 years).” ↩ ↩ ↩

Tocheri, Matthew W. et al.  “The Primitive Wrist of Homo floresiensis and Its Implications for Hominin Evolution.”  Science 317(5845):1743–1745.  Sep 21, 2007.  Three-dimensional shape analysis of three of LB1's wrist bones against modern humans, Neanderthals, early Homo, australopiths and African apes.  Tocheri, then at the Smithsonian, is a specialist in the primate wrist.  Six of the ten authors were members of the Liang Bua excavation team.

1. 17a.

   Page 1744:  “In modern humans, the trapezoid, capitate, and trapezium arise in the mesenchyme in essentially their adult form by the 11th week of development, long before the processes of chondrification and ossification are complete”. ↩

Kubo, Daisuke et al.  “Brain size of Homo floresiensis and its evolutionary implications.”  Proceedings of the Royal Society B 280(1760):20130338.  Jun 7, 2013.  A high-resolution micro-CT measurement of LB1's endocranial volume, 426 cc, with about 17 per cent of the surface reconstructed, followed by brain-on-body scaling from two candidate ancestors using slopes fitted across twenty Holocene human populations.  The authors note that the slope is a within-human one extrapolated below the human range.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 18a.

   Page 5:  “we conclude that the original ECV of the LB1 cranium was 426 cc with only a limited degree of error, probably within ±3 cc.” ↩ ↩

Berger, Lee R. et al.  “Homo naledi, a new species of the genus Homo from the Dinaledi Chamber, South Africa.”  eLife 4:e09560.  2015.  The type description, by the excavating team.  Describes 1,550 specimens from the Dinaledi Chamber and names the species.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 19a.

   Section Description:  “H. naledi has a range of body mass similar to small-bodied modern human populations”.  Endocranial volumes of about 560 and 465 cc for the two composite crania;  body mass 39.7 to 55.8 kg from eight femoral subtrochanteric diameters;  stature about 144.5 to 147.8 cm from one tibia, a range the paper prints as "mm", an evident misprint.  The paper lists the cranial shape and teeth as resembling early Homo, the hand, wrist, foot and lower limb as human-like, the finger bones as more curved than any australopith's, and the shoulder, trunk, pelvis and upper femur as australopith-like, and notes that within Homo only the smallest H. habilis, one H. erectus and H. floresiensis overlap the brain volumes. ↩ ↩

Neubauer, Simon et al.  “The evolution of modern human brain shape.”  Science Advances 4(1):eaao5961.  Jan 2018.  A CT study from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology of 20 fossil Homo sapiens skulls from 315,000 to 8,000 years ago, eight Neanderthals, Middle Pleistocene and Homo erectus skulls, and 89 living people, all measured by one method.  It finds that early sapiens already had brains of modern size while the shape of the brain became modern only gradually.  It supplies this article's late skulls and its living-human comparison.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 20a.

   Section Abstract:  “Our data show that, 300,000 years ago, brain size in early H. sapiens already fell within the range of present-day humans.”  Section Results:  “The endocranial volumes of early H. sapiens individuals (Jebel Irhoud 1, 1375 ± 6 ml; Jebel Irhoud 2, 1467 ± 6 ml; Omo 2, 1491 ± 4 ml) fall within the range of our samples of present-day humans (mean, 1328 ml; SD, 164 ml) and Neandertals (mean, 1450 ml; SD, 189 ml) and are considerably larger than those of our H. erectus sample (mean, 919 ml; SD, 108 ml).” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

Collard, Mark, and Bernard Wood.  “Defining the Genus Homo.”  Handbook of Paleoanthropology, 2107–2144.  Springer.  2nd edition.  Edited by Winfried Henke and Ian Tattersall.  2015.  Collard and Wood's own update of their 1999 review, weighing six newer family-tree studies.  It keeps the 1999 conclusion while conceding that the family-tree evidence on habilis and rudolfensis is weak either way.  Mirror:  Profmarkcollard.com

1. 21a.

   Page 2108:  “We find that, on balance, the available evidence still supports their suggestion that Homo should be reconfigured such that it includes H. ergaster, H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis, and H. sapiens but excludes H. habilis and H. rudolfensis.”  Page 2129:  “but only weak support for the hypothesis that H. habilis and H. rudolfensis are more closely related to H. sapiens than to the types species of any other genus.” ↩

Kimbel, William H., and Brian Villmoare.  “From Australopithecus to Homo:  the transition that wasn't.”  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371:20150248.  2016.  An essay by the leaders of the Ledi-Geraru team arguing that a genus should be defined by shared ancestry alone, so that habilis stays in Homo even though its anatomy is close to the australopiths.  It also warns how weak the links between early Homo skulls and skeletons are.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 22a.

   Section 1. Introduction:  “Biologists nearly universally agree that monophyly is the one essential criterion for grouping species in a genus.”  Section 2. The changing idea of early Homo:  “Our taxonomy first and foremost needs to reflect the underlying branching pattern”. ↩

Wood, Bernard.  “Human evolution:  Fifty years after Homo habilis.”  Nature 508:31–33.  2014.  A retrospective on the fiftieth anniversary of the naming of habilis, by one of the authors of the 1999 proposal to remove it from Homo.

1. 23a.

   Page 32:  “So, if H. habilis is added to Homo, the genus has an incoherent mishmash of features. Others disagree, but I think you have to cherry-pick the data to come to any other conclusion. My sense is that handy man should belong to its own genus, neither australopith nor human.”  A reference number after "data" is omitted. ↩

Ham, Ken.  “Did Homo Naledi Create Art and Start Fires?”  Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham Blog.  Jun 15, 2023.  Answers in Genesis's response to the 2023 preprints.

1. 24a.

   Paragraph beginning "First off, we must ask":  “If you look at the skeletal remains of Homo naledi , it’s clear that this creature was just a variety of ape.”  The space before the comma is in the original.  The post goes on to quote Answers in Genesis's 2015 list of the shoulder, finger, hip and rib-cage features. ↩

McDougall, Ian, and Francis H. Brown.  “Precise ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar geochronology for the upper Koobi Fora Formation, Turkana Basin, northern Kenya.”  Journal of the Geological Society 163(1):205–220.  2006.  Single-crystal argon-argon dates on about fifteen ash layers in the upper Koobi Fora Formation, which give the KBS Tuff its modern age.

1. 25a.

   Section Abstract:  “KBS Tuff (1.869 ± 0.021 Ma)”. ↩

Ferring, Reid et al.  “Earliest human occupations at Dmanisi (Georgian Caucasus) dated to 1.85–1.78 Ma.”  PNAS 108(26):10432–10436.  Jun 28, 2011.  A research paper that dates the Dmanisi site in Georgia.  It places the stone artifacts and animal fossils between 1.85 and 1.78 million years old, using argon-argon dating of the Masavera Basalt and magnetostratigraphy, the dating of magnetic reversals in the rock.  The article uses it for the bracketing dates of the Skull 5 site.

1. 26a.

   Page 10433:  “Here, the magnetostratigraphy and 40Ar/39Ar dating of the Masavera Basalt (4) constrain the age of stratum A deposits and the recently discovered artifact and faunal assemblages between 1.85 Ma and 1.78 Ma, the age of the Olduvai/Upper Matuyama reversal (14).” ↩ ↩

Jaubert, Jacques et al.  “Early Neanderthal constructions deep in Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France.”  Nature 534(7605):111–114.  Jun 2, 2016.  A dating study of ring-shaped structures of broken stalagmites found deep inside Bruniquel Cave in southwest France.  The authors say the regular shape of the rings, the arrangement of the broken stalagmites and several traces of fire show that people made them.  The article uses it for the age and the depth of these constructions.

1. 27a.

   Section Abstract:  “Uranium-series dating of stalagmite regrowths on the structures and on burnt bone, combined with the dating of stalagmite tips in the structures, give a reliable and replicated age of 176.5 thousand years (±2.1 thousand years), making these edifices among the oldest known well-dated constructions made by humans.” ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 27b.

   Section Abstract:  “Their presence at 336 metres from the entrance of the cave indicates that humans from this period had already mastered the underground environment, which can be considered a major step in human modernity.” ↩

Richter, Daniel et al.  “The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the origins of the Middle Stone Age.”  Nature 546:293–296.  Jun 8, 2017.  The dating paper for Jebel Irhoud:  thermoluminescence on 14 burnt flints, with the gamma dose measured in place by 47 buried dosimeters, and a new uranium-series and spin-resonance date on a human tooth.  Its Methods, Extended Data and Supplementary Information give every sample's figures and the authors' own caveats.  Mirror:  Eva.mpg.de

1. 28a.

   Page 293, section Abstract:  “A weighted average age places these Middle Stone Age artefacts and fossils at 315 ± 34 thousand years ago.  Support is obtained through the recalculated uranium series with electron spin resonance date of 286 ± 32 thousand years ago for a tooth from the Irhoud 3 hominin mandible.”  Page 295:  “The apparent ages range from 240 ± 35 ka to 378 ± 30 ka (Table 1) for the entire stratigraphy … Sample sizes are sufficient for calculating weighted average ages for layers 6 and 7 and yield ages of 302 ± 32 ka and 315 ± 34 ka, respectively.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 28b.

   Section Supplementary Information, pages 10–11:  “Because of the shared γ-dosimetry, we here consider these methods as quasi-independent and argue that the ESR data is, therefore, supporting the TL data.  Nevertheless, other independent age control would be desirable.” ↩

3. 28c.

   Tables Extended Data Table 2, panel d:  The seven layer-7 flint measurements give palaeodoses of 529 ± 53, 561 ± 53, 344 ± 19, 340 ± 26, 423 ± 25, 374 ± 30 and 442 ± 53 gray, total dose rates of 1,128 to 1,461 millionths of a gray a year, and a cosmic dose rate of 70.  The table is an image in the published file, and the figures were read from it. ↩

Shen, Guanjun et al.  “Age of Zhoukoudian Homo erectus determined with 26Al/10Be burial dating.”  Nature 458(7235):198–200.  Mar 12, 2009.  A 2009 Nature paper that dated the Zhoukoudian site, where Homo erectus fossils were found, by cosmogenic burial dating.  This method measures how far two rare isotopes that cosmic rays make in quartz have decayed since the sediment was buried.  The article uses the 0.77 million year age of the lower cultural layers, which it notes is older than the dates it compiles for the two Zhoukoudian skulls.

1. 29a.

   “The weighted mean of six meaningful age measurements, 0.77 ± 0.08 million years (Myr, mean ± s.e.m.), provides the best age estimate for lower cultural layers 7–10.” ↩

Higham, Tom et al.  “The timing and spatiotemporal patterning of Neanderthal disappearance.”  Nature 512(7514):306–309.  Aug 21, 2014.  A radiocarbon dating study of the period when Neanderthals disappeared, by Tom Higham and 55 co-authors, 56 authors in all.  Its abstract says that dating this period is hard because the radiocarbon method reaches its limit at about 50,000 years ago.  The article cites it for the dates when the Mousterian tool industry ended and for the overlap with the first modern human industries.

1. 30a.

   Section Abstract:  “We show that the Mousterian ended by 41,030-39,260 calibrated years bp (at 95.4% probability) across Europe.” ↩ ↩ ↩

Dirks, Paul H. G. M. et al.  “The age of Homo naledi and associated sediments in the Rising Star Cave, South Africa.”  eLife 6:e24231.  2017.  The dating paper, twenty authors, six methods.  eLife publishes its decision letter and the authors' response with the paper, and several quotations here are from that exchange.  The paper has no page numbers;  places are its section headings.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 31a.

   Section Results, Radiocarbon dating:  “Three weathered bone fragments of H. naledi were analysed via radiocarbon dating at Beta Analytic Inc. (Florida, USA).  Analyses indicated that no collagen was present in any of the samples and that the bone appeared possibly cremated.  This was investigated with a bone carbonate extraction technique.  Tests did not support cremation and indicated that extensive secondary CaCO3 replacement had occurred, providing ages of 33.0 ± 0.2 ka and 35.50 ± 0.16 ka for two of the fragments.  We interpret these ages to relate to late calcite precipitation in the bones that may reflect a wet period in the cave.”  The three fragments were a tibia shaft, a femur shaft and a hand or foot bone shaft, collected from the surface of Unit 3 near the excavation pit. ↩ ↩

2. 31b.

   Section Discussion, Age estimates for H. naledi and implications for hominin evolution:  “The maximum age limit of 335 ka for the H. naledi fossils relies on 80% Rn loss throughout the burial history of the fossils and is probably an over-estimate.” ↩

Petr, Martin et al.  “The evolutionary history of Neandertal and Denisovan Y chromosomes.”  bioRxiv, published as Science 369(6511):1653–1656, 25 September 2020, doi 10.1126/science.abb6460.  Mar 9, 2020.  A preprint of a genome study that sequenced the first Denisovan Y chromosomes and the Y chromosomes of three late Neanderthals from ancient bones.  It dates the split between Neanderthal and modern human Y chromosomes to about 370,000 years, well younger than the 588 thousand years that Mendez and colleagues gave in 2016.  The article cites it for that date, for the Neanderthal Y falling outside living men's Y chromosomes, and for the replacement of Neanderthal Y and mitochondrial DNA.

1. 32a.

   Page 6, lines 129–134:  “We found that the two Denisovan Y chromosomes (Denisova 4 and Denisova 8) split from the modern human lineage around 700 kya (CI: 607-833 kya for the higher coverage Denisova 8, Figure 2B, Table S7.3).  In contrast, the three Neandertal Y chromosomes split from the modern human lineage about 350 kya:  353 kya for Spy 94a (286-449 kya), 369 kya for Mezmaiskaya 2 (326-419 kya) and 339 kya for El Sidrón 1253 (275-408 kya)”. ↩ ↩

Joordens, Josephine C. A. et al.  “Improved age control on early Homo fossils from the upper Burgi Member at Koobi Fora, Kenya.”  Journal of Human Evolution 65(6):731–745.  2013.  A study of the magnetic record and strontium-isotope climate cycles in the beds below the KBS Tuff where 1470 was found.  It ties the fossils to the base of the Olduvai magnetic subchron and to the KBS Tuff date, and gives 1470 its current age by interpolating a sedimentation rate.  Page numbers below are those of the accepted manuscript.  Mirror:  Insu.hal.science

1. 33a.

   Section Magnetostratigraphy, Results, manuscript page 10:  “In the UBU section of Area 131, the base of the Olduvai chron is situated between the 30.2 and 32.0 m levels (14.0 to15.8 m below the KBS Tuff; Fig. 4a, b, c).”  Section Magnetostratigraphy, Results, manuscript page 11:  “From the base of the UBU section up to ~ 35 m below the KBS Tuff (m level 11) in Area 131 we found exclusively reversed polarities (Table 3, Fig. 4b, c).” ↩

2. 33b.

   Section Age control on hominin fossils, manuscript page 19:  “We have established that KNM-ER 1470 derives from 26 m below bC2n, 19 m below the base of the Pre-Olduvai event, and 5 m above the base of the section (reported here).”  “Our calculation results in an age of 2.058 ± 0.034 Ma for KNM-ER 1470 (Table 6).”  "bC2n" is the base of the Olduvai normal magnetic subchron;  the average sedimentation rate used is "23.0 ± 9 cm/kyr". ↩

Brumm, Adam et al.  “Age and context of the oldest known hominin fossils from Flores.”  Nature 534(7606):249–253.  Jun 9, 2016.  The dating paper for the Mata Menge hominins:  argon-argon on single crystals, zircon and glass fission-track, laser-ablation uranium-series on a hominin tooth root, and combined uranium-series and ESR on two Stegodon molars from the fossil layer.  Line numbers below are those of the authors' accepted manuscript, which is titled "Stratigraphic context and age of hominin fossils from Middle Pleistocene Flores";  the journal pagination is 249–253.  Mirror:  Strathprints.strath.ac.uk

1. 34a.

   Lines 104–108:  “At the base of this slot-trench, a thin (<30 cm-thick) fossil-bearing fluvial sandstone layer was exposed underlying a sequence of mudflow deposits (Layers Ia-f) up to 6.5 m thick. This fossiliferous sandstone, named Layer II, represents the deposit of a small stream channel that has an irregular lower bedding plane and was incised into a well-developed, consolidated paleosol with prominent root traces (Layer III).”  Lines 169–171:  “The GLM contains at least 85 crystal-rich tephra inter-beds of basaltic composition, collectively named the Piga Tephra (the lower 56 tephras are sequentially numbered PGT-1 to PGT-56).”  GLM is the Gero Limestone Member, the thin-bedded lake limestones and clays that cap the basin fill.  PGT-2, dated in the next sentence, is one of the 85. ↩

2. 34b.

   Lines 171–175:  “At Mata Menge, PGT-2 occurs 13.5 m above Layer II, and produced a 40Ar/39Ar weighted mean age of 0.65 ± 0.02 Ma from single crystal dating of hornblende (Extended Data Fig. 5). This is in accordance with the published ZFT age of a basaltic tephra inter-bed from the lower part of the GLM (0.65 ± 0.06 Ma).” ↩

3. 34c.

   Lines 186–191:  “U-series dating of the hominin tooth root independently confirms this specimen was deposited at least 0.55 Ma, whereas combined U-series/ESR indicates minimum and maximum ages of around 0.36 Ma and 0.69 Ma, respectively, for the Stegodon molars. In sum, therefore, we have used multiple dating methods to establish a secure age of ~0.70 Ma for the Layer II hominin fossils.” ↩

Hershkovitz, Israel et al.  “The earliest modern humans outside Africa.”  Science 359(6374):456–459.  Jan 26, 2018.  The description and dating of the Misliya-1 jaw, with a 62-page supplement that sets out the anatomy and each dating method.  Pages cited are the supplement's.  Mirror:  Archive.org

1. 35a.

   Section Supplementary Materials, page 18:  “The TL ages of 9 burned flints from the upper part of the EMP archaeological layer from squares close to the location of the fossil (N12, L10), yielded a calculated mean age of 179±48 ky (n=9; 2σ error)”.  “The oldest sample derived from the crust covering the maxilla itself (#6 in table S2) indicates a minimum age of 185±8 ky (2σ error) ago for Misliya-1”.  Section Supplementary Materials, pages 18–19:  “The age range for Misliya-1, calculated based on the dates directly connected with the fossil (U-Th on crust provides the minimum age and combined US-ESR on the enamel of I2 the maximum age), is between 177 ky (=U-TH 185 ky-8 ky) and 194 ky (=US-ESR 174 ky+20 ky) (2σ confidence interval, dark band in Fig. 2B).” ↩

Brown, Peter et al.  “A new small-bodied hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia.”  Nature 431(7012):1055–1061.  Oct 28, 2004.  The paper that described LB1 and named the species.  Brown, then at the University of New England, was the anatomist who cleaned and measured the skeleton;  Morwood led the excavation.  The stature and body-mass formulae are in its Supplementary Information.

1. 36a.

   Page 1055:  “It is associated with calibrated accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dates of approximately 18 kyr and bracketed by luminescence dates of 35 ± 4 kyr and 14 ± 2 kyr.”  Under the heading "Horizon." ↩

Sutikna, Thomas et al.  “Revised stratigraphy and chronology for Homo floresiensis at Liang Bua in Indonesia.”  Nature 532(7599):366–369.  Apr 21, 2016.  The correction of the Liang Bua chronology, from the 2007 to 2014 excavations, by the same team that published the original dates.  It dates the hobbit-bearing pedestal by thermoluminescence, infrared-stimulated luminescence, uranium-thorium on speleothem, laser-ablation uranium-series on the hobbit bones, argon-argon on the overlying tephra, and radiocarbon on charcoal at the top of the pedestal.  Sutikna led the Indonesian side of the excavations.  Quotations are located by the paragraph of the main text in which they sit, since the authors' manuscript is not paginated like the journal.  Mirror:  Ro.uow.edu.au

1. 37a.

   Paragraph final paragraph of the main text:  “All skeletal remains assigned to H. floresiensis are from the pedestal deposits dated to approximately 100–60 kyr ago, while stone artefacts reasonably attributable to this species range from about 190 kyr … to 50 kyr in age.”  The ellipsis stands for a reference numeral. ↩ ↩ ↩

Rizal, Yan et al.  “Last appearance of Homo erectus at Ngandong, Java, 117,000–108,000 years ago.”  Nature 577(7790):381–385.  Jan 16, 2020.  A Nature paper by Yan Rizal and colleagues that re-excavated the Ngandong site in Java and dated its fossils.  Its abstract models the Homo erectus bone bed at 117 to 108 thousand years old, and says the results rule out the extreme ages proposed earlier for the site.  The article uses it as the newest date for the site.

1. 38a.

   Section Abstract:  ka means thousands of years ago.  “Non-human fossils recovered during the re-excavation of Ngandong date to between 109 and 106 ka (uranium-series minimum) and 134 and 118 ka (US–ESR), with modelled ages of 117 to 108 thousand years (kyr) for the H. erectus bone bed, which accumulated during flood conditions.” ↩ ↩

Grün, Rainer et al.  “Dating the skull from Broken Hill, Zambia, and its position in human evolution.”  Nature 580(7803):372–375.  Apr 16, 2020.  The first direct dating of the Kabwe skull:  uranium-series by laser ablation on a piece of the skull base, with ESR on enamel for an upper limit, by the geochronologist Rainer Grün with Chris Stringer.  Quotations located by line number are from the authors' submitted manuscript and may differ in wording from the printed text;  the abstract and the figure of 299 ± 25 ka are from the published paper.

1. 39a.

   Page 372, section Abstract:  “the original site has since been completely quarried away … the cranium is often estimated to be around 500 thousand years old … Here we carried out analyses directly on the skull and found a best age estimate of 299 ± 25 thousand years (mean ± 2σ).  The result suggests that later Middle Pleistocene Africa contained multiple contemporaneous hominin lineages (that is, Homo sapiens, H. heidelbergensis/H. rhodesiensis and Homo naledi)”.  The skull is museum number E686.  The authors' manuscript gives the ESR upper limit as 322 ka and says faunal comparisons had suggested an age "perhaps as old as 500 ka". ↩

Bischoff, J. L. et al.  “Geology and preliminary dating of the hominid-bearing sedimentary fill of the Sima de los Huesos Chamber, Cueva Mayor of the Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain.”  Journal of Human Evolution 33(2–3):129–154.  1997.  The first dating of the Sima fossils, by the excavating team's geochronologist.  Uranium-series on sixteen human and 25 bear bones, and ESR on six bear bones.

1. 40a.

   Section Abstract:  “Electron spin resonance (ESR) analyses of six selected bear bones indicates dates of 189 +/- 28 ka, for which each is cordant with their corresponding U-series date (181 +/- 41 ka).  Combined ESR and U-series dates for these samples yielded 200 +/- 4 ka.  Such agreement is highly suggestive that uranium uptake in these bones was close to the early-uptake (EU) model, and the dates are essentially correct.”  “The dating results, therefore, seem to provide a firm minimum age of about 200 ka for the human entry: and suggestive evidence of entry before 320 ka.”  "cordant" is as printed in the abstract.  The second quotation is the abstract's last sentence;  the authors claimed a minimum, and the accepted age is now about 430 ka. ↩

Hebert, Jake et al.  “Do Varves, Tree-Rings, and Radiocarbon Measurements Prove an Old Earth?”  Answers Research Journal 9:339–361.  2016.  A long young-earth reply, by three scientists at the Institute for Creation Research and Answers in Genesis, to a critique of young-earth dating.  One passage states where young-earth scientists place accelerated radioactive decay, which is what this article needs from it.

1. 41a.

   Section Constant Decay Rates and Circular Reasoning:  “While we do believe that the decay rates for the heavier nuclides were accelerated tremendously during the Flood event and (possibly) during the Creation Week (Vardiman, Snelling, and Chaffin 2000, 2005), such accelerated decay would have decelerated at the end of the Flood.  Hence, creation scientists think, as do uniformitarian scientists, that decay rates have been essentially constant during most of the post-Flood period, although there is intriguing evidence suggesting this may not be strictly true (for example, Cardone, Mignani, and Petrucci 2009).  Furthermore, because creation scientists found that the magnitude of the accelerated decay seemed to be proportional to the atomic weights of the parent radioisotopes, they think that the decay rates for the lighter nuclides (such as radiocarbon) would not have been significantly altered even during such episodes of accelerated decay.” ↩ ↩ ↩

Snelling, Andrew A.  “How Reliable Are Dates for Human Fossils?”  Answers.  Sep 1, 2018.  A magazine article by the research director of Answers in Genesis, a geologist, explaining each dating method used on human fossils and mapping each to a window of real time after the Flood in a three-row chart.  It is the clearest statement of how the young-earth side recalibrates these dates.

1. 42a.

   Section chart, first row, Difficult Assumptions:  “Multiple lines of evidence show that radioactive elements decayed rapidly during and soon after the flood, so these “early” dates must be calibrated to the biblical timeframe—a matter of months, years, or decades, not millions of years.” ↩

2. 42b.

   Section introduction:  “the Lord divided human languages at Babel—just over 4,000 years ago—and all human migrations and cultures have occurred since that time.”  Section The Challenges of Dating “Early” Humans:  “The Bible gives a very different picture of human history, however, including creation 6,000 years ago and cataclysmic changes brought on by Noah’s flood about 4,350 years ago.” ↩

If decay runs k times faster than today for W years and at today's rate for the rest of a span of T years, the dose gained is k × W + (T − W) years' worth.  Setting that equal to 315,000 years' worth, the Irhoud layer-7 age,²⁸ gives k = (315,000 − (T − W)) / W.  With T = 4,350:  W = 4,350 gives k = 72;  W = 2,000 gives 156;  W = 1,000 gives 312;  W = 500 gives 622;  W = 300 gives 1,037;  W = 100 gives 3,108.  The same speed-up raises the dose from the ground and from the body's own potassium-40 by the same factor;  cosmic rays, which are not radioactive decay, are not affected, and are about 70 of the 1,128 to 1,461 millionths of a gray a year the layer-7 flints receive.²⁸ ↩

Humphreys, D. Russell.  “Reversals of the Earth's Magnetic Field During the Genesis Flood.”  Proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism 2:113–126.  1986.  The standard young-earth model of the earth's magnetic reversals, by the young-earth physicist D. Russell Humphreys.  It accepts that the rocks record about fifty reversals and puts them all in the Flood year.

1. 44a.

   Section Conclusion:  “(3) Rapid reversals during the year of the Flood, (4) Large fluctuations continuing for several thousand years after the Flood”.  Section Evidence for Reversals:  “since roughly 50 reversals are recorded in the rocks, our model must average about one reversal per week”. ↩

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. 45a.

   “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.” ↩ ↩

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. 46a.

   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. 46b.

   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.” ↩

3. 46c.

   Page 23:  “From a creationist position, habilis is an invalid taxon, being instead a collection of assorted fossils that can either be classified as humans (e.g. as erectus) or as australopithecine apes.”  “If the evaluation of KNM-ER 1813 by White and Wolpoff is correct, then this cranium, with a cranial capacity of only about 509 cm3, may have belonged to a very small human.”  “the cranium of the latter is much more likely that of a human than an ape.”  "The latter" is KNM-ER 1470. ↩

Line, Peter.  “Explaining robust humans.”  Journal of Creation 27(3):64–71.  2013.  Line's statement of the young-earth model for the robust fossil humans:  variants that arose after Babel through genetic variation, drift and environment.  The figure caption on p. 65 gives Kabwe 1 as 1,325 cc.

1. 47a.

   Page 65:  “as the people groups migrated away from Babel, variants of robust humans, such as H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis and Neandertals, arose through a combination of genetic variation in bony characters and local environmental factors, in a similar way that other ‘racial’ characteristics of people groups became established.” ↩

Wise, Kurt P.  “The Flores Skeleton and Human Baraminology.”  Occasional Papers of the BSG 6:1–13.  Nov 2, 2005.  The one young-earth paper that gives the hobbit a place in a chronology and a mechanism other than disease or island selection.  Wise is a Harvard-trained palaeontologist and the leading young-earth theorist of post-Flood diversification.  Written eleven years before the Mata Menge fossils.

1. 48a.

   Page 2:  “Since post-Flood trans-continental distribution of humans did not occur until after Babel, we can deduce that H. erectus represents an early post-Babel morphology and we then deduce that both Lower and Upper Pleistocene sediments are post-Babel in age. Given that the Flores skeleton was found in Upper Pleistocene sediments, it follows that it would date from slightly later post-Flood (and post-Babel) times.” ↩

2. 48b.

   Page 2:  “Lying between the Flood and ca 1000 B.C. (the time of David), the C-14 dates of LB 1 are consistent with a post-Babel date for the specimen. Thus although young-age creationists have not yet reinterpreted most of the absolute dating technologies employed for dating the Flores skeleton, a post-Babel patriarchal date is a very likely one.” ↩

Wise, Kurt P.  “Paleontological Note on Homo naledi.”  Journal of Creation Theology and Science Series B: Life Sciences 6:9–13.  2016.  The most careful young-earth reading of the 2015 taphonomy paper, by a Harvard-trained palaeontologist.  Written before any date existed.  Mirror:  Archive.org

1. 49a.

   Page 13:  “Although H. naledi has not yet been dated, it is found in a cave system that dates from the uppermost Pliocene and younger (Dirks et al. 2015). … All hominins, then, date from centuries after the Flood and most – and probably all – date from post-Babel times (Wise 1994).” ↩

2. 49b.

   Page 9:  “representing nearly every bone in the human body and at least fifteen different individuals from both genders and a wide range of ages”.  “The best explanation for how the bodies got there is that humans, using artificial light, carried the bodies along challenging cave passage to deliberately deposit them there.  Small CVs, combined with the uniformity of variable and unusual morphological characters suggest that all the H. naledi were probably from one family.  The naledi are probably a family unit recently dispersed from Babel, who used this isolated cave passage as a burial chamber for the duration of their residence in the region.” ↩

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. 50a.

   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.” ↩ ↩ ↩

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. 51a.

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

The arithmetic for the table on this page.  Hardy and Carter put the Flood "certainly between 3386 bc and 2256 bc",⁵¹ 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 the children give for a species by 5,411 and the oldest by 4,281, and rounds.  Habilis and rudolfensis:  1,750,000 ÷ 5,411 = 323 and 2,058,000 ÷ 4,281 = 481;  the Ledi-Geraru jaw, 2,750,000 ÷ 5,411 = 508 and 2,800,000 ÷ 4,281 = 654.  Erectus:  108,000 ÷ 5,411 = 20 and 1,780,000 ÷ 4,281 = 416, where 1.78 million years is the magnetic reversal at the top of the earliest Dmanisi layer and the fossils lie in the layer above it, so the factor is about 400.  Middle Pleistocene:  146,000 ÷ 5,411 = 27 and 860,000 ÷ 4,281 = 201, on the ages that the dates article lists as preferred by the current papers.  Naledi:  241,000 ÷ 5,411 = 45 and 335,000 ÷ 4,281 = 78;  the radiocarbon age, 33,000 ÷ 5,411 = 6.1 and 35,500 ÷ 4,281 = 8.3.  Liang Bua:  60,000 ÷ 5,411 = 11 and 100,000 ÷ 4,281 = 23;  Mata Menge, 650,000 ÷ 5,411 = 120 and 800,000 ÷ 4,281 = 187.  Neanderthals:  39,260 ÷ 5,411 = 7.3, a radiocarbon age, and 176,500 ÷ 4,281 = 41.  Oldest Homo sapiens:  154,000 ÷ 5,411 = 28 and 315,000 ÷ 4,281 = 74.  For Ngandong, the young end of erectus, 108,000 ÷ 5,411 = 20 and 117,000 ÷ 4,281 = 27.  The children's own figures differ a little from these, because they divide by other Flood dates or use the ends of the error bars:  the oldest Homo sapiens article reaches 80 from Irhoud's upper limit of 349,000 years, and the Middle Pleistocene dates article's lowest figure, 14, is the lowest age ever measured at any site in that period (62,000 years at Harbin), not an age the current papers prefer.  The model places every one of these people after the Flood and most after Babel, so each factor is a minimum.  Radiocarbon and uranium-thorium ages are not calendar ages on a young-earth reading;  the factors show scale, and how far a recalibration would have to go. ↩ ↩

Antón, Susan C.  “Natural History of Homo erectus.”  Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 46:126–170.  2003.  A 2003 review of Homo erectus that surveys its fossils specimen by specimen.  The article uses it for the cranial capacity of each site, the trend in Asian brain size, and Antón's reply to the critique of the Java chronology.

1. 53a.

   Table 3, page 136:  Cranial capacities against geological age.  Dmanisi D2280 = 780 cc, D2282 = ?650 cc, D2700 = ~600 cc (citing Vekua et al. 2002);  KNM-ER 3733 = 848 cc, KNM-ER 3883 = 804 cc, KNM-WT 15000 = 909 cc (citing Walker & Leakey 1993), OH 9 = 1,067 cc, OH 12 = 727 cc;  Sangiran 4 = 908 cc, Trinil = 940 cc;  Zhoukoudian III = 915 cc, X = 1,225 cc;  Ngandong 6 = 1,251 cc, Ngandong 7 = 1,013 cc. ↩

Rightmire, G. Philip.  “Homo in the Middle Pleistocene:  hypodigms, variation, and species recognition.”  Evolutionary Anthropology 17(1):8–21.  2008.  The case for one Afro-European species argued from measurements:  ten crania tabulated and their coefficients of variation compared with those of Homo erectus and living humans.  Table 1 lists the endocranial capacities used in this article.

1. 54a.

   Page 9, table 1:  Endocranial capacities in cm³:  Bodo 1250;  Ndutu 1100;  Broken Hill 1280;  Arago 1166;  Sima de los Huesos 4, 1390;  Sima de los Huesos 5, 1125;  Steinheim 1100;  Petralona 1230.  Omo 2 and Elandsfontein are listed without a capacity.  Page 12:  “At close to 1,100 cm3, SH 5 is rather small, but SH 4, with a capacity of 1,390 cm3, is one of the largest of all Middle Pleistocene specimens.” ↩

Ji, Qiang et al.  “Late Middle Pleistocene Harbin cranium represents a new Homo species.”  The Innovation 2(3):100132.  2021.  The two-page paper that names Homo longi on the Harbin cranium and proposes Homo daliensis for Dali and Hualongdong.  The journal uses article numbers, so quotations are located by section.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 55a.

   Section Comparative morphology:  “The endocranial capacity is estimated as 1,420 ml, falling in the range of H. sapiens and Neanderthals, and larger than other Homo species such as H. erectus, H. naledi, H. floresiensis, and even some H. heidelbergensis/H. rhodesiensis.” ↩

Détroit, Florent et al.  “A new species of Homo from the Late Pleistocene of the Philippines.”  Nature 568(7751):181–186.  Apr 11, 2019.  The paper that named Homo luzonensis from thirteen pieces in layer 14 of Callao Cave.  Locators below are pages of the authors' manuscript as deposited at HAL, counting its cover sheet as page 1;  the journal pagination is 181–186.  Détroit is at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, Mijares at the University of the Philippines led the excavation.  Mirror:  Hal.science

1. 56a.

   Section manuscript page 3:  “seven postcanine maxillary teeth (CCH6-a to CCH6-e, CCH8, CCH9; Fig. 2a, f, g), two manual phalanges (CCH2 and CCH5; Fig. 2b, c), two pedal phalanges (CCH3 and CCH4; Fig. 2d, e) and a femoral shaft (CCH7; Fig. 2h). CCH1 and CCH6-a are directly dated by U-series analysis to minimum ages of 67 thousand years (kyr) and 50 kyr, respectively.” ↩

Clark, J. Desmond et al.  “Stratigraphic, chronological and behavioural contexts of Pleistocene Homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopia.”  Nature 423:747–752.  Jun 12, 2003.  The companion paper to White and colleagues' description of the Herto skulls, reporting their geology, argon-argon dating and archaeology.  The article quotes its abstract.

1. 57a.

   Section Abstract:  “The fossils and artefacts are dated between 160,000 and 154,000 years ago by precise age determinations using the 40Ar/39Ar method.  The archaeological assemblages contain elements of both Acheulean and Middle Stone Age technocomplexes.  Associated faunal remains indicate repeated, systematic butchery of hippopotamus carcasses.  Contemporary adult and juvenile Homo sapiens fossil crania manifest bone modifications indicative of deliberate mortuary practices.” ↩ ↩

Menton, David.  “On the (Evolutionary) Road to Morocco?”  Answers in Genesis.  Jun 8, 2017.  The Answers in Genesis response to the Irhoud papers, posted on 8 June 2017, a day after the Nature news report it cites.  It is the only young-earth source found that gives a number of years for an early Homo sapiens fossil, and it raises the specific objections answered in this article.

1. 58a.

   “Thus, the real age of these bones is only probably around 4,000 years, and the bones are those of Noah’s descendants.” ↩ ↩

Slon, Viviane et al.  “The genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.”  Nature 561(7721):113–116.  Sep 6, 2018.  A genome study of a long-bone fragment from Denisova Cave in Siberia, sequenced from six DNA extractions.  The genome shows that the individual, called Denisova 11, had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.  The article uses it to show that she was a first-generation hybrid, not a member of a population that had mixed for generations.

1. 59a.

   Section Proportions of matching fragments:  “We conclude that Denisova 11 did not originate from a population carrying equal proportions of Neandertal and Denisovan ancestry.  Rather, she was the offspring of a Neandertal mother, who contributed her mtDNA, and a Denisovan father.” ↩

Madupe, Palesa P. et al.  “Proteomic analysis of dental enamel from 20 Homo naledi individuals shows no male markers.”  Cell 189(14):4415–4424.e11.  Jun 24, 2026.  Enamel proteins recovered from 23 teeth of at least 20 naledi individuals from several parts of the cave system, including the Lesedi skeleton.  The author list ends with John Hawks, Lee Berger and Enrico Cappellini, so it is the excavating team's own result.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 60a.

   Section Highlights:  “Out of 20 H. naledi individuals screened, no male individuals were confidently identified”.  “There is no variation in the protein sequences recovered”. ↩

2. 60b.

   Section Results:  “the remains come from different locations in the cave system, separated by as much as 145 m, and were not deposited at a single time, making it unlikely that they are a single-family group.” ↩

Cuozzo, Jack W.  Buried Alive: The Startling Truth about Neanderthal Man.  Master Books, Green Forest, AR.  1998.  A 1998 creationist book on Neanderthal anatomy.  Its author weighs whether Neanderthal growth was very fast or took much longer than in modern children, and gives Pech 4-5 (4.5) years and the Moustier youth 32 years.  The article uses it as the creationist book that explains Neanderthal anatomy by a mechanism rather than by ordinary variation.

1. 61a.

   Page 185:  “Pech was at least 2-2.5 years old by modern tooth development charts but could have been as old as 4-5, and there were at least 26-28 years between he and Le Moustier, most likely more because of the speed of modern rates.  I am going to tentatively designate Pech 4-5 (4.5) years old and Moustier 32 years old for the sake of discussion and simplicity in the rest of this book.” ↩

Smith, Tanya M. et al.  “Dental evidence for ontogenetic differences between modern humans and Neanderthals.”  PNAS 107(49):20923–20928.  Dec 7, 2010.  A study of tooth microstructure in a varied sample of Middle Palaeolithic juveniles, including Neanderthals, used to estimate their age at death.  Most Neanderthal tooth crowns grew faster than modern human teeth, so the article uses it to test Cuozzo's claim of slow growth.  Jean-Jacques Hublin is the last named author.

1. 62a.

   Section Abstract:  “We find that most Neanderthal tooth crowns grew more rapidly than modern human teeth, resulting in significantly faster dental maturation.  In contrast, Middle Paleolithic H. sapiens juveniles show greater similarity to recent humans.” ↩

Line, Peter.  “Sorting 'early' Homo.”  Journal of Creation 27(1):13–15.  Mar 2013.  Line's second look at habilis, published in the journal and later on the web without page numbers.  Leaning on Bromage's 2008 reconstruction, it moves 1470 and 1813 to the australopiths and calls habilis a mixture made mostly of australopiths, reversing his 2005 view of 1470.

1. 63a.

   Section Faulty reconstruction of KNM-ER 1470:  “However, one reason why KNM-ER 1470 is almost certainly an australopithecine is that the original reconstruction appears to have been faulty.”  Section Where do Homo habilis specimens fit?:  “However, subsequent assessment indicates KNM-ER 1813 belongs with the australopithecines.”  Section Sinking Homo habilis into the australopithecines:  “is a composite species, consisting mostly of australopithecines, but with a few Homo erectus specimens also wrongly categorized.” ↩

Line, Peter.  “New Homo erectus crania associated with stone tools raise issues.”  Journal of Creation 34(2):55–61.  Aug 2020.  A survey by Peter Line, a creationist writer, of 48 Homo erectus skulls, published in Journal of Creation.  He measured cranial capacity, the volume inside the skull and a rough guide to brain size, and found 546 to 1,260 cc, with a mean of about 934 cc.  He concedes that pathology (disease) cannot explain most of the small skulls, and the cause is unknown.  The article uses it because a creationist's own survey concedes that the brains are small.

1. 64a.

   Page 57:  “the mean cranial capacity of 48 Homo erectus crania was calculated to be about 934 cc (range of 48 crania was 546 cc to 1260 cc), which is about 70% of the mean cranial capacity in modern humans.”  Line's own note 13 attributes the 48-cranium compilation to his chapter 14 of The Apeman Controversy (2020), so it is his own count. ↩

2. 64b.

   Pages 58, 59:  “The most logical conclusion appears to be that most Homo erectus specimens were not pathological and that there was a huge natural variation in cranial capacity of these humans ... For reasons unknown many members of this group had small brain size, and hence small cranial capacity.” ↩

Sinclair, P., and Todd C. Wood.  “Revising Hominin Baraminology with Medoid Partitioning and Fuzzy Analysis.”  Answers Research Journal 14:451–462.  2021.  Re-runs the hominin baraminology with medoid partitioning, fuzzy analysis and Jaccard distances after a creationist critic argued the earlier statistic was untested.

1. 65a.

   Section Results:  “For this two-cluster partition, Au. sediba had an individual silhouette width of 0.40, and H. naledi had a silhouette width of 0.49.”  Moving naledi to the non-human cluster gives −0.49;  giving it a cluster of its own gives an average silhouette width of 0.16. ↩

Wood, Todd Charles, and P. S. Brummel.  “Hominin Baraminology Reconsidered with Postcranial Characters.”  Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Creationism, 251–266.  Edited by J. H. Whitmore.  2023.  The first young-earth sorting of the hominins to use the skeleton below the skull:  239 new characters for 14 taxa, analysed alone and with skull characters.  It is the postcranial analysis O'Micks asked for, run by the method's own author, and it left naledi's place less clear than the skull data had.

1. 66a.

   Page 260:  “For three clusters, fuzzy analysis broke up the Homo taxa to make a cluster of H. floresiensis, H. naledi, H. habilis, and all three Australopithecus taxa for simple matching distances and a cluster of H. habilis, H. naledi, H. floresiensis, and Au. sediba for Jaccard distances.”  From the results for the 239 skeleton characters alone.  Page 263:  “The status of the Australopithecus taxa and H. naledi, H. floresiensis, and H. habilis are less clear.”  “Distance correlation supports placing Homo naledi with other members of Homo, which is confirmed by cluster analysis.”  “With H. naledi and Au. sediba so different from the others postcranially, questions persist about their human status.” ↩

eLife.  “eLife assessment and public reviews of "Evidence for deliberate burial of the dead by Homo naledi", reviewed preprint version 1.”  eLife.  Jul 12, 2023.  The editors' assessment and four anonymous reviews of the first version of the burial paper.  eLife publishes its reviews and assessment with the preprint whatever the authors wish, which is why this exchange is on the record.  Senior editor George H. Perry.

1. 67a.

   Section eLife assessment:  States that demonstrating the earliest known intentional funerary practice by a small-brained hominin.  “would be a landmark finding”.  but that.  “the evidence for these claims is considered inadequate in the current version of the study”.  and records that the four reviewers were.  “in strong consensus that the methods, data, and analyses do not support the primary conclusions”.  that without full excavations the study lacks crucial geoarchaeology and taphonomic work, and that the null hypothesis must be that the skeletons accumulated naturally. ↩

Klenck, Joel David.  “A Genesis Model for the Origin, Variation, and Continuation of Human Populations.”  Creation Research Society Quarterly 47(2):111–137.  2010.  A creationist model in which the non-modern human forms of the fossil record are the Nephilim of Genesis 6 or their hybrids with Adam's line, all destroyed by the Flood, so that only anatomically modern humans come after it.  It gives no dates in years and calls the conventional ones "alleged".  Klenck wrote from the Paleontological Research Corporation of Arlington, Virginia.

1. 68a.

   Page 123, figure 2:  “Just before the Flood human populations comprised direct non-Nephilim descendants of Adam, Nephilim populations, and hybrid populations with morphological features of both aforementioned groups. … (2.2) H. floresiensis, LB I, Liang Bua Cave, 18 kya, Liang Bua Cave, Flores, Indonesia”.  From the caption.  The 18 kya is the date then in print, one of those Klenck calls alleged. ↩

Line, Peter.  “Revisiting Homo floresiensis.”  Journal of Creation 36(3):82–91.  Dec 2022.  The most recent and most detailed young-earth treatment.  It discusses the 2016 redating and the Mata Menge fossils.  Line holds a doctorate in neuroscience and writes Creation Ministries International's hominin articles.  Its reference list carries Obendorf 2008, Oxnard 2010 and Oxnard's 2012 rejoinder, and not Brown 2012, Baab 2013, Baab 2016, Falk 2007 or Falk 2009;  it also holds that Homo habilis is "an illusory species" and that all australopiths are "extinct apish primates."  Locators are the section headings of the web version.

1. 69a.

   Section Discussion and conclusion:  “Running parallel to the above debate, at least for a while, was the belief by some that Homo floresiensis was a pathological modern human, with the cretinism explanation favoured by me, albeit not necessarily of a modern human.” ↩

Kaifu, Yousuke et al.  “Early evolution of small body size in Homo floresiensis.”  Nature Communications 15:6381.  Aug 6, 2024.  Reports the adult humerus SOA-MM9 and two teeth from Layer II at Mata Menge, bringing the site to ten hominin pieces, with bone histology, stature estimates and a molar-shape comparison.  Kaifu is a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Tokyo.  Open access.

1. 70a.

   Page 8:  “Alternatively, if H. habilis s.l. was ancestral to Mata Menge/Liang Bua H. floresiensis, the latter would need to have experienced substantial molar size reduction of ~65–60% in mesiodistal and buccolingual crown diameters (from H. habilis means), and this accompanied by form changes comparable to the early Javanese H. erectus condition. Because no such allometric relationships are evident between molar crown size and form within H. habilis (Supplementary Note 6), the hypothesis that H. floresiensis is a direct lineal descendant of H. habilis s.l. is not supported.”  Page 10:  “the reported craniometric and odontometric analyzes which almost unanimously support strong affinities of H. floresiensis with H. erectus (particularly early H. erectus from Java)”.  Page 8 also reports that the 2016 jaw and first or second molar, and now the third molar, are closer in shape to early Javan Homo erectus than to Australopithecus and Homo habilis. ↩

Chen, Lu et al.  “Identifying and interpreting apparent Neanderthal ancestry in African individuals.”  Cell 180(4):677–687.e16.  Feb 20, 2020.  A genome study that introduced IBDmix, a new probabilistic method that finds Neanderthal DNA in living people without using a modern reference population.  The authors applied it to 2,504 individuals from geographically diverse populations and found a stronger Neanderthal signal in Africans than earlier work had seen.  The article uses it for the finding that remnants of Neanderthal genomes survive in every modern human population studied to date.

1. 71a.

   Section Summary:  “Our results refine our understanding of Neanderthal ancestry in African and non-African populations and demonstrate that remnants of Neanderthal genomes survive in every modern human population studied to date.” ↩

Meyer, Matthias et al.  “A high-coverage genome sequence from an archaic Denisovan individual.”  Science 338(6104):222–226.  Oct 12, 2012.  A genome paper that sequenced the finger bone of a Denisovan to about 31-fold coverage, using a new way of preparing the DNA that recovered at least 6-fold and 22-fold more DNA molecules than the two earlier preparations from the same bone.  It estimated how much Denisovan DNA is in present-day people and listed the genetic changes that set modern humans apart.  The article cites it for the fused chromosome 2 and for the count of 260 human-specific protein changes.

1. 72a.

   Page 225, section Denisovan genomic features:  “The great apes have 24 pairs of chromosomes whereas humans have 23.  This difference is caused by a fusion of two acrocentric chromosomes that formed the metacentric human chromosome 2 (25) and resulted in the unique head-to-head joining of the telomeric hexameric repeat GGGGTT.  A difference in karyotype would likely have reduced the fertility of any offspring of Denisovans and modern humans.  We searched all DNA fragments sequenced from the Denisovan individual and identified 12 fragments containing joined repeats.  By contrast, reads from several chimpanzees and bonobos failed to yield any such fragments (8).  We conclude that Denisovans and modern humans (and presumably Neandertals) shared the fused chromosome 2.” ↩

Carter, Robert W.  “Neanderthal genome like ours.”  Creation Ministries International.  May 19, 2010.  A 2010 web article by Robert Carter, who writes about genetics for Creation Ministries International, updated 1 June 2010.  It says the draft Neanderthal genome, which covers about 60 percent of the genome, strengthens the creationist case that Neanderthals were fully human, and it offers three possible scenarios for who they were.  The article uses it for those three scenarios and for Carter's admission that realistic modeling has yet to be performed.

1. 73a.

   “Or, they could have been just one tribe of people, dispersed from Babylon with the rest, highly inbred, and pushed out, conquered, or killed as the European ancestors migrated into Europe.  There are many other possible scenarios, but realistic modeling has yet to be performed.” ↩

Wood, Todd Charles.  “Do Moroccan fossils rewrite early history of humanity?”  Todd's Blog.  Jun 8, 2017.  A blog post by a young-earth biologist who leads statistical studies of which fossils group with humans, posted on 8 June 2017, as the Irhoud papers appeared.  It accepts the fossils as human and declines to offer a young-earth date.

1. 74a.

   “Plus, there's a huge amount of uncertainty for creationists when re-interpreting a combination of thermoluminescent dating, molecular clock inferences, and other forms of fossil dating.  I'm not really qualified to comment on thermoluminescent dating, but I know when inferences are built on inferences which are built on other inferences.  That's a time to be reasonably skeptical.” ↩