Ancient DNA Overturns Assumptions
Increasing availability of sequences from ancient DNA is
raising eyebrows among evolutionists but should raise alarms, too
Isn’t it fun to watch scientists having to rethink ideas they took for granted but are wrong? Not long ago, it seemed impossible to expect DNA to be found in cave dirt or ice, because DNA was thought to degrade too quickly. In recent years, scientists have been able to recover DNA fragments that are lengthy enough to learn things about animals and humans that once lived in those environments. They’re having to rethink old ideas all right, but should be rethinking them even deeper than they are willing to dig.
Ancient DNA Leads to Megafauna Rethink
Ancient DNA suggests woolly mammoths roamed the Earth more recently than previously thought (Tyler J. Murchie, The Conversation, 23 Jan 2022). That tell-tale phrase “than previously thought” begs the question, “WHO thought that?” The Tontological sentence structure usually implies, “WE scientists thought that, but incorrectly,” although they almost never come out and say so, much less apologize for misleading the public. Watch below for two other terms evolutionists overuse that mislead.
Dr. Murchie works on ancient DNA recovered from permafrost cores in Arctic regions. What he and his colleagues have found is shaking up assumptions about when large Pleistocene mammals, like woolly mammoths, went extinct.
For my doctoral research, I was part of a team that developed a a [sic] new technique to extract, isolate, sequence and identify tiny fragments of ancient DNA from sediment.
We analyzed these DNA fragments to track the shifting cast of plants and animals that lived in central Yukon over the past 30,000 years. We found evidence for the late survival of woolly mammoths and horses in the Klondike region, some 3,000 years later than expected.
That’s not the only rethink being rethought. Like all evolutionists, Murchie takes reckless drafts on the bank of time (2 July 2007), but the consensus dates of when these creatures lived are more ideological than empirical. They must fit the Darwin Years deep-time timeline. He doesn’t mention radiocarbon, but the accuracy of C14 dates declines beyond a few millennia that can be corroborated by historical evidence. It becomes vulnerable to assumptions about production rates of C14 in atmospheric conditions that cannot be observed. Suffice it to say that even within his own timeline, he has found surprising results.
Until recently, there was no evidence of mammoth survival into the mid-Holocene*. But studies have now shown that mammoths survived until 5,500 and 4,000 years ago on Arctic islands.
Researchers at the Centre for GeoGenetics in Copenhagen found evidence for the late survival of horses and mammoths in Alaska until as recently as as 7,900 years ago. They also found evidence of mammoths surviving as recently as 3,900 years ago in Siberia, alongside woolly rhinoceros to at least 9,800 years ago.
*[Holocene is the name given by evolutionists to the last 11,700 Darwin Years of the Earth’s history since the “last ice age.”]
Then there’s the real shocker:
Steppe bison, which were thought to have disappeared and been replaced by the American bison during the Pleistocene, have likewise been found to have survived even as recently as perhaps just 400 years ago.
For an animal that evolutionists taught went extinct 10,000 Darwin Years ago, that represents a 2500% error. And that’s not all. “There is a growing body of evidence that many ice age megafauna probably survived well into recorded human history,” he says, “roaming the north during the Bronze Age and while builders worked on the pyramids of Egypt.” This is a drastic rethink indeed. Will the cartoonists have to revise all those Ice Age movies to include humans building cities?
Dr Murchie, unfortunately, does not rethink deep enough.
Advances in paleogenetics continues to push the boundaries of what was once relegated to science fiction. Who knows what undiscovered evolutionary information remains frozen in ordinary sediments, hidden in microfossils of ancient DNA?
Time will tell. More ancient DNA is being sequenced every year.
Why “evolutionary” information? Why not just information? What has evolution done to information other than to promulgate misinformation?
Ancient DNA Leads to Early Man Rethink
Ancient DNA Sheds New Light on Africa’s Stone Age (The Scientist, 23 Feb 2022). Another phrase evolutionists overuse is the “shed light” meme. Based on what ancient DNA samples revealed in Africa, they’ll need more light.
In this article, reporter Sophie Fessl withdraws thousands of Darwin Years from the bank of time, saying that “The oldest DNA yet isolated from humans in Africa reveals long-range migrations around 50,000 years ago, which likely played a role in the Middle to Later Stone Age transition.” Likely is not a scientific term until calibrated and stated with numbers. Otherwise, one is entitled to ask, “Likely to whom?”
The researchers looked at the ancestry of the six newly sequenced individuals and 28 other individuals who had lived between 8,000 and 400 years ago in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa and whose genetic data had previously been published. Surprisingly, all 34 individuals were descended from the same three genetic lineages from eastern, southern, and central Africa. “The fact that all of these individuals are descended from the same three lines suggests that in the past, we had this big period of mixing and moving,” explains [Elizabeth] Sawchuk [University of Alberta].
This ancient DNA is causing some rethinking about human evolution, admits veteran paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer, who was surprised by the complexity of interactions between early humans. All these researchers thought they were evolving, but the early humans were apparently behaving smartly, using intelligent design. If we know anything about the human brain and human nature, it did not require “a tens of thousands of years process that involved many, many people moving over many, many generations” to develop cooperative relationships. It could have happened in one generation. How long did it take people groups to decide to build the Tower of Babel?
“The rich fossil record of eastern Africa is a persistent draw to palaeoanthropologists, but this study also underscores the importance of forested regions of the continent, such as Central or West Africa, to understand patterns of population interactions in some of the most recent phases of human evolution, as well as how they have laid the foundations for the world around us today.”
Population interactions involving “mixing and moving” are not matters of human evolution. They are matters of logical thinking by people with free will. Stringer continues,
“This is a very important study that reaffirms patterns we find from ancient DNA research in Europe and Asia, that what we thought were long lasting and settled populations in fact have unexpectedly complex and dynamic roots,” Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the work, tells The Scientist in an email.
Paleoanthropologist John Hawks, bless his critical-thinking heart, warns that some of the speculation issuing from the fragmentary data is a bit oversold.
For John Hawks, an anthropologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the work, there is still a lot to learn, he tells The Scientist in an email. “The current sample of ancient genomes in Africa is still very small, and the individuals come from only a few small parts of the continent. It also only represents the last short slice of time. I think that when we have samples from earlier times, we may find that the scenario outlined in this paper is still too simple.“
Scenario: that’s the third term overused by evolutionists. Like a model, a scenario is not scientific until confirmed by evidence. A good model or scenario might stimulate a better search for evidence. A bad scenario that is “still too simple” becomes a playbook for just-so storytelling.
The Darwin in the tale
The Darwin in the tale
Hi ho scenario
The Darwin in the tale.