Creation Moment 7/9/2025 - Denisovans

And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. Genesis 9:1

"According to evolutionary ideas, there are multiple archaic species of human, with only one, Homo sapiens sapiens (anatomically

modern man), surviving until today. One of those supposed archaic species is called Denisovan and is known from only a few fossil bone fragments.

Just like neanderthals, these people were fully human, descendants of Adam and Eve, just like us. Yes, there are minor variations, but we expect that—there’s genetic variation throughout God’s creation. It’s all part of the genetic diversity in the human kind.

--These people aren’t some mysterious human ancestor or cousin or failed branch of the evolutionary tree. 

--They were human beings (ordinary people like us), made in God’s image, who lived after the dispersion at Babel in areas that were hit hard by the ice age, making finding food and shelter a full-time job. 

For some reason, like neanderthals, they eventually died out, but some of their unique variations live on in the DNA of modern people groups, including in the Tibetan highlanders, Papuans, and other Melanesians." 

AIG

Creation Moment 10/27/2022 - Breaking News: Humans Procreated With... Humans

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. Genesis 1:27

"Over a century ago, evolutionists taught that Neanderthals were sub-human brutes.

But in the intervening decades, as more research and discoveries have been made, Neanderthals are believed to be fully human, able to interbreed with Homo sapiens. DNA analysis confirms this.

A recent news article stated,

A Swedish scientist [Svante Paabo] has been awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for his groundbreaking research that proved modern humans once procreated with ancient Neanderthals…. [Paabo’s] work is considered revolutionary because it introduced a new branch of paleontology called ‘paleogenomics,’ which looks to ancient DNA to unlock the mystery of how present-day humans came to be.

We could say humans once procreated with humans, since the scientific evidence has shown repeatedly that Neanderthals (and a human group called the Denisovans discovered from bones and a tooth found in Altai Mountains, Siberia) were 100% human.

In fact, an evolutionary paleoanthropologist stated, “The irony is that

the scientific community is going to have to come round to the acceptance that the Denisovans and the Neandertals also belonged to the species which we all call Homo sapiens.” Finlayson was correct.

If one wants to see what Homo neaderthalensis looks like, he simply looks at Nikolai Valuev, a member of the Russian parliament, who has enlarged brow ridges and a sloping forehead. Indeed, Homo sapien skulls come in all shapes and sizes, but they are all people.

Ancient DNA shows that Neandertals and Denisovans have always been people.

Researchers interested in unraveling humanity's past recently sequenced a female Neandertal's ancient DNA and published their results in Nature. The research included sequences that closely matched: Neandertal, Denisovan, modern man, plus an unidentified variation of man. The study authors suspected that these different groups interbred. Just as prior studies showed, this one confirmed that similarities between Neandertal and other human DNA sequences place "Miss Neandertal" inside human kind.

Then what happened to the Neanderthals? An evolutionary article states,

Modern humans are usually seen as superior in a wide range of domains, including weaponry and subsistence strategies, which would have led to the demise of Neandertals. This systematic review of the archaeological records of Neandertals and their modern human contemporaries finds no support for such interpretations, as the Neandertal archaeological record is not different enough to explain the demise in terms of inferiority in archaeologically visible domains. Instead, current genetic data suggest that complex processes of interbreeding and assimilation may have been responsible for the disappearance of the specific Neandertal morphology from the fossil record.

 

Q: What does humans procreating with Neanderthals have to do with the theory of human evolution? 

A: Nothing. Man and woman were created by God in the beginning—no sub-human ancestry." ICR

Creation Moment 10/16/2022 - Pääbo's Research Actually Shows....

And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;

Acts 17:25

 

"Nobel Prize awarded to Svante Pääbo for work on human evolution.

Ironically, 

his work fails to support human evolution.

Svante Pääbo was awarded a Nobel Prize on October 3 for his DNA research on human fossils. It was touted as another proof of evolution. However, an evaluation of his work shows it does not support evolution at all, and, in fact, confirms just the opposite.

 

The Research

Pääbo’s team first sequenced Neanderthal mitochondria from a single bone. 

Then the team sequenced ancient DNA found in the nucleus from three Neanderthal bone specimens. 

The bone specimens came from the Vindija cave in Croatia, and also from Neanderthals found in Germany, Russia, and Spain. Eventually Pääbo sequenced the three billion base pairs of the entire Neanderthal genome. 

Then, Pääbo sequenced DNA from a finger bone discovered in a cave in southern Siberia.

Success in completing these tasks were widely believed to be impossible. Now, it is common. Pääbo’s success opened up a new field, namely the now fiercely competitive field of paleogenomics, which concerns the analysis of ancient DNA. So far paleogenomics has complete genetic sequencing on almost 8,000 “ancient” individuals.

Date Estimates

My main concern was that the DNA obtained from the bone

fragments could not have been even close to 430,000 years old, a conclusion that now appears likely from the research. The dating methods used were partly because evolution demands an ancient age for Neanderthals in order to fit into the orthodox human evolutionary scenario. This scenario requires long ages to explain the many evolutionary changes required to go from apes to modern humans. 

Pääbo thus achieved, using “old, degraded and contaminated genetic material from our ancestors,” what many experts thought “was an impossible challenge,” namely sequencing old, degraded and contaminated DNA.

 

Relationships

The results of DNA comparisons with Neanderthals, most of whom once lived in Europe and Western Asia, show that the Neanderthal DNA was distinct from both modern-day humans and chimpanzees. Pääbo’s research supported this view. It concluded that a chasm exists between human and chimp DNA, not the two percent as is often claimed:

Despite the early discoveries of apparently high DNA similarity between humans and chimps, large-scale DNA sequencing projects began to present a different picture. In 2002, a large DNA sequencing lab produced over 3 million bases of chimp DNA sequence in small 50 to 900 base fragments that were obtained randomly from the entire chimp genome. When these were matched with the human genome using computer software, only two-thirds of the DNA sequences could be lined up onto human DNA. While there were many short stretches of DNA that were very similar to human DNA, this meant that more than 30% of the chimp DNA sequence was not similar to human DNA at all! 

The finding that Neanderthal DNA was “distinct,” meaning different from modern DNA, is not surprising. DNA tests can be done today to determine one’s ethnic background because the different ethnic groups have distinct DNA. This includes Neanderthal DNA compared to modern human DNA. Pääbo also found that “comparisons between Neanderthal DNA and humans from around the world showed their DNA was a closer match to humans coming from Europe or Asia.”

 

Interbreeding of Neanderthals

 and Modern Humans

The Neanderthal genome determined a major surprise at the time. DNA comparisons showed

that Homo sapiens had sex and children with Neanderthals

after migrating out of Africa around 70,000 years ago. They are not a missing ling as believed for over a century. And you can still see the legacy of that difference today. Between 1 and 4 percent of modern human DNA comes from our Neanderthal relatives and this even affects our body’s ability to respond to infection.

Thus Neanderthals could interbreed with modern humans, showing that they were one species—one Genesis kind, the human species. 

---They are not a different species or missing link as evolutionists have attempted to claim since Darwin’s time. Instead of providing “us with new insight into the life of our African ancestors and the emergence of the modern human,” the DNA analysis has shown, at most, that much variety existed in the past as also exists in the present.

 

Arrows between different branches show mating that occurred.

Pääbo was also able to sequence a DNA sample of Denisovans, a people group similar to Neanderthals. The DNA analysis showed that “Homo sapiens bred with Denisovans… In parts of South East Asia up to 6% of people’s DNA is Denisovan.”

 

‘The Half-Life of DNA Problem’ 

and the 430,000-Year Estimate

DNA decays with time, 

casting doubt on the age estimates. 

An article at The Scientist about the Nobel award states, “DNA degrades relatively quickly, and so researchers often struggle to purify and analyze fragments of the molecule from remains” of a body. 

The decay rate of DNA depends on the DNA’s exposure to heat, water, sunlight, oxygen, and especially radiation. If a body is left out in the sun and rain, its DNA will be useful for analysis for only a few weeks. Conversely, DNA frozen solidly deep in Antarctic ice may last a hundred thousand years. The ideal preservation conditions are in a very dry, hermetically sealed container protected from radiation and frozen solid at about -80 degrees Celsius. Even then, ambient radiation will eventually render the DNA unusable.

 

Much controversy exists about DNA longevity. All of the DNA in living organisms constantly sustains damage, but it is also constantly being repaired by the body’s elaborate repair system which is accurate to the 99.9 percent level. This occurs because

Ionizing radiation interacts with matter by depositing energy in the target structure within about 10^-19 to 10^-14 seconds. This energy deposition event is followed by radiochemical processes leading to altered target molecules (DNA) which are the substrates for subsequent enzymatic repair reactions, taking place in the time range of seconds to days. These physical, chemical and biological processes together determine the effect of radiation on unicellular and multicellular organisms.

Pääbo’s team dealt with this concern by developing methods for estimating the amount of DNA damage (caused by thousands of years of exposure to background radiation and contamination). For this purpose, they used sequences from microorganisms and modern humans.

 

Critique

My main concern is that the cave conditions where the ancient DNA samples were found were, at best, poor for preserving the DNA. 

To conclude that it was 430,000 years old is very problematic. 

DNA that old would likely have very few genes that are even partly intact. 

The 430,000-year-old date is not based on any evidence revealed in the DNA or its environment, but rather from the long-age assumptions required to explain the problems of evolution.

 

Summary

Put a suit on a Neanderthal and most people wouldn’t notice the difference.

I have no reason to question the validity of the results of the sequences obtained. They conform to other comparisons showing that Neanderthals and Denisovans were fully human, albeit part of other people groups distinct from those alive today. They are part of the human family as Genesis teaches – not evolutionary precursors. Other so-called missing links, or primitive humans, were also part of the human family. In an article about genomic comparisons between so-called “primitive humans” at The Conversation on October 7, Princeton geneticist Joshua Akey said,

From the well-known Neanderthals and more enigmatic Denisovans in Eurasia, to the diminutive ‘hobbit’ Homo floresiensis on the island of Flores in Indonesia, to Homo naledi that lived in South Africa, multiple hominins abounded.”

This variety is no different than the variety of humans seen today which were once called “races.” They are more accurately referred to as people groups.

My major disagreement is about the age estimate for the bone fragments used to extract DNA. The fossils were found in locations that were far less than ideal for preservation. From what we know about DNA deterioration rates, I find it hard to believe that the Neanderthal DNA recovered is more than 3,000 years old, if even that old." CEH

Creation Moment 4/13/2018 - Denisovan DNA Shown to Be Human...Again

Therefore is the name of it called Babel;

because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth:

and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Genesis 11:9

"Denisovans are ancient humans represented by various teeth and a finger bone found in a Siberian cave. Their claim to fame is largely based on the DNA extracted from these few fragments of human remains. According to evolutionists, they are more closely related to Neanderthals than modern humans. But their DNA is essentially human, and people all over the world today carry many of the same gene variants found in Denisovans.

Homo erectus supposedly migrated out of Africa about one million years ago. About 500,000 years later, the ancient human ancestor of Neanderthals and Denisovans is claimed to have made the same migration. Then, according to this legend, anatomically modern humans migrated about 120,000 years ago and traveled to Europe and Asia, where they interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans already living there.

New research confirms the results of previous studies showing that Denisovan-based regions of the genome are common in Asian people groups and that they interbred with modern humans. Interestingly, the largest proportion of Denisovan DNA in the human genome was found in people from the remote islands of Papua New Guinea, a long way from the Denisovan cave in Siberia. Amazingly, these island people also had a healthy dose of Neanderthal DNA. No good evolutionary reason for this anomaly was offered.

According to the data, all humans belong to the same genetic group. This agrees perfectly with the biblical view and agrees with other studies which show that the current status of the human genome can be no more than 5,000 years. After the global Genesis Flood about 4,500 years ago, Noah’s three sons and their wives formed the basis for repopulating the planet. Their descendants led to the 70 people groups comprising the Table of Nations. As these peoples dispersed from the Mediterranean region across the world, they took their own variants of the human genome with them, establishing genetic lineages unique to their ancestral founding families along with variants of genes shared by other people groups. Thus, it’s not surprising that evolutionists cannot make any sense of this genetic data with their errant timeline and convoluted Out-of-Africa dispersal model." ICR