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Fire, engravings, burial all bogus???

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  Let's talk about naledi . I'm sorry this blog has become a broken record over these questions, but I have been interested and excited about these hominin remains for years now.  I don't want to just ignore the current state of things. Quick recap: The remarkable remains from the Dinaledi chamber were first published in 2015.  Lee Berger's research team claimed they were members of genus Homo (our own genus) but that they were a species new to science.  They called this newly discovered species Homo naledi , but the real excitement over these remains was their hypothesis that the bodies of these creatures had been intentionally placed there in the deep recesses of that cave.  The evidence for that was basically lack of a credible alternative explanation.  The chamber contained thousands of bones of the same species, all highly similar and placed over time.  At the same time, other bones of African animals were generally lacking.  The bones were also in partial articul
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Core Academy research in the 2023 ICC Proceedings

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  I'm pretty excited to see the ICC Proceedings are now available as a full volume (not sure when individual papers will appear). I often get asked "What do you do?" and it's very hard to describe.  I'm part promoter, part fundraiser, part administrator, part mentor, part scientist, part scholar, part writer, part teacher, part podcast mastermind.  Here in the ICC Proceedings, you can get a glimpse of a couple of those parts: mentor, scientist, scholar, writer.  You can catch up on previous ICC reporting on my blog ( here and here ) and on Let's Talk Creation podcast ( here and here ). Now you might think these papers will be written in egghead-ese and impossible to understand, and you'd be close to right.  But I especially want to draw your attention to one of our biggest contributions, Human History from Adam to Abraham , which was (hopefully) written with a more general reader in mind.  It's not exactly great bedtime reading, but I sincerely hope
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Studying Skeletons

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  Now that ICC is over, let's talk about skeletons. I hardly know where to begin.  I've spent three years now immersed in skeletons, slowly amassing the information I needed to assess the skeletal similarities of fossil hominins.  For most of my career, I was just too intimidated to try this.  I'm not an expert in human anatomy.  I don't understand anthropology jargon.  A person with my lack of training is extremely likely to make foolish mistakes, and I didn't want to make a fool of myself. Then things changed.  After years of being frustrated by the "hobbit" Homo floresiensis , I decided to see for just this one fossil form if I could fill in more information in the matrix of skull characteristics I was using.  I was surprised to find how accessible it was.  Oh, I had to spend a lot of time studying anatomical diagrams and looking up unfamiliar terms, but sometimes the information I wanted was just stated in the scientific papers describing the fossils.
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Reflecting on the 9th ICC

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I am exhausted, but in a very good way. The Ninth International Conference on Creationism is now in the record books.  We're still waiting for the papers to be released, but the presentations have been made and the conference itself is over.  I thought the last one was pretty good, but I'm certain this one topped it.  Attendance was massive, behavior was pretty much exemplary, and I had a lot of silly fun with the "Let's Talk Creation" photo booth.  Most importantly, I got to sit in on what I would consider to be one of the most important presentations in a very long time. Where to begin?  The crowds were impressive.  I didn't know what to expect moving the conference from Pittsburgh to Cedarville University, and I'm glad to say the attendance was still strong.  I presented and heard papers in rooms where people were lined up in the back and sitting on the floor.  The theater that held the plenary sessions in the evening was also standing room only.  This
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Coming up at the International Conference on Creationism

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  The International Conference on Creationism is just around the corner, July 16-19 at Cedarville University. I've got five papers coming out at the ICC, and I thought I'd share a preview here. First up, "Testing the order of the fossil record: Preliminary observations on stratigraphic-clade congruence and its implications for models of evolution and creation," a collaborative effort to study the large-scale patterns of the fossil record.  This was actually a massive project that ballooned into something much bigger than I anticipated.  We used published phylogenies to measure how well these evolutionary hypotheses actually fit the order of appearance in the fossil record.  The results were complicated but extremely interesting.  We found lots of patterns that we didn't expect and really didn't have a good explanation for.  It should make for an interesting talk. Next, "A preliminary evaluation of ape baramins."   This one is long overdue.  Definin
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Graves, engravings, and tools? Oh my!

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  Before we get started, I thought it would be good to recap the last decade of work.  If you'd like to skip straight to the current stuff, scroll down to the paragraph that begins "Yesterday, we got two more big announcements...."  First, I'll set the stage. In 2013, explorers working on the suggestion of Lee Berger discovered a cache of hominin bones in an extremely remote chamber of the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa.  In 2015, the new hominin was introduced to the world by a set of papers, scans, and a documentary film.  The researchers suggested that this newly-described hominin was deliberately placing bodies of its contemporaries in the chamber, which at the time they termed "body disposal."  This suggestion sparked some skeptical remarks from folks like Chris Stringer, who thought that something with a brain that small could not engage in such a complex behavior. I got involved almost immediately by trying to discern whether Homo naledi sho
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