To this point, as candidates for such ancestors, the australopiths are more or less the ‘only game in town’.Thus, it is important for evolutionists to be able to prop up the evidence for fossil ‘ancestors’ for us, ones that are somehow ‘in-between’ humans and the alleged common ancestor we were supposed to have shared with chimps.If we evolved from apelike ancestors, then we are not accountable to the Creator God of the Bible (read Romans Chapter 1).The level of hype over this discovery, while not quite rivalling the Nebraska Man furphy, is understandable on several counts, as follows. They did not walk upright, but had a unique rolling locomotion. They concluded that this was a unique group of extinct primates with an anatomy that, overall, was further from apes and people than those two groups were from each other. That’s not what Oxnard’s team found at all. People would be expected to cluster in a blob around one position in this space, apes around another, and australopiths somewhere in-between. Evolutionary expectations for the results were clear. The total anatomical coordinates of the three groups-modern apes, modern people, and australopithecines-were plotted in a 3-D morphometric space, as it’s called. The approach uses a computerized technique known as multivariate analysis that tries to remove the subjective element from anatomical comparisons. He has been Professor of Human Anatomy at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and is still Professor Emeritus at the University of Western Australia. The work was carried out over several years by a team led by evolutionist and anatomist Charles Oxnard. This was based on a detailed objective analysis of multiple coordinates on the bony skeletons of australopiths. Importantly, too, these creatures were, overall, not anatomically intermediate between humans and apes. So by the circularity that is quite common in evolutionary logic, the prints have to have been made by the ancestors of humans, which then shows that the ancestors of humans walked upright. This is more than ‘3 million years’, and modern humans are not supposed to have been around that early. The only reason they are assigned to Lucy and her kin is because of the ‘dating’ of the ash.
Russell Tuttle of the University of Chicago showed, they are indistinguishable from the prints of modern humans who walk habitually barefoot. The ‘upright walking’ claims were, till now, largely based on a set of bipedal footprints in volcanic ash, the famous ‘Laetoli prints’.
She became a ‘poster child’ for human evolution, and was regarded as our definite ancestor. Menton leaves no doubt that the famous “Lucy” fossils belong to a knuckle-walking, apelike creature, who was not a lady!įound by Donald Johanson in 1974, Lucy had no foot bones or skull, but most of the rest of her skeleton was substantially present. "Lucy" non missing link Lucy-She’s No LadyĪre you confused about the discovery of Lucy, a “missing link” between chimps and humans? Anatomist Dr.