Australopithecus to Modern Man?
Mood:  a-ok
Topic: Evolution
The fossil known as “Lucy” was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia which is from an extinct species thought to have lived between 4 to 2.7 million years ago called “Australopithecus afarensis.” It was classified as an ancestor of modern humans. National Geographic credits Lucy’s discoverer, Donald Johnson, for adding “crucial link to our understanding of human evolution” for his find. It continues to say,

“Lucy,” as the skeleton was called, represented a previously unknown human ancestor—the species Australopithecus afarensis, now considered a key turning point in the descent of humankind. Mixing ape-like features with characteristics we consider more “human,” Lucy occupies a pivotal place on the human family tree between more primitive and more advanced hominids.

Well, obvously, from this it would seem that evolution had won a victory against dissenters. Yet another victory for the “fact” of evolution.

Further, about Lucy’s species, PBS shows that even though “her hip and knee joints were less specialized for an upright posture than our own” she was apparently able to walk like a modern human but also that she probably couldn’t run. It also elaborated that her fossil showed that ancestors of modern humans were already walking upright before they invented tools and their brains got bigger.

Looks good for evolution, right? Well, maybe not. I actually think there’s evidence that modern humans may have co-existed with Lucy’s sort, Australopithecus afarensis. Between 1974 and 75, in Laetoli, Tanzania some footprints were found that were estimated to be 3.6 million years old.

They were, because of the age, attributed to Australopithecus afarensis. This is because it was the only so-called “huminid” at the time in that location. But there is a problem with this identification. - In PBS’ article about the prints it is said that,

The prints, say experts on hominid body structure, are strikingly different from those of a chimpanzee, and in fact are hardly distinguishable from those of modern humans.

If these are in fact prints (that can be seen to the side) in fact do belong top Australopithecus then that species should have foot structure that is “hardly distinguishable from those of modern humans.” –But does it? In speaking about differences between the foot characteristics of Humans and Australopithecus, the magazine The American Scientist shows that,

Human feet are nearly useless for grasping but are well adapted to bipedalism. An intermediate condition occurs in early hominids such as Lucy (the best-known individual of Australopithecus afarensis), who had opposable thumbs and numerous adaptations to bipedalism, and yet retained rather long and curved toes. Lucy and probably other types of Australopithecus were walkers, hand-graspers and somewhat compromised foot-graspers.

Lucy was a foot-grasper with long curved toes. Of course, humans have no such characteristic. And let’s remember that the Laetoli Footprints are “hardly distinguishable from those of modern humans.”  – Geologist, John D. Morris in his article (Who Or What made the Laetoli Footprints?) shows,

Because of the dates, the prints have been assigned to Australopithecus afarensis, i.e., Lucy’s kind. But is this valid? Lucy was essentially a chimp. Even discoverer Donald Johansson only claims that Lucy was a chimp that walked somewhat more erect than other chimps. The Australopithecus foot was an ape’s foot, with an opposing thumb, and long curved toes just right for climbing in trees, but most unlike a human’s foot. According to researcher Dr. Charles Oxnard in a 1996 interview: “If you examine (Australopithecus foot bones) more closely, and especially if you examine it using the computer multivariate statistical analyses that allows you to assess parts that the eye doesn’t easily see, it turns out that big toe was divergent.”

Why do evolutionists continue to maintain that the chimp-like Lucy made the Laetoli human-like footprints, and that both represent our ancestors? Well, it’s certainly not for scientific reasons. The drive to prove man’s animal ancestry is great, for it frees one from accountability to a creator-God.

Thus we see that it is the creationists, not the evolutionists who are the empirical scientists. A human footprint must be made by a human foot!

By adding two and two, it became apparent that these footprints show that modern humans were around 3.6 million years ago. This would therefore be problematic for the evolutionary timeline because modern humans supposedly didn’t exist so early on. But then again, since many scientists believe Australopithecus afarensis is is our ancestor, then there would have been a massively quick evolutionary change in at most 400,000 years because this so-called human ancestor supposedly appeared 4 million years ago.  And if this is true, then the entire evolutionary timeline would be rendered irrelevant. Other so-called “Ape-Men” such as Homo Erectus and Homo Habilis which appeared later would therefore not be our ancestors either.

Finally, researchers from Tel Aviv Universityin a study they did claimed that they had disproven the theory that Australopithecus afarensis was indeed a direct ancestor of humans,

The specific structure found in Lucy also appears in a species called Australopithecus robustus. Prof. Yoel Rak and colleagues at the Sackler School of Medicine’s department of anatomy and anthropology wrote,

“The presence of the morphology in both the latter and Australopithecus afarensis and its absence in modern humans cast doubt on the role of [Lucy] as a common ancestor.”

Rak and his colleagues also wrote that the structure of Lucy’s mandibular ramus closely matches that of gorillas, which was “unexpected” because chimpanzees are the closest living relatives of humans, and not gorillas.

UPDATE August 8, 2008: It turns out that Yoel Rak is not the first researcher to call into question the idea that Australopithecus is not our evolutionary ancestor. Years earlier, (as early as December 1975) C.E. Oxnard in his study  ”The place of the Autralopithecines in human evolution: Grounds for doubt?“, which appeared in Nature, argues that,

The genus Homo (i.e., species like Homo Erectus and Homo Sapiens) may, in fact, be so ancient as to parallel entirely the genus Australopithecus thus denying the latter a direct place in the human lineage. (Parenthesis mine)

So it is not only Creationists that call the supposed link between Autralopithecus and humans into question, but also evolutionists. But interestingly many evolutionist text books have yet to mention this fact.