The Daughter Of Lucy Is Chimp-Like

Image courtesy of Jlorenz1, CC BY-SA 3.0.



Joel Kontinen

How can a skeleton become the daughter of Lucy which was discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. the current view is that it is 120,000 years older at 3.3 million years ago while Lucy is 318,000 years old.

The scientists wanted to take a look at this fossil by taking the only fossil of Australopithecus afarensis that they had.

The scientists wanted to take a look at this fossil by taking the only fossil of Australopithecus afarensis that they had.

Why is Lucy considered to walk upright? It is because the
Laetoli footprints that showed they walked.

While the Laetoli footprints have been dated a mere “400,000 years” or so older than Lucy, there is a huge logical gap between her and the footprints.

So they took” super–high-resolution images of the deformed skull and teeth of an A. afarensis toddler, known as the Dikika child, which Zeresenay Alemseged discovered in Ethiopia in 2000.”

“The team zoomed in on the inside of the skull, where the brain leaves an imprint. They found that a fold in the tissue at the back of the brain, called the lunate sulcus, was in the same position as in a chimp, not a human brain where its position may have had some impact on complex mental function. Other features also showed “the brain imprint of A. afarensis is completely apelike,” says paleoanthropologist Philipp Gunz of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.”

They also found other skulls. “A second skull was of similar age and size; both suggest A. afarensis’s brain grew at about the same rate as a chimp’s, the team reports today in Science Advances. “

Source:

Gibbons, Ann. 2020. Lucy’s baby’ suggests famed human ancestor had a primitive brain. Science 1 April.

Laetoli Footprints – They Look Like Human Footprints But ...

A replica of the Laetoli footprints at the National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo, Japan. Image courtesy of Wikipedia (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license).






Joel Kontinen

In Darwinian explanations, the cart often comes before the horse. Fossils are seldom if ever carbon dated because evolutionists assume that they are too old to contain radiocarbon.

And if some features are in the wrong place (evolutionary speaking, that is), they cannot be what they obviously are. A well-known example is the existence of fossil footprints in Tanzania that are assumed to be 3.6 million years old. As this brief video produced by Creation Ministries International shows, they look exactly like human footprints, yet Darwinists cannot accept this, because it would be contrary to their storytelling.

Marks of Lucy’s stone tool found? Anthropologists disagree on old bones

Nature recently advertised the marks of the assumed stone tools of Australopithecus on its cover.




Joel Kontinen

Did Lucy use stone tools? Recently Nature published a letter that reported the discovery of bones in Ethiopia assumed to be approximately 3.4 million years old. Anthropologists think that they bear the marks of stone tools. They calculated the age of the bones from the volcanic ash in the region.

Shannon McPherron, Zeresenay Alemseged and colleagues believe that the marks in the bones are evidence of the earliest use of stone tools. They assume that Australopithecus afarensis used the tools 800, 000 years before H. habilis learnt to make such implements.

Not all anthropologists agree with the interpretation of McPherron and Alemseged. Tim D. White, a paleoanthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told the New York Times that the ”claims greatly outstrip the evidence”. Sileshi Semaw, a paleoanthropologist at Indiana University says that he is ”not convinced of the new discovery.” He goes on to say that trampling animals or other natural causes have often misled scientists in the past.

The researchers have not found any tools at or near the site where they discovered the bones so the debate has to do with the cause of the marks. No evolutionist will publicly admit that H. sapiens could have used the tools to carve up Australopithecus since they do not believe that modern man had evolved at the time.

For the same reason they still believe that Lucy left the Laetoli footprints.

The most logical solution to the dilemma would be to admit that Lucy could not have been capable of using stone tools and that faulty assumptions behind dating methods have led them astray.


Sources:

McPherron, Shannon P. & al. 2010. Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika, Ethiopia. Nature 466:7308, 857-860.

Wilford, John Noble. 2010. Lucy’s Kin Carved Up a Meaty Meal, Scientists Say. The New York Times (11 August).

New research: An ape could not have left the Laetoli footprints

New research suggests that a being resembling modern man left the Laetoli footprints. Lucy could probably not make them.


Joel Kontinen

In 1976 Mary Leakey found the footprints in Tanzania that are now pictured in most biology textbooks and major natural history museums. Their estimated age – 3,6 million years – makes them roughly as old as the famous Lucy or Australopithecus afarensis. They do not differ from the marks left by a barefooted H. sapiens.

Recently, David Raichlen, an associate professor at the University of Arizona, and colleagues examined how modern man walks barefooted on sand. They analysed the footprints left by eight human subjects walking on sand, and compared them with the Laetoli prints.

To the amazement of the researchers, the footprints did not differ essentially from the Laetoli prints. Lucy had the curved hands of an ape and probably also feet so the contribution of our grandmother to the prints is purely speculative.

Few people believe that H. sapiens walked on the Tanzanian savannahs 3. 6 million years ago. The dilemma can be solved if we keep in mind that radiometric dating methods do not measure that what we might assume them to measure, viz. time.

Instead, they measure the amounts or ratios of atoms or isotopes in a sample, and the date is computed on the basis of this. Errors of a few million years are not exactly rare.

Thus, a better explanation is that 1) the Laetoli footprints are human footprints and 2) they are not millions of years old.

Sources:

Evidence Indicates Humans' Early Tree-Dwelling Ancestors Were Also Bipedal. Science Daily March 20, 2010. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100319202526.htm

Raichlen, David A., Adam D. Gordon, William E. H. Harcourt-Smith, Adam D. Foster and Wm. Randall Haas, Jr. 2010. Laetoli Footprints Preserve Earliest Direct Evidence of Human-Like Bipedal Biomechanics. PLoS ONE 2010; 5(3):
e9769 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009769