Scientists claim 'Lucy' may not be our direct ancestor after all, stoking fierce debate

 

The skull of a 3-year-old female Australopithecus afarensis, dated to 3.3 million years ago, discovered at the site of Dikika in Ethiopia. Image courtesy of Zeresenay Alemseged

Joel Kontinen

Recent fossil finds could mean that "Lucy" wasn't our direct ancestor, some scientists say. Others strongly disagree.

For a half century, the iconic "Lucy" fossil species, Australopithecus afarensis, has held the title of being the most likely direct ancestor of all humans.

Now, a key paper published last month in the journal Nature could overturn that theory entirely, some scientists say. They argue that, given the new evidence, an older species, Australopithecus anamensis, was our direct ancestor, not Lucy.

The proposal has revealed intense disagreements in the field. Some say A. anamensis is our direct ancestor, others argue that we don't know which Australopithecus species we descended from, and still others say the new analysis doesn't shake up the family tree at all.

The new discovery is "not altering our picture of human evolution in any way, in my opinion," Zeray Alemseged, a paleoanthropologist and professor of organismal biology University of Chicago who was not involved in the new study said.

The roots of the debate requires going back a century. In 1925, Raymond Dart announced the discovery of the first known Australopithecus — a skull dubbed the Taung Child unearthed in what is now South Africa that dates to around 2.6 million years ago. For the next 50 years, researchers thought that humans descended directly from the Taung Child's species, Australopithecus africanus.

But Lucy's discovery in 1974 at the Hadar site in Ethiopia rewrote that picture. The 3.2 million-year-old fossil became the oldest known australopithecine specimen at the time.

And Darwinian  researchers found her species, A. afarensis, walked upright on two legs similarly to how humans do today, yet it had a smaller brain — about the size of a modern-day chimp's. This suggested Lucy's kind could represent a "halfway" point in human evolution between the last common ancestor with chimps and us, making her species a good candidate for our direct ancestor among the many known hominins, the lineage that encompasses humans and our closest relatives.

According to evolution, Darwinian  evolution, with its millions of years, is the only reason for how we evolved, However, according to intelligent design, we were not produced that way,

Source:

Sophie Berdugo 2025 Scientists claim 'Lucy' may not be our direct ancestor after all, stoking fierce debate | Live Science December 22

What was the first human species?

 

Image courtesy of The Natural History Museum via Alamy

Joel Kontinen

According to evolution, the first human species saw daylight roughly 300,000 years ago.

 Modern humans emerged roughly, but our genus Homo is much older. So what's the oldest human species on record?

“All humans today are members of the modern human species Homo sapiens — Latin for "knowing man." But we're far from the only humans who ever existed. Fossils are revealing more and more about early humans in the genus Homo — ancestors like Homo erectus (Latin for "upright man"), who lived in Africa, Asia, the parts of Europe between 1.9 million and 110,000 years ago.

Various species of Australopithecus lived from about 4.4 million to 1.4 million years ago. It may be that H. habilis evolved directly from the species Australopithecus afarensis — the best-known example of which is "Lucy," who was unearthed at Hadar in Ethiopia in 1974.

The fossils of our genus are usually distinguished from Australopithecus fossils by Homo's distinctively smaller teeth and a relatively large brain, which led to the greater use of stone tools.

But White noted that traits like smaller teeth and bigger brains must have emerged at times in the Australopithecus populations that early Homo evolved from."

Source:

Tom Metcalfe  2025 What was the first human species? | Live Science August 16

Human ancestor 'Lucy' was hairless, new research suggests.

 

Joel Kontinen

Some evolutionists propose that Lucy was hairy, but new research supposes that she was not.

They say that Lucy was the mother of us all. This supposedly 3,2 million year old fossil belonging to the genus of Australopithecus afarensis.

”Popular renderings dress her in thick, reddish-brown fur, with her face, hands, feet and breasts peeking out of denser thickets. ”This might be wrong, hairy picture of Lucy, it turns out. ”

For evolutionist, this posed the question of why they left being nude, clothes became the norm.

Lucy was an ape. For creationist, God made humans to lose their nudity in Genesis 3 after the fallof mankind.   

Source:

Stacy Keltner 2024 Human ancestor 'Lucy' was hairless, new research suggests. Here's why that matters. | Live Science 23. June

Evolutionist belief that the first instance of microevolution was in Lucy’s relative

 

Image courtesy of Nikhil Iyengar,  CC BY-SA 3.0

Joel Kontinen

Evolutionist believe that our ancestors and our close evolutionary cousins that lived at the same time as other human ancestors, including  Homo erectus that some creationists think was human   and evolutionists belief that the first instance of microevolution was in Lucy a form of Australopithecus.,

 Now, evolutionists have found a fossil Paranthropus robustus that shows that males and females were of equal sixe and that P. robustus was a large toothed, small-brained hominins.

 Evolutionists claim that the difference in size was was comparable to  gorillas, orangutans and baboon were males were taught to bigger than females, but the fossil say the difference in size was caused by climate change.

Source:

Geggel, Laura. 2020.  1:st instance of microevolution in early human relative discovered.  Live Science 13 November

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.

For Evolutionists, It’s a Brand-New Ape that's Seen As Our Ancestor

Image courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, fair use doctrine.



Joel Kontinen

"Researchers have discovered a nearly complete 3.8-million-year-old skull of an early ape-like human ancestor in Ethiopia.“It is called Australopithecus anamensis, and it could have existed “4.2 million years” ago.

"An analysis of the new specimen challenges ideas about how the first humans evolved from ape-like ancestors.

The current view that an ape named Lucy was among a species that gave rise to the first early humans may have to be reconsidered.

The discovery is reported in the journal Nature.

The skull was found by Prof Yohannes Haile-Selassie at a place called Miro Dora, which is in the Mille District of Ethiopia's Afar Regional State."

Evolutionists believed that Lucy was the ape that gave rise to humans. Lucy was made up of bones that belonged to a baboon, for instance. And it is now certain that she fell to earth from a tree.

Source:

Ghosh, Pallab,2019. All bets now off' on which ape was humanity's ancestor. BBC News (28 August).

Temporal evidence shows Australopithecus sediba is unlikely to be the ancestor of Homo

Image courtesy of Brett Eloff,CC BY-SA 4.0.




Joel Kontinen

Even for evolutionists, austrapithecus sediba is a mystery. The earliest humans, found in Ethiopia, are from 2.8 to 2.75 Ma ago at Ledi-Geraru. However, the “Fossil specimens from A. sediba are currently only known from Malapa, South Africa, which is dated to 1.977 million years (Ma) ago.”

That leaves at least 0.8 million years in between, that they say cannot accounted for by evolutionary ways.

They also say: “Together, these results suggest it is highly unlikely that A. sediba is ancestral to Homo, and the most viable candidate ancestral species remains Australopithecus afarensis.”

Which is a mystery, as Lucy’s not all bones belong to it, but it also includes a baboon’s hip bone and it certainly fell to Earth from a tree.

So what does the study propose? Even evolutionists will speak well of a human ancestor, that is not too far off the track.


Source:

Du, Andrew and Zeresenay Alemseged. 2019. Temporal evidence shows Australopithecus sediba is unlikely to be the ancestor of Homo. Science advances (8 May ),Vol. 5, no. 5, eaav9038.

Chewie, Lucy’s Imaginary Big Brother, Left Footprints in Tanzania

The new footprints are a bit bigger than these. Image courtesy of Momotarou2012, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact,” Mark Twain wrote over a century ago.

It seems that nothing much has changed since then. Scientists made up an entire species (Nebraska Man) on the basic of a single tooth.

Now they have invented a hominid on the basis of footprints found at Laetoli in Tanzania.

A news article in Nature adds some dramatic effects into the story:

“The sound was more like a squish than a thud, as the tall male australopith strode across the East African savannah. A volcanic eruption had left a patina of grey ash underfoot, while rainstorms that followed transformed the earth into wet cement. Squish, squish. Four smaller individuals walked not far behind. Squish, squish, squish. Later, ash rained down from the sky again, covering their tracks for 3.66 million years.”

Reported in a paper published in eLife, the tracks are near the very famous footprints that prompted evolutionists to speculate that Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) walked on two feet just like us.

However, there is no fossil evidence in support of this claim. We simply don’t know what Lucy’s feet looked like, as the foot bones are still missing.

The new “individual” is called Chewie, and he is assumed to be 165 cm (5 feet 5 inches) tall, making him two heads taller than Lucy.

How did they come up with this figure? The largest footprint is 27 cm (10.6 inches) long, with some smaller ones, prompting New Scientist to speculate that early humans had multiple wives.

And his discoverers are convinced that like Lucy, he is an Australopithecus.

I wouldn’t be so sure.

Source:

Anon. 2016. Meet Chewie, the biggest Australopithecus on record. Nature News (14 December).

Lucy Was a Tree Climber, New Research Suggests

Lucy’s bones. The leg bones are still missing, so theories of how our assumed grandmother walked are not based on facts.




Joel Kontinen

Lucy’s upper limbs resembled those of modern chimps. This suggests that our assumed grandmother Australopithecus afarensis, as she is more formally known, spent a lot of her time in trees.

This is the take-away message from a recent study conducted by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Texas at Austin.

The research, based on CT scan images of Lucy’s bones, was published in the journal PLOS ONE. Science Daily summarizes the findings:

“Analysis of the partial fossilized skeleton, the investigators say, shows that Lucy's upper limbs were heavily built, similar to champion tree-climbing chimpanzees, supporting the idea that she spent time climbing and used her arms to pull herself up.”

However, when it comes to Lucy’s feet, bias creeps in, as it tends to do in research on our assumed ancestors:

“In addition, they say, the fact that her foot was better adapted for bipedal locomotion (upright walking) than grasping may mean that climbing placed additional emphasis on Lucy's ability to pull up with her arms and resulted in more heavily built upper limb bones.”

This assumption is based on evidence that is still missing. The foot bones have not been found. But the Laetoli footprints have prompted some evolutionists to assume that Lucy walked on two feet, just like us.

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.

They look exactly like human footprints. No tree dwelling ape could possibly have made them.

Moreover, Lucy’s bones were found in the Afar region in northern Ethiopia. Laetoli is in Tanzania. The distance separating them is roughly a thousand kilometres (600 miles), as Kenya happens to separate the two East African countries.

In other words, there is no reason to believe that Lucy’s kin made those marks.

But perhaps it’s best to let Science Daily continue:

“Exactly how much time Lucy spent in the trees is difficult to determine, the research team says, but another recent study suggests Lucy died from a fall out of a tall tree. This new study adds to evidence that she may have nested in trees at night to avoid predators, the authors say. An eight-hour slumber would mean she spent one-third of her time up in the trees, and if she also occasionally foraged there, the total percentage of time spent above ground would be even greater.”

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen: Lucy was a tree-dwelling ape.

Source:

Johns Hopkins Medicine. 2016. Human ancestor 'Lucy' was a tree climber, new evidence suggests. Science Daily (30 November).

Australopithecus deyiremeda: The Evidence for Lucy’s Relative Is Trifling

In 1922, the Illustrated London News featured this interpretation of the now infamous Nebraska man by Amédée Forestier. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.



Joel Kontinen

There’s not much evidence for the latest hominin – a few teeth and two tiny pieces of the mandible or jawbone. But the earliest reports touted the find as a new human ancestor.

Found in Ethiopia, it already has its own species name Australopithecus deyiremeda although some experts are a bit more cautious, as the diversity within a species can be considerable.

Au. Deyiremeda is thought to be closely related to Au. Afarensis (a.k.a. Lucy) that many evolutionists revere as their grand-grand-grand etc. mother – or something like that. The assumed dates for both southern apes are almost identical, just over 3 million years.

Warning of the danger of extrapolating a bit too much from the evidence, Mark Twain wrote: “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

It might not be a bad idea to spare a few thoughts on some of the past announcements concerning our assumed ancestors. The evidence for Nebraska Man consisted of a single tooth.

Moreover, perhaps science journalists should keep in mind what J. Shreeve wrote in Discover magazine in 1990: ”Everybody knows fossils are fickle; bones will sing any song you want to hear.”



Source:

Callaway, Ewen. 2015. New species of early human discovered near fossil of ‘Lucy’ Nature news (27 May).

Lucy’s Wrist Joints Suggest She Walked on All Fours

Here’s how the Natural History Museum in London depicts Australopithecus afarensis, better known as Lucy.





Joel Kontinen

For three decades, Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) has been the poster girl of Darwinian evolution. Museum reconstructions often show an upright-walking creature with both human and apelike traits.

However, research on Lucy’s bones does not support this view at all. A recent video produced by Creation Ministries International shows why this old Darwinian story is wrong.

Grandma Lucy Could Not Speak

New research suggests that Lucy’s voice sounded like today’s monkeys.


Joel Kontinen


While natural history museums present Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) as our grandmother, she obviously could not walk upright like we do. She had long curved hands that were well suited for hanging from tree branches.

Recent research highlights another ape-like feature in Lucy: She was unable to articulate like humans, but uttered sounds that an ape would make.

Bart de Boer, a researcher at Vrije University in Brussels, built a plastic model of Lucy’s vocal tract. An expert on the evolution of speech, de Boer concluded that Lucy could not speak the way we do, but sounded more like today’s monkeys.


Source:

Neimark, Jill. 2012. Big Idea Bring Ancient Voices Back to Life. Discover Magazine (9 August).

New Fossil Find: An Ape That Lived in a Tree at the Same Time as Lucy

Evolutionists almost always assume that Lucy had big feet although her foot bones have not been found.




Joel Kontinen

Some old fossils make headlines in the popular media and some don’t. Recently, the journal Nature reported on the discovery of toe bones found in Ethiopia. What is interesting is that they were found in the same layer as Lucy or Australopithecus afarensis – and in the same region – Afar that gave Lucy her last name afarensis.

They have been dated at approximately as old as A. afarensis or 3.4 million years.

However, they have not attracted much attention – probably because they are so clearly the curved toe bones of an ape living in a tree.

Some researchers, for instance Yohannes Haile-Selassie, who led the team that wrote the paper, think that the new find resembles Ardi (Ardipithecus ramidus). They have not yet given it a name, as they are not sure what species it belongs to.

Our purported family tree has to be redrawn – for the umpteenth time. Certainly no evidence for evolution.

Source:

Switek, Brian. 2012. Ancient human ancestor had feet like an ape. Nature news (28 March).

”We Have All the Fossils”

We often have different interpretations of the same fossil.



Joel Kontinen

Some time ago, an evolutionist tried to discredit Darwin doubters by claiming that he and other neo-Darwinists had all the fossils. His assertion is somewhat odd, because as Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis has said, we all have the same fossils.

The creation-evolution debate is not about who has the fossils but rather about what we infer about them.

Most fossils displayed in museums are actually not fossils at all but reconstructions made on the basis of a few bones. An artist has often given a Darwinian bias to a reconstruction, as seen in the case of Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis).

Most fossils remind us of the global flood of Noah’s day.

How Did Lucy Walk?

A reconstruction of Lucy at the Natural History Museum in London.




Joel Kontinen

A paper recently published in the journal Science on the discovery of the metatarsal bones (the long bones connecting the toes to the rest of the foot) of Australopithecus afarensis has given rise to many kinds of headlines in the popular press. In the wildest scenario, we see a high heeled Lucy walking down a city street without attracting any attention from the other city dwellers.

It is good to remember that researchers have debated Lucy’s bones for over 35 years.

Paleoanthropologists Carol Ward of the University of Missouri and Donald Johanson of the University of Arizona analysed 35 fossils assumed to be A. afarensis specimens that were discovered in the past 15 years in Hadar, Ethiopia. They believe that the fourth metatarsal shows that Lucy was not flat footed but could almost walk like modern humans.

According to Ward, the bone suggests that when its one end touched the ground, the other formed an angle of eight degrees with it, functioning like a shock absorber.

Donald Johanson belonged to the research team that discovered the first A. afarensis remains in 1974 so this might cause him to see Lucy as a very special link leading to modern man.

The history of paleoanthropology knows surprisingly many cases in which the discoverer of a fossil believed that it was the find of the century.

Not all paleoanthropologists share Ward’s optimism. ScienceNOW mentions the dissenting view of Will Harcourt-Smith of the American Museum of Natural History in New York:

“Although he agrees that A. afarensis had some arching, it may have lacked the most important arching on the inside of the foot. Lucy's fingers and toes also were more curved than those of living humans and her shoulder was more apelike—traits useful for tree-climbing.”

According to Harcourt-Smith, Lucy would have been more at home in trees than on the open ground.

Once again, it seems that the headlines do not match reality. We cannot even be sure that the foot bones belong to A. afarensis although they were dated at roughly the same age as the ”original” Lucy found in 1974.

Usually, researchers do not date fossils but they date the ground below or around them, which makes radioactive dating somewhat unreliable.

The assumptions behind the methods also lessen their reliability.


Source:

Gibbons Ann. 2011. Lucy Had a Spring in Her Step. Science NOW (10 February).

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).

Is ”Big Man” Lucy’s long-lost great-uncle?

No longer alone? A new fossil discovery is hailed as a relative of Lucy.



Joel Kontinen

Lucy’s long-lost great-uncle has been found. Or perhaps not.

Recently, the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a paper on a fossil discovered in Ethiopia, believed to be 3.58 million years old or 400,000 years older than Lucy. While Lucy was hardly 1 metre tall, her new male relative, dubbed Kadanuumuu or ”Big Man”, might have stood at anywhere from 1.5 to 1.8 metres tall.

Big Man’s estimated height varies so much because he has lost his head and lacks most of his bones. The partial fossil consists of a shoulder blade, a few ribs, shinbone and parts of the pelvis.

Authored by anthropologists Yohnannes Haile-Selassie and C. Owen Lovejoy, the paper has nevertheless re-ignited speculations of Lucy’s ability to walk upright as they believe that Big Man can also be classified as an Australopithecus afarensis.

This time, the media have been rather reticent about the discovery. National Geographic News for instance added a question mark after its headline. NG also mentioned that Zeresenay Alemseged, an anthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, does not think that the new discovery is Lucy’s relative.

Why do Haile-Selassie and his colleagues then believe that Lucy and Big Man walked upright? The answer may be found in the Laetoli footprints that are practically identical to the footprints of modern man.

They do not believe that modern humans had evolved at that time so they have to find an apeman or apewoman to leave those footprints that are assumed to be over 3 million years old.

Once again, researchers have let their preconceptions determine how they interpret old bones.

Sources:

Dalton, Rex. 2010. Africa's next top hominid. Nature News. (21 June)
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100621/full/news.2010.305.html

Than, Ker. 2010. "Lucy" Kin Pushes Back Evolution of Upright Walking? National Geographic News. (21 June)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/06/100621-lucy-early-humans-walking-upright-science/

3.6 Million-Year-Old Relative of 'Lucy' Discovered: Early Hominid Skeleton Confirms Human-Like Walking Is Ancient. Science Daily. 21 June. 2010 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100621151119.htm

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

National Geographic News: A Third of Dinosaur Species Never Existed

According to a National Geographic documentary there were far fewer dinosaur species than we thought. Image: dinosaurs at the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum in Kentucky.




Joel Kontinen

Dinosaurs Decoded is a new documentary that challenges our views of dinosaurs. The film, produced by the National Geographic Channel, claims that a third of dinosaur species never existed.

Young dinosaurs differed in many ways from their parents. However, researchers have not always taken this into account. Science thus ”knows” species that have never existed.

Mark Goodwin of the University of California, Berkeley, and Jack Horner of Montana State University, are prominent palaeontologists who present their discoveries in the documentary. They suggest, for instance, that the relatives of T. rex were often classified as distinct species although they actually were juveniles that lacked the traits that are characteristic of adult Tyrannosaurs.

Nowadays many researchers regard Nanotyrannus as a young T. rex. They know that dinosaurs changed as they got older just like many present species do. For instance, deer get their antlers when they are full-grown.

Dinosaurs Decoded has important ramifications for the reliability of fossil finds. It suggests that we should perhaps take a more skeptical approach to them – or at least to headlines that advertise a discovery as the fossil of the century.

Later research almost always brings to light features that refute the original claims of the importance of the discovery. Recently, we saw this happen in the case of the Ida fossil.

Finding a new species brings prestige and fame to its discoverer. Is it any wonder, then, that scientists habitually defend the importance of their fossil and discount the significance of rival discoveries? Richard Leakey, whose research team found Turkana Boy, the famous Homo erectus fossil, for instance, moved Lucy or Australopithecus afarensis to a side branch of the hominid tree.

Seen from a creation perspective, Dinosaurs Decoded is a welcome innovation. Noah did not have to take as many dinosaurs on board the ark as evolutionists assumed. In addition, it is good to keep in mind that the average dino was as small as a sheep or a calf.

Sources:

Barras, Colin. 2009. Richard Leakey: Passionate, prickly and principled. New Scientist 2730 (14 October) http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427301.000-richard-leakey-passionate-prickly-and-principled.html?full=true


Handwerk, Brian. 2009. A Third of Dinosaur Species Never Existed? National Geographic News (9 October)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091009-dinosaur-species-never-existed.html

Much Ado About Ardi

The discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus, recently published in Science, changes man’s pedigree –once again. Image courtesy of Science via Time.com © 2009, J.H. Matternes.




Joel Kontinen

In Ardipithecus ramidus we have the second fossil to be touted as the discovery of the century this year. The first was the case of Ida or Darwinius masillae that turned out to be a flop.

Before Ida, we had the Hobbits or H. floresiensis. And during the dark ages, i.e. the 1970s, we all became acquainted with our grandmother Lucy a.k.a. Australopithecus afarensis.

According to Science, Ardipithecus ramidus, found in Afar in Ethiopia, is 4.4 million years old or 1.2 million years older than Lucy. Ardi is touted as the oldest hominid discovery of all time.

Putting together the fossil bones has been like trying to fit the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together, as for instance the skull was badly crushed and it had to be put together from over 60 broken pieces that had spread over a large area.

Ardi was found in 1994. It took 15 years to reconstruct Ardi’s extremely fragile bones and put them together, which might say something about the speculative nature of the outcome.

Time.com. describes the condition of Ardi’s earthy remains, quoting Penn State paleoanthropologist Alan Walker:

"One problem is that some portions of Ardi's skeleton were found crushed nearly to smithereens and needed extensive digital reconstruction. 'Tim [White] showed me pictures of the pelvis in the ground, and it looked like an Irish stew,' says Walker."

It seems that the researchers’ basic assumptions decided which pieces they put where. While the bones were extremely fragile to the point of breaking apart in their hands, they nevertheless succeeded in putting together the remains of a female hominid estimated to be 47 in or 120 cm tall and weigh 50 kg.

Andrew Hill of the University of Yale says in a video released by Science that only four or five hominid fossils have been found. Most of our assumed ancestors are only known from skull fragments like in the case of Sahelanthropus, or from a few teeth or a bone or two.

What is obvious, however, is that evolutionists have been teaching a history of our past that is not true and man’s genealogical tree will have to be re-drawn. The discovery of Tim White and colleagues has awakened the Darwinists to realise that the assumed ancestor of man and the chimpanzee does not primarily look like a chimpanzee.

Hill disclosed that since very few chimpanzee and gorilla fossils have been found, researchers had not expected them to have changed considerably.

There is much less glory to be had in discovering a chimpanzee or gorilla ancestor than in getting a human forefather on the cover of a prestigious science journal. Perhaps for this reason few would even want to look for them.

Ardi has a typical ape’s foot, i.e. its big toe is sticking out sideways. Many evolutionists believe that Lucy or Australopithecus afarensis left the Laetoli footprints that do not considerably differ from those left by modern man although Lucy’s big toe most probably also stuck out sideways like Ardi’s. Ardi was definitely not able to leave such marks.

Dating old fossils is a game that is anything but precise since scientists will not date the fossils but rather the age of the place where they are found and since the methods include many assumptions. Thus, we cannot be certain whether Ardi really is the oldest hominid.

In addition, there is something suspicious in keeping extremely fragile fossil pieces out of the public eye for fifteen long years.

Sources:

Dalton, Rex. 2009. Oldest hominid skeleton revealed. Nature News. (1 October) http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091001/full/news.2009.966.html?s=news_rss

Science. 2009. Before “Lucy,” There Was “Ardi”: First Major Analysis of One of Earliest Known Hominids Published in Science.
http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2009/1001sp_ardi.shtml

The Analysis of Ardipithecus ramidus--One of the Earliest Known Hominids. Science Video.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/326/5949/60-b

Lemonick, Michael D. & Dorfman, Andrea. 2009. Ardi Is a New Piece for the Evolution Puzzle. Time.com. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1927200-2,00.html

Luskey, Casey. 2009. Bones of "Ardi," New Human Evolution Fossil, “Crushed Nearly to Smithereens”. Evolution news and views. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2009/10/key_bones_of_new_hominid_fossi.html#more

White, Tim D. 2009. Authors' Summary: Ardipithecus ramidus and the Paleobiology of Early Hominids. Science 326: 5949, 64, 75-86. (2 October).