Evolutions Lucy Lies
In researcher the evolutionary story of human origins, I came across this astounding and appalling piece of information about 'Lucy' and the species of fossils she belongs to, being Australopithecus Afarensis. The story goes something like this.

The Laetoli footprints, 'dated' at 4 million years old provided a problem for evolutionists because they seemed unmistakably human-like. They had the same weight pattern and structure as a human foot, clearly showing a human-like bipedal walking action.

If evolution was assumed to be true, they needed a bipedal hominid, with human like feet and gait to make those prints. Humans were not supposed to be around for another 3+ million years so they needed a different species. Enter Lucy, the 40% complete fossil skeleton. Found by Donald Johanson in 1974 (and his earlier find of a leg/knee joint in 1973) Putting aside for a second the self-serving artistic creations that were passed off as how 'lucy' looked, a much worse travesty was about to happen.

As the knee joint showed signs of some bipedal like motion (the angle and locking mechanism), and the evolutionists needed a human-like foot and gait, Lucy was given human like feet and hands, even though the fossil found did not have hands or feet. Evolutionists, in their rush for a bipedal human ancestor created details (repeated in countless drawings) that didn't exist. In their rush to pronounce the knee as human-like, they ignored the excessive angle of the joint (15 degrees, as opposed to humans, chimps and orangutans at 9 Degrees and other apes at 0 degrees), and many continue to ignore even more recent evidence that Lucy was a knuckle walker, like many other apes. Hand and wrist fossils were found that showed she had the wrist locking mechanism of a knuckle walker and also that she had ape like hands, not human-like.

Christine Berge, in her study of the australopithecines, also pointed out that many evolutionists assumed that the muscle patterns were also human like, and then went on to show how an ape-like muscle structure would offer better ability, of course, further reducing the case that Lucy walked upright.

(Berge, C., How did australopithecines walk? A biomechanical study of the hip and thigh of Australopithecus afarensis, J. Human Evolution 26:270, 1994.)

Many other evolutionists are now arguing against the upright bipedal locomotion of the afarensis (e.g. Richmond & Strait, Nature 2000, Stockstad 2000), but it is of course still trumpeted as having a human like gait in order to bash creationists.

Assumptions forced to fit evolution are standard fair of the evolutionists, so none of this is that shocking. What is shocking however, is the lengths some evolutionists have gone to force Lucy to fit into the upright bipedal locomotion that they needed to explain the Laetoli footprints. The pro-evolution PBS Series Nova provides the sordid details (in a completely accepting way). From the transcript

DON JOHANSON: ...We needed Owen Lovejoy's expertise again, because the evidence wasn't quite adding up. The knee looked human, but the shape of her hip didn't. Superficially, her hip resembled a chimpanzee's, which meant that Lucy couldn't possibly have walked like a modern human. But Lovejoy noticed something odd about the way the bones had been fossilized.

OWEN LOVEJOY: When I put the two parts of the pelvis together that we had, this part of the pelvis has pressed so hard and so completely into this one, that it caused it to be broken into a series of individual pieces, which were then fused together in later fossilization.

DON JOHANSON: After Lucy died, some of her bones lying in the mud must have been crushed or broken, perhaps by animals browsing at the lake shore.

OWEN LOVEJOY: This has caused the two bones in fact to fit together so well that they're in an anatomically impossible position.

DON JOHANSON: The perfect fit was an allusion[sic] that made Lucy's hip bones seems to flair out like a chimps. But all was not lost. Lovejoy decided he could restore the pelvis to its natural shape. He didn't want to tamper with the original, so he made a copy in plaster. He cut the damaged pieces out and put them back together the way they were before Lucy died. It was a tricky job, but after taking the kink out of the pelvis, it all fit together perfectly, like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. As a result, the angle of the hip looks nothing like a chimps, but a lot like ours. Anatomically at least, Lucy could stand like a human.{Emphasis Added}

Appalling. Lovejoy took the 'kink out'. He reworked the fossil in order to make it fit his assumptions. Note how Lovejoy said that the fossil parts of the hip fit "so well" that they were in an "anatomically impossible position". Yet the Johanson clearly indicates the hip was pretty much like a chimp's hip. If a chimp can have a hip like that then it is not so much anatomically impossible then, as much as being impossible if the evolutionists WANTED lucy to walk like a human.

It isn't bad enough that fossils are so pliable (as Shreeve said in Discover Magazine 11(8) 1990 "Everybody knows fossils are fickle; bones will sing any song you want to hear") or that fossils are incapable of identifying ancestory (as Paterson admitted in his letter to Luter Sunderland in 1979 "...statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test."). Having evolutionists falsify evidence to make it fit their assumed reality is just appalling.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Monday, February 26, 2007