“Lucy" the Australopithecus Afarensis: Evidence for Evolution or Extinct Ape? (Full Length Version)

Lucy as an Ape-to-Human Icon in Museum Displays

Natural history museums everywhere display lineups of ape-to-human icons that supposedly show how humans evolved from ape-like creatures millions of years ago. After the icon named Arty, which evolutionists placed in the 4 to 5 million years ago time slot, the next ape-to-human icon is Australopithecus afarensis with the leading specimen named Lucy.

Check out this short BBC video about Lucy's kind, narrated by Lucy's discoverer, Dr. Donald Johanson.

We now have 400 specimens of Lucy's species Australopithecus afarensis, named after the Afar region.

But did they really find the hundreds of complete skeletons like those shown in the video when they say, we now have 400 specimens of Lucy's species? Actually, no. All they really have are just 400 bone pieces and over 30 of these are just teeth.

The entire collection is barely enough to display on this picnic table. To create the Lucy icon we see in museums, they took hundreds of bone pieces found scattered over a 9-foot area and glued them together to make 47 skeletal parts.

Even though they sifted through 20 tons of sediment covering a 160-foot area, they only found about 20 of her bones, if you count hand and feet bones. And they didn't find any of those, except this tiny finger bone.

There's no way to tell if all these bones are from the same creature and they recently learned that at least one of Lucy's bones actually belonged to an extinct type of baboon. While this vertebrae didn't even belong to Lucy or her kind, it's still included in Lucy's displays all over the country.

They believe Lucy was an adult female that weighed 55 to 65 pounds and stood 3 .5 feet tall, right about the same size as today's chimps or bonobos. After gluing these hundreds of pieces into 47 parts and creating models of what they think Lucy looked like, evolutionists came up with some surprisingly human-like creatures, with most models even including complete hands and feet, even though they didn't find Lucy's hands or feet.

Most Lucy models even include eye whites, which no apes have, except for some that have a small rim of eye whites. This sure exaggerates Lucy's human-like appearance in museum displays and books. Lucy's complete head and skull are shown in museums and school textbooks across America, but all they found of her skull were just a few brown pieces here.

All the rest is, well, imagination. As leading paleo expert Dr. Leakey noted, Lucy's skull was so incomplete that most of it was imagination made of plaster of Paris, thus making it impossible to draw any firm conclusion about what species she belonged to.

Interestingly, her skull matches up quite well with a modern bonobos, which is a pygmy chimp. Lucy's brain was just one-third the size of a human's, making it the same size as the average chimp's. Paleo expert Dr. Zuckerman said that the australopithecine skull is in fact so overwhelmingly ape-like as opposed to human that the contrary position could be equated to an assertion that black is white.

Evolutionists claim that Lucy supposedly walked upright like humans, but how could this be true when her spine entered the base of her skull at an angle, just like chimps today, putting her into a hunched-over position?

And her face was just as sloped as chimps today, so even if she tried to walk upright and look down, she'd be looking at her nose. Chimps can walk upright, but only for short distances. Our spines enter into the middle of the base of our skulls at a relatively straight angle, so we can walk upright with ease, turning our heads as we walk.

But in both chimps and Lucy's kind, the spine enters more toward the rear of the skull and comes in slanted, forcing her to walk hunched over so she could see where she's going. Skull scans of Lucy's kind have found another big problem with the idea that they walked upright.

They found that her inner ears resemble those of African apes today and were more like chimps than modern humans, leaving even evolutionary scientists to admit her kind was best suited for facultative bipedalism or walking occasionally on two feet like chimps do today.

They've also discovered their wrists, hands, and fingers were quite ape-like, even by ape standards, and were best suited for swinging in trees. Lucy had a locking wrist system for walking on all fours.

This locking system included ledges and notches that are classic features for knuckle-walking apes and are not found in humans. Next, on to Lucy's feet. One of the most profound stretches made by evolutionists involve Lucy's missing feet and the Laetoli footprints that were found 1 ,000 miles away from where Lucy was found.

Remember, they didn't even find Lucy's feet, and all the foot bones they believe are from Lucy's kind can fit into a small lunchbox. But this doesn't stop natural history museums from showing Lucy walking around with perfectly human feet and claiming that Lucy's kind made the footprints, even though they widely admit the footprints look exactly like a human's.

Just how was Lucy, or her friends or cousins, supposed to make these footprints when they look completely human, with some of them over 10 inches long? That's a size 9 .5 shoe and a person that was likely 5 feet 9 inches tall.

Remember, Lucy was only 3 and a half feet tall. Even if these footprints were made by a massive male of Lucy's kind that was 5 '9 with huge 10-inch feet, that's 65 taller than Lucy. How much sense does that make?

Especially when males and females of Lucy's closest lookalike today, Bonobos, are about the same height. That's putting some big, human-looking feet on this little creature. It sounds more like the human footprints were made by humans, and the dating timeline is off.

Way off. They also found 13 fossils in that region which they classified in the genus Homo, that looked human-like. So, if the footprints look unmistakably human, and human-looking bones were found closer to the footprints than Lucy's kind, wouldn't it make more sense that the footprints were actually made by humans?

In fact, they just found anatomically modern human footprints in Western Crete that dated to 5 .7 million years old. The article states, at approximately 5 .7 million years old, they are more than a million years older than Ardipithecus remedus with its ape-like feet.

This conflicts with the hypothesis that Ardipithecus is a direct ancestor of later hominins. These human footprints pre-date both Ardy and Lucy. It sure seems like the ape-to-man story doesn't line up with deep time.

With these footprints dating to a time before upright walking was supposed to happen, it's more likely that these ape-like creatures died in ice age flooding just thousands of years ago. So, to recap, Lucy is based on hundreds of bone pieces glued together to make a fragmented skeleton of about 20 of her bones.

She was pulled out of 20 tons of sifted dirt over a 160-foot area. She was the size and weight of a chimp or bonobo, had a brain the size of a chimp, and in her ears for balancing like a chimp, not walking like humans.

And somehow, after she's paraded around in museums and school textbooks for 20 years, they find out that she has the vertebrae of an extinct baboon and locking wrists like other apes. Today, scientists are still arguing about basic things, like even her gender, publishing articles like Lucy or Lucifer and Lucy or Brucie.

Just a few years ago, CNN reported on a study that showed Lucy most likely died by falling 40 feet out of a tree traveling 35 miles per hour. So, what's this little ape that was supposedly walking upright doing 40 feet up in a tree?

That's ironic. Yet, when millions of students every year see Lucy in museums and textbooks, she is shown with complete human-like hands and feet, human-like eyes, and walking upright with human-like gazes and poses.

Sometimes, they even remove Lucy's hair, trying to make her appear even more human-like. There's a whole lineup of secular paleo-experts who have similar concerns about Lucy. Dr. Oxnard in The Order of Man wrote, Australopithecines are now irrevocably removed from a place in the evolution of human bipedalism.

All this should make us wonder about the unusual presentation of human evolution in introductory textbooks. Dr. Herbert says that his fellow paleo-anthropologists compare the pygmy chimps to Lucy, one of the oldest hominid fossils known, and finds the similarity striking.

They are almost identical in body size, in stature, and in brain size. So, just what was Lucy? Lucy and other Australopithecines are extinct apes, just like many other ape species that have gone extinct.

She walked on all fours, ate the foods that apes eat, and lived among other animals that are like those that live around apes today. Is there scientific evidence that supports the Bible's account of human origins?

The Design of the Human Hearing System

Let's look and find out. One of the most obvious examples that humans are created is found in our hearing system. Taking an honest look at our hearing system reveals an obvious designer. How could random, mindless evolution engineer five separate components that have no purpose, unless they are all joined together in a certain order and in a certain way for the purpose of hearing?

Even if some random process could put together just one of these five components, it takes engineering and intelligence to join these five parts together, so that the sound waves from speech could be heard and then immediately interpreted as communication in our minds.

The eye might even be more convincing, containing hundreds of parts that had to be assembled to create the overall purpose and function for seeing. Random chance certainly doesn't have the intelligence needed for assembling different parts into a cohesive, interdependent system for sight to work.

DNA, Mitochondrial Mutation Rates, and the Limits of the Evolutionary Clock

Next, let's take a quick tour of some scientific discoveries over just the last few decades that give strong evidence for the Bible's account of human origins. Let's start by looking at DNA, a protein-coding language that cannot be replicated by any scientist in the world.

It's the most sophisticated information storage system in the known universe. Nothing comes even close. In fact, over 10 ,000 DNA molecules can fit on the head of a pin, and unfolding just one of them reveals six feet of instructions capable of building who you are.

Stretching out DNA in the trillions of cells in your body could reach to the sun and back hundreds of times. Perhaps you've heard that humans and chimps share 98 of their DNA, but did you know that when they made this comparison, they ignored 18 of the chimp genome and 25 of the human genome?

Plus, the chimp genome is over 6 larger than ours. When they give the 98 similarity figure, it's based on cherry-picked DNA regions that were similar. Of course, humans and chimps have similar DNA.

They're mammals living in the world with similar requirements for biological life. Our DNA is also similar to several other creatures. What about DNA research that purportedly shows our genome dates back tens of thousands of years, far outreaching the biblical timeline?

Recent research into mitochondrial DNA mutation rates gives the answer. This is unique because it comes only from the mother's egg, making it useful for tracing maternal ancestry. Since DNA was sequenced in 1981, researchers have been studying the mutation rates in mtDNA to try and estimate when different groups of people possibly diverged.

Evolutionary researchers have based these timelines on the assumption that humans and chimps shared a common ancestor about 5 million years ago. That date was based on counting the mtDNA and protein differences between all the great apes and timing their divergence using dates from fossils of one great ape's ancestor.

This evolutionary assumption counts on the mtDNA mutation rate of about one mutation every 300 to 600 generations or one every 6 ,000 to 12 ,000 years. But do these evolutionary assumptions hold up? Actually, recent studies have shown that the actual mutation rates are much faster than the rates assumed by evolution theory, causing researchers to rethink the mtDNA clock they depend on for forensic investigations.

This discovery was published in Nature Genetics by Dr. Parsons and his colleagues, who investigated the mtDNA of 357 individuals from 134 different families representing 327 generational events, which are counted by the number of times that mothers passed on mtDNA to their offspring.

Parsons' team showed that mutation rates actually occur at a rate of one every 33 generations, which was 20-fold higher than the estimates based on the theoretical 5-million-year timeline between chimps and humans that expect about one mutation in every 300 to 600 generations or one every 6 ,000 to 12 ,000 years.

This study was published in Nature Genetics and the faster rate has stood fast even as the number of families in the study has doubled. Other studies have confirmed these findings since Parsons' discovery.

For example, Howell's team analyzed mtDNA from 40 members of a family with an overall divergence rate of one mutation every 25 to 40 generations. Howell remarked that both of our studies, his and Parsons', came to a remarkably similar conclusion.

Based on these findings, Howell warned that phylogenic studies, studies that try to estimate the evolutionary branching between animal kinds, have substantially underestimated the rate of mtDNA divergence.

As one science writer puts it, evolutionists are most concerned about the effect of a faster mutation rate. For example, researchers have calculated that mitochondrial Eve, the woman whose mtDNA was ancestral to that in all living people, lived 100 ,000 to 200 ,000 years ago in Africa.

Using the new clock, she would be a mere 6 ,000 years old. This, of course, fits well within the Bible's timeline. Based on their updated work, identifying 220 soldiers' remains from World War II to the present, Parsons and Holland now have new guidelines, adopted by the FBI as well, to account for a faster mutation rate.

Studies have also confirmed that there was a massive DNA variability explosion that happened on Earth just thousands of years ago, within the time frame of Noah's flood and the Babel dispersion that occurred afterwards.

The Scarcity of Transitional Fossils and the Reality of Human Creation

Next, let's consider the extent of the fossil evidence that exists for human evolution. Charles Darwin postured that if evolution was true, innumerable transitional forms must have existed. He also questioned, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the Earth?

We agree. If human evolution was true, wouldn't we expect the ground to be filled with numerous transitions between ape-like creatures? We agree with Darwin that the lack of transitions is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory of evolution.

Even Ian Tattersall, Emeritus Curator with the American Museum of Natural History, noted that you could fit all the supposed ape-to-human fossil evidence into the back of a pickup truck if you didn't mind how much you jumbled everything up.

With centuries of recorded history and over 7 billion interfertile humans on the planet today, we should certainly have more than a truck bed of fossil evidence if evolution was true. The truth is that we are too sophisticated to evolve out of some primordial mud pit over billions of years.

We sing, worship, have ceremonies, pray, educate ourselves, and do so many other things that reflect the fact that we are spiritual beings and not animals. God made us on the sixth day of creation to name and take dominion over the entire animal kingdom.

This happened just thousands of years ago. God sent his son to redeem us from the fall that happened when our real forefathers sinned. We have been mercifully brought into a place of grace, forgiveness, and rest if we accept his sacrifice by confessing our sins and surrender our lives to him.

Looking for answers about what the Bible teaches about creation, the fossil record, dinosaurs? Download the Genesis Apologetics app from the iTunes or Google Play stores for answers to these questions and more.