Genesis Impact Clip - Australopithecus Afarensis "Lucy"

Lucy as the Best Evidence for Human Evolution

Take Lucy for example, she's probably the best evidence of human evolution. She's displayed in museums and school textbooks around the world as the leading ape-to-human.

Icon.

Well here, check out this short BBC video narrated by Dr. Donald Johanson, the person who found Lucy.

We now have 400 specimens of Lucy species Australopithecus afarensis, named after the Afar region, and we know that there are very large individuals, which were males, and the smaller ones are certainly female.

Did they really find hundreds of complete skeletons like they show in the video?

No. Here's what they actually found. What they mean by 400 specimens is 400 bone pieces, and over 30 of those are teeth. So no, there's only enough to display on a picnic table. So here's Lucy, and the rest of the fossils, they believe, are from her species, they're scattered around the table.

I'm sure you can only fill a bucket or two with them.

That sure doesn't look like what they show on the video when they say they found 400 specimens. It looks like they're exaggerating quite deliberately. When it comes to Lucy's fossils specifically, did they find her bones at the same place and were they all connected?

Uh, no. She was found in hundreds of pieces scattered across a three-meter area on a hillside. They sifted a total of 20 tons of sediment covering 50 square meters to find what resulted in only about 20 of all of her bones, but they didn't find any hand or feet bones, except for one small finger bone.

Yet, you showed us pictures of Lucy rendered by different artists with human-like hands, hands, feet, and even eye whites. Could you pull that one up? Do apes even have eye whites, like the picture you showed?

No.

Look, I know that Lucy has some limitations, and they didn't find much of her, but remember Lucy is 3 .2 million years old, and we have a few million years of ape-to-human progression since then.

The Sparse Fossil Record Between 3 and 2 Million Years Ago

Okay, tell me about the next million years, from, say, 3 million to 2 million years ago. What does the fossil record look like during that period?

The fossil record is quite sparse during that period.

How sparse?

Well, Dr. Kimball, the director of the Institute of Human Origins, said due to how rare the Homo fossils are from 2 to 3 million years ago, you could probably fit all of the fossils into a small shoebox and still have room for a good pair of shoes.

Don't you think that's an unusually long time to go without any supposed transitions between apes to humans? So Charles Darwin said, as by evolution theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed.

Why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? He also said, why is not every geological formation in every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain, and this is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.

You seem to have come prepared, with props and books just like I have.

I'm just trying to understand. I mean, when you look at the big picture, how many apes of human fossils are there, all in all?

Well, according to Dr. Tattersall, you could fit it all in the back of a pickup truck if you didn't mind how much you jumbled everything up.

All the evidence for the entire human line?

Yes, look, I'm not saying we have hundreds and hundreds of clear connections between ape-like creatures and humans. The record is in fact sparse. I'm admitting that. And look, watch this clip. I didn't show it during the presentation.

This is the leading paleo expert, Dr. Berger, giving a speech at Google.

I'm a paleoanthropologist. I look for early human ancestors. I actually look for the rarest sought-after objects on the planet. I'm in a field of science that actually probably has more scientists in it than it does objects that we study.

There are literally just a few thousand of these incredibly precious objects. Most of them are just fragments, tiny little bits and pieces. About 80 of the record of human origins in Africa represents isolated teeth.

The remaining, say, 18 of that represents little bits and pieces of post-cranial bones of which we almost have had no complete elements from the neck down. Those skulls and stuff that you see on National Geographic and such, those are incredibly.

Rare.

A number in just a few dozen.

Lucy’s Body Size and Bonobo-Like Features

All right.

So there's the big picture. Now let's focus in on some of the points about Lucy to see how she fits in the human evolution tree. Overall, Lucy was about three and a half feet tall and likely weighed about 64 pounds.

To put that in perspective, female chimps are about the same height as Lucy and typically weigh between 70 and 100 pounds. But Lucy's body type was more similar to a pygmy chimp or a bonobo, which is a cousin to the chimp.

They're about the same size as Lucy. Females average three feet, eight inches and about 68 pounds.

So Lucy was basically the same height and weight as many chimps and most bonobos we see today in zoos?

Well, in many ways, she was very similar to a bonobo, but we believe she had several features that show she was becoming more human-like. Let's start with the head and we'll work our way down to her toes.

Lucy's complete skull is shown in museums and school textbooks across America, but did they actually find her skull?

No. No, but we did find these skull fragments.

So these few brown pieces are what they actually found and the rest is, well, imagined?

I wouldn't go that far.

But did they find the white parts?

No.

So how can they not be imagined? Besides, don't you think her skull looks very similar to a modern bonobo skull?

I see what you're saying. Lucy's discoverers said Lucy's skull was almost entirely missing, so knowing the exact size of Lucy's brain was the crucial bit of missing evidence. But from the few skull fragments we had, it looks surprisingly small.

Later estimates reveal that Lucy's brain was just one-third the size of the human brain, making her brain about the average size of the average chimp.

So just what is it about her skull that makes her anything but an ape?

What do you want me to say? Yes, there's a lot of controversy about her skull. Some anthropologists believe her skull is very ape-like, while others are convinced it's more human-like.

Lucy’s Upright Walking and Ape-Like Anatomy

May I? Lucy's claim to fame is that she supposedly walked upright, like we do. But how could she walk upright when studies show that the spine of her species entered the base of her skull at an angle, just like chimps today?

Also, her face was totally sloped like a chimp's. That certainly wouldn't have helped. Our spine enters into the middle of the base of our skull, at a relatively straight angle, so that we can walk upright with ease, and turn our heads as we walk.

But in both chimps and Lucy's kind, the spine enters more towards the rear of the skull and comes in slanted, forcing her to walk hunched over, so she can see where she's going. I also understand that the semicircular canals in Lucy's species would have made it really difficult to walk on two legs.

Have you heard about that?

No, not yet, but I'm sure you would enjoy enlightening me.

May I use your laptop to pull something up?

Be my guest.

Humans and apes have three semicircular canals embedded deep within their ears to keep balanced while moving. Scientists have learned from the skull skins of other australopithecines that they were best suited for walking occasionally on two feet, just like chimps do today.

A Dr. Woods study revealed that the semicircular canals of Lucy's kind were more like those of chimps than modern humans, and suggested that Lucy's species would not have been restricted to walking on two feet.

Other studies in the Scientific American have found that the semicircular canals of Lucy's kind resemble those of African apes today. It seems like she was much better equipped for living in trees, like chimps today.

So now moving on from her head, what's that little bone at the bottom of her skull?

Well that bone is not supposed to be there any longer.

What do you mean it's not supposed to be there?

Excuse me. That's her thoracic vertebrae, and scientists learned about five years ago that it belonged to an extinct relative of the baboon called the Theropithecus dartii, a common ape-like creature around when Lucy was alive.

It didn't belong to Lucy or her species.

Then how did it get mixed in with Lucy's skeleton?

We're not sure, but remember, Lucy is made up of hundreds of broken bone pieces that were scattered across a hillside, and they screened 20 tons of dirt over 50 square meters to be sure they collected everything.

So I guess it accidentally got included with her fossil.

If this is the case, then why haven't you removed the bone from her display case?

We just haven't gotten around to it yet.

Have any other natural history museums removed it?

No.

None that I'm aware of.

This chick thinks this is all just a bunch of guesswork. Who does she think she is?

I know, but the docent doesn't seem to be giving any solid evidence to support his claims.

Lucy’s Wrists, Hands, Feet, and the Laetoli Footprints

What about her wrists and hands? Were they like those of apes or humans?

They were quite ape-like. Over 20 years after Lucy was found, some scientists discovered that Lucy had the same kind of locking wrists, with ledges and notches that are classic features of knuckle-walking apes.

And we don't have locking wrists.

Correct.

It's only found in apes that walk using both their hands and feet. The fingers of Lucy's species were quite curved and ape-like, even by ape standards, and best suited for swinging in trees.

What about her feet?

Well, they didn't find any of Lucy's foot or toe bones.

Well, that sure didn't stop them from putting feet on her in basically every natural history museum in America.

That's because they found a couple hundred bones in another location that represented 13 to 17 or so creatures they believe were her same species. Some of those were foot or toe bones, maybe enough to put into a lunchbox.

They also found some footprints, called the Laetoli footprints. They believe they were made by Lucy's species.

Where did they find them, and did they date about the same time as Lucy's fossils?

They found them in Tanzania, about a thousand miles away, and they dated the footprints to about half a million years older than Lucy's bones.

I'm sorry, it's just I had no idea. The case for human evolution was so weak.

It's not weak. She's just not relying on science.

Even if they did have Lucy's feet, based on the size of her species, how well would they fit into the footprints found at Laetoli?

Now that's a hot topic because experts agree that the footprints they found looked human. I mean, completely human. And some of them were quite long, like over 10 inches. In modern terms, that equates to a nine and a half foot shoe size and a person about five feet nine inches, probably made by a male.

How tall was Lucy again?

About three and a half feet tall.

What? That doesn't make any sense. They believe that Lucy was a full-grown female at only three and a half feet tall. But they say that a male of her species was five foot nine and made the footprints with a massive ten inch feet?

That's like 65 taller than the female version. I'm not buying it. Sounds more like the human footprints were made by humans and your dating timeline is.

Off.

I mean, way off. Also, didn't they find 13 fossils belonging to the genus Homo in that region that looked human?

Yes, but the team that found Lucy later reclassified those bones as Lucy's species.

Sounds convenient. If the footprints look unmistakably human, human-looking bones were found around the footprints and Lucy's fossils were found about a thousand miles away, wouldn't it make more sense that the footprints were actually made by humans and that your timeline is off?

Sure, I guess one would certainly make that argument, but we know for sure that humans were not around back then.

I thought you might say that. Did you know that just a couple of years ago, they found anatomically modern human footprints in Western Crete that supposedly dated to 5 .7 million years old? The article stated that the footprints were a million years older than Ardipithecus romidus.

That conflicts with the hypothesis that Ardi is a direct ancestor of later hominids. So using the evolutionary timeline, these human footprints predate both Ardi and Lucy. It sure seems like the ape-to-man story doesn't line up with these footprints dating to a time before upright walking was even supposed to happen.

It sounds more plausible to me that these ape-like creatures died in Ice Age flooding that happened after Noah's Flood just thousands of years ago.

A flood that there was no evidence for.

Well, I actually believe there's a lot of evidence for Noah's Flood, but the evidence that you claim to have for Lucy is based on hundreds of bone pieces glued together to make a fragmented skeleton of about 20 of her bones.

By the way, may I pull up something else? Just a few years ago, CNN did a report on a study done by a team of scientists where Lucy fell 40 feet from a tree, traveling 35 miles an hour, where she died.

So what was a little ape who was supposedly walking upright doing 40 feet up in a tree? Yet when millions of students every year see Lucy in museums, she's shown with complete human-like feet and hands, eye whites like a human, walking upright with human-like gazes and poses.

Sometimes they even remove the hair from her skin, again, trying to make her appear more human-like.

Hey, come on! You're not a credible source. I bet all these trained paleo-experts don't even have these concerns about Lucy.

As I've already brought up, though, there's a whole lineup of famous paleo-experts who would stand up here and say these same types of things. Just read Dr. Oxnard's Order of Man. He said that Australopithecines are now irrevocably removed from a place in the evolution of human bipedalism.

All of this should make us wonder about the usual 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 find the similarities striking.

They're almost identical in body size, in stature, and in brain size.