Press Goes Ape Over Baby Lucy
The news media, especially National Geographic, BBC News, and Associated Press (see Fox News) have new fodder for human-evolution stories and artwork, now that a partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis has been reported in Nature.1 The teeth, cranium, shoulder blades, fingers, inner ear, hyoid bone and other well-preserved parts match “typical African ape morphology.” This is not a new discovery. The research team has been gently extracting the pieces of bone from cemented sandstone for five years. They submitted their initial paper in for publication in April, but estimate it will take several more years to extract remaining fragments from the matrix.
Based on tooth morphology, they estimate this specimen to have been a 3-year old female. Because of the species affinity with “Lucy” (though found some 10 km from Johanson’s famous fossil), some are nicknaming this skeleton “Lucy’s baby” (but the discoverers have nicknamed her Salem, “peace”). The skeleton from the waist up is very ape-like, indicating a life in the trees, they claim. Though more complete than previous A. afarensis fossils, it lacks the pelvis; only a foot, pieces of leg bones, kneecaps “as small as a dried pea” provide anatomists with evidence to claim she walked upright – one of the most contentious parts of the debate over the older Lucy fossil.
The authors indicated that several parts of the skeleton have been distorted in the burial process: “The cranium is intact except for parts of the frontal squama and significant parts of both parietals, which have broken away to reveal the complete natural brain endocast (Fig. 1d),” the paper states. “The back of the calvaria is slightly distorted, pushing the nuchal region forward (Fig. 1f).” Later, “The articulated postcranial elements in the primary sandstone block include both scapulae and clavicles, the cervical, thoracic and the first two lumbar vertebrae, and many ribs. They are displaced from their original anatomical positions, and are compressed superiorly under the cranial base and the palate, making preparation difficult (Fig. 1b, c).” The scientific papers, furthermore, tend to be less dogmatic than the press releases. The authors only say that this skeleton resembles Lucy, and are tentative about the age, which the popular press state confidently as 3 years old. Furthermore, the authors understand that interpretations of life habits based on bones is not an exact science:
Now that the scapula of this species can be examined in full for the first time, it is unexpected to find the strongest similarities with Gorilla, an animal in which weight-bearing and terrestrial knuckle-walking predominately characterize locomotor use of the forelimbs. Problematic in the interpretation of these findings is that the diversity of scapula architecture among hominoid species is poorly understood from a functional perspective.
Most surprising, this specimen was apparently buried suddenly in a watery flood along with many other animals:
This depositional setting, combined with the remarkable preservation of many articulated faunal remains lacking evidence of preburial weathering, most likely indicates that the juvenile hominin was buried as an intact corpse shortly after death during a major flood event.
This is echoed by Wynn et al. who, in the same issue of Nature,2 described the geological setting of the fossil:
This depositional setting, combined with the remarkable preservation of many articulated faunal remains lacking evidence of preburial weathering, most probably indicates rapid deposition during major flood events, burying many fossils as intact corpses (including the juvenile hominin).
In the vicinity of the skeleton were found bones of catfish, mouse, rat, monkey, baboon, mongoose, elephant, extinct horse, rhino, hippo, pig, bushbuck, giraffe, antelope, impala, gazelle, crocodile, coral snake, tortoise, and other animals.
In the same issue of Nature,3 Bernard Wood called Lucy’s baby “a precious little bundle.” He agrees, “The corpse of the infant was buried more or less intact, and the sediment in flood waters must have swiftly covered it.” As to this species’ ability to walk upright, Wood is equivocal:
There remains a great deal of controversy regarding the posture and locomotion of A. afarensis. Most researchers accept that it could stand upright and walk on two feet, but whether it could climb up and move through trees is still disputed. Some suggest that its adaptations to walking on two feet preclude any significant arboreal locomotion, and interpret any limb features that support such locomotion as evolutionary baggage without any useful function. Others suggest that a primitive limb morphology would not have persisted unless it served a purpose.
Wood leaves any complete understanding to the future. After exploring several questions this fossil opens, he ended, “Whatever the answers to such questions, the Dikika infant has the potential to provide a wealth of information about the growth and development, function and taxonomy of A. afarensis.” He told Associated Press that this find won’t settle the debate among scientists, which he said “makes the Middle East look like a picnic.” National Geographic, though, was all ready with artwork, videos and special features about Lucy on the day of the announcement, and Scientific American went all-out with a special feature, including a clickable diagram of each bone fragment. On the other hand, Carl Wieland, a creationist with Creation Ministries International, considers this good news. The more complete skeleton confirms what critics have alleged for years, that Lucy was a tree-climbing, knuckle-walking ape that did not walk upright.
1Alemseged et al., “A juvenile early hominin skeleton from Dikika, Ethiopia,” Nature 443, 296-301(21 September 2006) | doi:10.1038/nature05047; Received 22 April 2006; Accepted 6 July 2006.
2Wynn et al., “Geological and palaeontological context of a Pliocene juvenile hominin at Dikika, Ethiopia,” Nature 443, 332-336(21 September 2006) | doi:10.1038/nature05048; Received 24 April 2006; Accepted 6 July 2006.
3Bernard Wood, “Palaeoanthropology: A precious little bundle,” Nature 278-281(21 September 2006) | doi:10.1038/443278a; Published online 20 September 2006.
When you scrape away the hype and artistic license, most of the details of the actual bones seem to back up criticisms by creationists that this is nothing more than an extinct ape. The only portions of the skeleton that evolutionists use to claim this creature had something to do with human evolution are the least preserved: the leg and foot bones. They interpret these to mean it walked upright, as if walking upright is the main human distinctive. The best-preserved parts of the skeleton, by contrast, are clearly ape-like and argue against this extinct ape being a walker. Read the articles skeptically, without assuming what the evolutionists assume, and the evidence is profoundly unconvincing for the claims made about it. Everything from the backbone up is well within the charts for an ape, not a human wannabee. The paleontologists admitted, also, that the skeleton has been deformed; how does that affect the interpretation, when assessing function from structure is “poorly understood” under the best of conditions?
This fossil also creates other problems for the evolutionists. Consider, for instance, how the evidence for arboreal (tree-climbing) behavior, based on the fingers and shoulder blades, scrambles the Lucy story: “The foot and other evidence from the lower limb provide clear evidence for bipedal locomotion [sic], but the gorilla-like scapula and long and curved manual phalanges raise new questions about the importance of arboreal behaviour in the A. afarensis locomotor repertoire.” This means that evolutionists must now either consider the tree-climbing equipment as “evolutionary baggage” or believe that this creature climbed trees half the time and walked upright the other half. (Only human boys exhibit this behavior today, but they quickly grow out of it.) If Darwin’s mechanism could produce instant phyla at the Cambrian, why couldn’t it get rid of its baggage just as quickly? On the other hand, if Baby Lucy was happy in the treetops, why was there evolutionary pressure to make her strut on the ground, when other primates found buried with her did not feel the same pressure? And how can minorities endure the racism implicit in the artwork (see Yahoo) that always shows these alleged primitives with dark skin?
The Darwin Party baby shower for Salem is, therefore, highly overblown, as is usual for human-evolution celebrations. They don’t seem to be focusing quite as much on the remarkable collection of animals buried with the little she-ape. If a sudden flood of this magnitude occurred today, burying this many animals in the same graveyard all at once, wouldn’t it be international news? This was not a volcanic landslide; it was a watery catastrophe. Notice how much the media are going out of their way to characterize this ape as a child and a baby when they won’t even afford that dignity to a human embryo. It is time to get rid of the evolutionary baggage and discover the real Peace Child.