Did Lucy Rescue the Human Evolution Story?
Scientific American admits that before the
discovery of Lucy very little evidence existed
for human evolution, and much of it was wrong!
by Jerry Bergman, PhD
Textbooks and journal articles have claimed for decades that the evidence for human evolution is irrefutable (example, footnote [1]). Those who dig into the details find otherwise.
The November 2024 issue of Scientific American featured a cover story on what evolutionists consider the central importance of Lucy in documenting human evolution. The article was titled How the Famous Lucy Fossil Revolutionized the Study of Human Origins.[2]
After writing that “this iconic fossil remains central to our understanding of human origins” the authors attempted to document their claim that we finally have incontrovertible evidence that humans evolved from an apelike common ancestor.[3] The report also admits that, before the discovery of Lucy, very little evidence existed for human evolution and much of it was wrong. The article by Donald Johanson and Yohannes Haile-Selassie is obviously biased, because they were the discoverers of Lucy, nonetheless, their claims have been echoed by many paleontologists:
Every once in a great while paleontological fieldwork turns up a fossil so extraordinary that it revolutionizes our understanding of the origin and evolution of an entire branch of the tree of life. Fifty years ago one of us (Johanson) made just such a discovery on an expedition to the Afar region of Ethiopia.[4]
Up to November 24, 1974 when Lucy was discovered, many of the leading paleontologists’ conclusions about human evolution were wrong. The two authors admit this:
“With the discovery of Lucy, scientists were forced to reconsider key details of the human story, from when and where humanity got its start to how the various extinct members of the human family were related to one another—and to us. Her combination of apelike and humanlike traits suggested her species occupied a key place in the family tree: ancestral to all later human species, including members of our genus, Homo.”[5]
Even though paleontologists had acted overconfident about the evidence for human evolution before Lucy, Johanson admits that very little evidence existed for human evolution prior to his discovery. Read this quote in light of the dogmatic claims that were made before 1974.
To understand why Lucy had such a massive impact on paleoanthropology, we have to look at the state of the science at the time of her discovery. Back in the early 1970s, the oldest hominin fossils on record were thought to be around 2.5 million years old and belonged to a species called Australopithecus africanus. ….. Although Australopithecus africanus was classified as gracile, it didn’t particularly resemble either of these later groups. Yet it was the only sufficiently well-documented hominin we had …. There were a few scraps of fossil material from eastern Africa that were older, but there wasn’t enough material preserved to get a good sense of the kinds of creatures they came from. And so scientists drew their evolutionary trees with Australopithecus africanus as the all-important ancestor of Homo and the robust forms.[6]
Johanson admits that “It can be precarious to hang such a pivotal argument on a single fossil individual,” then proceeded to do just that!
Lucy’s Ecological Context
When searching for evidence for human evolution, the site called Hadar was especially promising, Johanson continues, because its rugged landscape was “chock-full of mammal fossils that erode out of the hillsides over time.” To understand Lucy better, much more needs to be revealed about these mammals, which include specimens of rodents, elephants, rhinos, hippos, monkeys, horses, antelopes, and pigs. As far as I can determine, most of these were modern animals very similar to those living today.
This question needs to be answered because evolution teaches that these animals were the precursors of modern animals, as Lucy was the precursor of modern humans. Also found were 7,571 additional vertebrate specimens, mostly fragments of artiodactyls, perissodactyls, carnivorans, proboscideans, and other African species, some of which were well-preserved in contrast to Lucy, which was poorly preserved. In 1975, Donald Johanson made another discovery at a nearby site in Hadar: 216 specimens from approximately 17 individuals varying in age, most likely related to Lucy type.[7]
The Discovery of Lucy
Illustration in the Scientific American article depicting Lucy, claimed to be the earliest known human ancestor, walking upright on foot with an ape-like face. The artist made her look very much like a man with a powerful build! The fossil does not support this picture. From Johanson and Haile-Selassie, 2024.
On that momentous day in 1974, the Lucy fossil was discovered. It consisted of some skull fragments and a “lower jaw with teeth, as well as parts of the arm, leg, pelvis, spine and ribs—47 bones in all representing a whopping 40 percent of the skeleton of a single individual. Her remains promised untold insights into the human past.”[8] By number there were 47 bones, but these were mostly several hundred small fragments. By weight the fragments were close to 23 percent of the entire skeleton. Furthermore,
a significant percentage of the known bones are rib fragments. Very little useful material from Lucy’s skull was recovered which is common: many of the replica skulls of early hominids … were clearly based upon extremely fragmentary pieces.[9]
Lucy did have a small, chimp-like head, and much of the rest of the body was also “quite ape-like” with “relatively long arms, and funnel-shaped chest.”[10] Furthermore, although the “body proportions were not incompatible with some form of bipedal locomotion… kinematic identity and functional equivalence with the bipedal gait of modern humans seems highly improbable.”[11] In other words, she would not have walked like modern humans but more like apes walked. Johanson admitted that when he found Lucy
he “looked up the slope and there were other bones sticking out.” … the bones were …scattered across a hillside. At one point, Johanson even says that if there had been only one more rainstorm, Lucy’s bones might have been washed away, never to be seen again. This does not inspire confidence in the integrity of Lucy’s skeleton or its proper reconstruction: If the next rainstorm could wash Lucy away completely, what happened during the prior rainstorms to mix-up “Lucy” with who-knows-what? How do we know that “Lucy” doesn’t represent bones from multiple individuals or even multiple species? … given the fragmentary nature of many of the bones and the highly incomplete nature of the skeleton, this argument seems fragile. … can we be sure that all are from one individual? Take Lucy’s femur or the pelvis, the most-prized parts of her skeleton. It’s a very difficult case to conclusively make that all “Lucy’s” bones are clearly from one individual of one species, and it requires some heavy assumptions.[12]
Lucy still leaves many problems with human evolution
Some leading paleontologists have admitted that Lucy does not live up to her original promise. This is a problem that Johnson totally ignored. Professor Bernard Wood, for instance, gave several reasons for the disappointment. He said, among other things, that she is “one of the most complete early-hominin fossils in terms of the number of bones preserved, even if the quality of their preservation leaves something to be desired.”[13] In his Nov-Dec article for American Scientist, Wood added that there is
reason to think that A. afarensis is a good candidate to be an ancestor of modern humans, but I’m not yet convinced. The good news is that we have pieces of nearly all of Lucy’s six long bones; the bad news is that the missing parts make estimating the maximum length of each limb and its segments (the arm/forearm and thigh/leg) a scientific guessing game.”[14]
He hopes more fieldwork may provide the required evidence, one way or another.[15] So far it has not.
Cranial and dental remains from this find allowed researchers to reconstruct the skull of Australopithecus afarensis. This illustration shows over half was missing. From Johanson and Haile-Selassie, 2024.
Although the majority of scientists still believe that humans evolved in Africa from some unknown bipedal ape like Lucy around 2 million years ago, evidence is rapidly accumulating against this position.[16] Evidence of what some critics infer is the last nail in Lucy’s coffin came from Laetoli, Tanzania. Mary Leakey found footprints in what was once wet volcanic ash, Darwin-dated to be at the time of Lucy, that were both the similar size and shape of modern humans.[17] One evaluation concluded: “The relative step widths of footprints from sites G and S fall squarely within the modern human distribution.”[18] The Laetoli footprints in volcanic ash “represent an early population of unshod modern humans.”[19] See my previous articles about the Laetoli footprints from 28 Jan 2022, 10 Dec 2021, and 3 July 2019.
Conclusions
Since the discovery of Lucy, research has not been very kind to the former superstar, nor to evolution itself. Even the progression icon of ape to human itself, one of the major, and visually illustrative, propaganda tools used to facilitate the acceptance of human evolution for decades,[20] has now fallen into academic disrepute. Johanson attempted to support the case for Lucy as solid proof of human evolution from some hypothetical ape ancestor, but he admits that the pre-1974 evolution evidence was seriously problematic. The newest evidence is also likewise problematic (see our Category Paleo/Early Man).
Casey Luskin, a geology PhD with the Discovery Institute, described his viewing of a Lucy exhibit at the Pacific Science Center in 2009:
The whole experience seeing Lucy was enlightening, though probably not in the way its creators intended. In short, I left the exhibit struck by the paucity of actual hard evidence for human evolution from ape-like species, and the amount of subjective, contradictory interpretation that goes into fossil hominid reconstructions.[21]
The phylogeny of claimed human progenitors. Note this does not illustrate a progression but rather a wide variety of primates as discussed by Bernard Wood. From Johanson and Haile-Selassie, 2024.
References
[1] Washburn, S.L., and R. Moore, Ape to Man. A Study of Human Evolution. Little Brown, New York, NY, 1973.
[2] Johanson, D., and Haile-Selassie, Y. “How the famous Lucy fossil revolutionized the study of human origins. Half a century after its discovery, this iconic fossil remains central to our understanding of human origins.” Scientific American, November 2024.
[3] Johanson and Haile-Selassie, 2024. Emphasis added.
[4] Johanson and Haile-Selassie, 2024. Emphasis added
[5] Johanson and Haile-Selassie, 2024.
[6] Johanson and Haile-Selassie, 2024; emphasis added.
[7] Geraads, Denis, et al. “Pliocene Giraffidae (Mammalia) from the Hadar Formation of Hadar and Ledi-Geraru, Lower Awash, Ethiopia,” Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 33(2): 470–481, March 2013.
[8] Johanson and Haile-Selassie, 2024.
[9] Johanson and Haile-Selassie, 2024. Emphasis added.
[10] Collard, M., and L.C. Aiello, “From forelimbs to two legs,” Nature 404: 339-340, 23 March 2000. Emphasis added.
[11] Jungers, W. “Lucy’s limbs: Skeletal allometry and locomotion in Australopithecus afrarensis.” Nature 297: 676-678, June 1982.
[12] Luskin, C., “My pilgrimage to Lucy’s holy relics fails to inspire faith in Darwinism,” https://evolutionnews.org/2009/02/my_pilgrimage_to_lucys_holy_re/, 2009.
[13] Wood, B., “Paleoanthropology’s superstar,” American Scientist 112(6): 326-327, November-December 2024.
[14] Wood, 2024, p. 327.
[15] Wood, 2024, p. 327; emphasis added.
[16] https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Lucy-Australopithecus-afarensis-important.
[17] McNutt, E., et al. “Footprint evidence of early hominin locomotor diversity at Laetoli, Tanzania,” Nature 600: 468–47, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04187-7, 2021.
[18] McNutt, et al., 2021 emphasis added.
[19] McNutt, et al., 2021.
[20] Bergman, J., “The ape-to-human progression: The most common icon is a fraud.” Journal of Creation 23(3): 16-20, 2009.
[21] Luskin, 2009. Emphasis added.
Dr. Jerry Bergman has taught biology, genetics, chemistry, biochemistry, anthropology, geology, and microbiology for over 40 years at several colleges and universities including Bowling Green State University, Medical College of Ohio where he was a research associate in experimental pathology, and The University of Toledo. He is a graduate of the Medical College of Ohio, Wayne State University in Detroit, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. He has over 1,900 publications in 14 languages and 40 books and monographs. His books and textbooks that include chapters that he authored are in over 1,800 college libraries in 27 countries. So far over 80,000 copies of the 60 books and monographs that he has authored or co-authored are in print. For more articles by Dr Bergman, see his Author Profile.