Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Evolution is a myth? Please explain:

Evolutionary thinking is fraught with logical gaps, so no I don't spend my my time chasing all the possibilities offered by various competing theories of evolution. Because there are competing theories I was asking which one the folks here are following. I have seen Lucy appear in evolutionary charts as the the predecessor to Homo Habilis. So I was asking if that is what you guys think? Since that doesn't seem to be going anywhere, I will take a different approach since you are recognizing Lucy in the chain. Lucy has been heralded as finding evidence for a missing link. So let's examine some of the assumptions in this.

1. There is only 1 of Lucy--otherwise she wouldn't be so heralded. We have a tremendous fossil record for data, so why is there not an abundance of comparative and similar evidence for more similar transitional life forms that support macro-evolution? This one point alone is sufficient to establish the speculative nature of conclusions drawn from Lucy.
2. There two knee joints used--one from near and one from far away. "The one found far away was found two to three kilometers away from the skull and 60-70 meters deeper in the strata. Dr. Johansen does not claim that the knee joint belonged to Lucy. Instead, it was part of another fossil he found some time earlier. He does put them together logically, though, claiming that they were of the same species." This is very speculative because when you are assembling the first data point of 1 you cannot make assumptions that there were more and that you can just borrow from them to assemble the whole and then conclude if they were or were not walking upright.
3.Dr. Charles Oxnard completed the most sophisticated computer analysis of australopithecine fossils ever undertaken, and concluded that the australopithecines have nothing to do with the ancestry of man whatsoever, and are simply an extinct form of ape (Fossils, Teeth and Sex: New Perspectives on Human Evolution, University of Washington Press, 1987).
4. Stern and Sussman write in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (60:279-313):

"In summary, the knee of the small Hadar hominid shares with other australopithecines a marked obliquity of the femoral shaft relative to the bicondylar plane, but in all other respects it falls either outside the range of modern human variation (Tardieu, 1979) or barely within it (our analysis). Since, aside from the degree of valgus, the knee of the small Hadar hominid possesses no modern trait to a pronounced degree, and since many of these traits may not serve to specify the precise nature of the bipedality that was practiced, we must agree with Tardieu that the overall structure of the knee is compatible with a significant degree of arboreal locomotion." (p.298)

The paper by Stern and Sussman also mentions that the hands and feet of Australopithecus afarensis are not at all like human hands and feet; rather, they have the long curved fingers and toes typical of arboreal primates. Notwithstanding, the St. Louis Zoo features a life-size statue of Lucy with perfectly formed human hands and feet.
5. One of the world's leading authorities on australopithecines, British anatomist, Solly Lord Zuckerman has concluded (based on specimens aged much younger than Lucy) that australopithecines do not belong in the family of man. He wrote "I myself remain totally unpersuaded. Almost always when I have tried to check the anatomical claims on which the status of Australopithecus is based, I have ended in failure." (Beyond the Ivory Tower, 1977, p. 77)
6.Dr. Chas. Oxnard (USC) writes "Although most studies emphasize the similarity of the australopithecines to modern man, and suggest, therefore that these creatures were bipedal tool-makers at least one form of which (A. africanus--"Homo habilis," "Homo africanus") was almost directly ancestral to man, a series of multivariate statistical studies of various postcranial fragments suggests other conclusions." He further concludes, "Finally, the quite independent information from the fossil finds of more recent years seems to indicate absolutely that these australopithecines of half to 2 million years and from sites such as Olduvai and Sterkfontein are not on a human pathway." In Oxnard's opinion, australopithecines were neither like humans or apes but more like Pongo, the orangutan...even more "distant" from man, than a gorilla... "to the extent that resemblances exist with living forms they tend to be with the orangutan" (U. of Chicago Magazine, Winter, 1974, pp. 11-12).
7.Over the years, various objections to Lucy’s bipedality have emerged among evolutionists. For example, anthropologist Russell Tuttle from the University of Chicago, as reported in Science News, believes that the Laetoli prints were made by a contemporary but much more human-like creature than Lucy.18 More recently, experts have decided that Lucy walked on flat feet but that others of her species had arched feet.1
Stern and Susman in 198320 as well as Tuttle21 believed that Lucy’s pelvis was well-adapted for arboreal (tree-dwelling) life. They, like many others, noted that the orientation of the iliac blade on the pelvic bone matched that of [bleep], not humans. (The iliac blade is a wing-shaped part of the pelvis, or hip bone.)


Just too many logical holes and speculative assumptions in using Lucy as the proof that humans evolved from ape-like creatures.