In the mid-1970s a team of palaeontologists led by Mary Leakey found numerous footprints in a layer of solidified volcanic ash at Laetoli, Tanzania. Those found in a location called Site G have been studied in detail. They are so like human footprints that some scientists have commented they could have been made by people walking on the beach today. However, Leakey’s team claimed they were made by Australopithecines, (aka Lucy and co) and they are presented as such in museums and textbooks all over the world.
A trackway of similar footprints was found in a nearby gully, named Site A, but these are less clear and not the same shape as the Site G prints, and until recently had not been closely investigated. The Site A prints were made by an upright bipedal (two-legged) creature and some scientists claimed they were made by a bear, because bears can walk on two legs and leave triangular footprints.
A group of scientists based at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire have now studied the prints in detail using digital scanning, and compared them with prints made by bears walking on their hind legs. They found bear prints were quite different to the fossil footprints. Bears have narrow heels and nearly equally sized toes, whereas the Laetoli Site A prints have a broad heel and prominent big toe alongside a smaller second toe. The Laetoli trackway was made by a creature that could walk by placing one foot crossed in front of the other. Bears cannot walk in this cross-stepping way, and neither can apes, because their hips and knees are the wrong shape.
Because the Site A prints are not exactly the same shape as the Site G prints the scientists claim the Laetoli trackways were made by “two different species of hominin two different species of bipedal hominins, at Laetoli were walking within 1 kilometre of each other within the span of a few days”. Jeremy DeSilva, who led the study commented: “It’s showing there were these different experiments in bipedalism occurring at this time”.
References and Links: Science (AAAS) News, ScienceDaily 1 December 2021, Nature 1 December 2021, doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-04187-7.
Editorial Comment: Even the evolutionists admit the bear theory was never going to work, but good on those scientists for checking it out and refuting it properly. They should do the same with “hominin” theory, but the lack of living hominins or even complete hominin fossil feet is a problem.
The most famous Laetoli footprints at Site G are clearly human, but the evolutionists refuse to admit this because of their belief that humans had not yet evolved. Therefore, they assigned them to a hominin whose fossils are not found anywhere near this site. Now they have done it again, this time inventing another hominin with no fossils anywhere.
The site A footprints are a little different from the Site G prints, but the wide heel and big toe, along with the bipedal cross step gait could easily be accounted for by a human picking his or her way across uneven ground covered in wet volcanic ash in a gully. Once again, the evolutionists have had to resort to inventing new creatures because they have locked themselves into an old date for this rock layer along with their made-up timetable of when humans came into existence.
Creation Research News 8 December 2021
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