Lucy’s laughable baboon bone, reported in an article in New Scientist 10 April 2015. Gary Sawyer and Mike Smith at the American Museum of Natural History in New York along with Scott Williams at New York University have been working on a new reconstruction of the famous “Lucy” skeleton, described by New Scientist as “arguably the world’s most famous early human fossil”.
The researchers noted that one of the vertebral bone fragments did not fit with the rest of the bone fragments of the spine. They compared the bone with vertebral bones of other animals known to have lived in the Hadar region, where Lucy was found, and found the best fit was with a baboon.
Scott Williams explained: “Baboons were a close match, both in shape and size, so we think we’ve solved this mystery. It seems that a fossil gelada baboon thoracic vertebra washed or was otherwise transported in the mix of Lucy’s remains”.
Editorial Comment: So the impression you got from text books and the museum displays, was they found an intact skeleton of Lucy? Note carefully then the comment that the aberrant bone was “washed or was otherwise transported in the mix of Lucy’s remains”. This is an admission that “Lucy” never was a whole skeleton, but actually a collection of disconnected bone fragments that had been moved about in flowing sediment.
Furthermore, never forget that even the scientists who found them classified them as an ape. The scientific name for Lucy is Australopithecus afarensis, which means “southern ape from Afar”.
What else can be said about the new baboon bone? Baboons are Old World Monkeys and they do currently live in the regions where the Lucy bones were found. Therefore, it seems that all that has happened is that a monkey bone has been mistakenly included in a collection of ape bones.
This finding is a good reality check about so-called “early human fossils”. Although they are invariably portrayed in museums and the media as whole functioning creatures with a mix of ape and human features, in reality they are collections of fragments that are embedded in an imaginary story made up by people who don’t want to face the fact human beings are unique creations made in the image of God, and are therefore accountable to God.
And yes, Prof Lovejoy’s TV comments from years ago that Lucy died and fell into a swamp and was stood on by a water-bufflo, so her hip bones were distorted to resemble a chimp pelvis instead of its man like pelvis are just as stupid today as they always have been. Read the transcript of Owen Lovejoy describing his “reconstruction” of the Lucy pelvis here. (Ref. anthropology, Australopithecines, ape-men)
Evidence News vol. 15, No. 5
15 April 2015
Creation Research Australia