Australopithecines aren't "just" apes

[Mallon]

Its not ignoring the data,its looking at it a different way with the bible as my framework,wheres your secular education looks at exactly the same information and attempts to connect us to animals.
We share common characteristics with everything on the planet due to breathing the same air,eating carbon based food etc.

Yet some things are more similar than others. We are more like dogs than fish. Fish are more like insects than sponges. Why, if not successive ancestry? You haven't explained the nested hierarchy yet. Do you know what I'm referring to?

You didnt answer how you managed to infer that lucy is more intelligent?

I didn't infer that Lucy was more intelligent. Where did I say that?
Regardless, I would infer that Lucy was more intelligent because she has a large cranial capacity, which correlates strongly with intelligence.

 

[brinny]

There's a great article here that documents the transitional nature of Australopithecus between humans and chimps, written in laymen's terms and well illustrated:

http://www.nabt.org/websites/instit...y_teacher/2010/February 2010/FebABTonline.pdf

So the next time you're told that australopithecines were "just" apes, make sure you refer to this article.

This is a hypothesis?

 

[Mallon]

We share common characteristics with everything on the planet due to breathing the same air,eating carbon based food etc.

BTW, it's an easy thing to show why this "biblical" explanation is wrong. It follows from what you've said that animals sharing similar ecologies should look more like one another than any other animal. Is this true?
Let's look at baleen whales and basking sharks. They both live in the deep ocean and filter feed on invertebrates. And superficially, they do look similar: they're both large animals, have a hydrodynamic body shape with fins, and filter food through their gaping mouths. But look more carefully: the shark's skeleton is made of cartilage, while the whale's is made of bone. The shark filters food through its gill slits, while the whale filters food through baleen. The shark's lower jaws are made of many bones, whereas the whale's lower jaws are made of just one bone (like mammals). Sharks have pelvic fins, but baleen whales don't (they have underdeveloped hip bones that look like those of mammals).
So we put your hypothesis to the test by looking to God's creation and it failed. That's science. Maybe it's time to reevaluate your interpretation of Genesis.

 

[Mallon]

This is a hypothesis?

No, I didn't state a hypothesis anywhere in the post you quoted.

 

[Assyrian]

I think in the field of paleontology,its best to just let the fossil record speak for itself.

Which if you really meant that, would mean sticking to cataloguing fossils with no attempt at analysing their significance or understand what they mean, but you don't really, you try to compare fossils too.

When i look at Australopithicus,i see something that is overwhelmingly simian,not human.Any contrary proposition is akin to saying black is white imho.
When i look at Lucy i see a variety of chimpanzee.Its all well and good to make predictions based on available evidence,but to infer this was a super intelligent primate without even having a skull...

The problem is that while Australopithecus looks pretty similar to a chimp, Australopithecus is also very to similar to Homo Habilis, more similar than it is to a chimp, and Homo Habilis looks more human than Australopithecus. Homo Ergaster also looks pretty similar to Homo Ergaster, which looks less like an Australopithecus or chimp than Homo Habilis and even more like a human.

 

[Smidlee]

Lucy could just be a bigger variety of chimp.Why do you keep inferring shes connected to us?
Its not ignoring the data,its looking at it a different way with the bible as my framework,wheres your secular education looks at exactly the same information and attempts to connect us to animals.
We share common characteristics with everything on the planet due to breathing the same air,eating carbon based food etc.You didnt answer how you managed to infer that lucy is more intelligent?

Not only that but they put Lucy together with the idea there were no modern humans around at the time even though they found modern man's footprints not far where they found Lucy. Thus for all we know it very possible some of Lucy's bones look human because some of them were human. Fossils like Lucy were found scattered all over the place with lots of other fossil bones. They put fossils together by how they image they look like. Slapping bones together is not a exact science unless of course the fossil was found complete which is very rare.
Even taking Lucy at face value, the more they learn for her the more ape-like she appears. She was more likely a tree dwelling ape.

They used to believe that humans brain/skull got bigger with time (smaller skulls = ape-like) until they found a lot of modern day humans with a very small skulls. They have found thousands of human fossils yet most of them look modern and/or they don't fit into Darwin theory. Darwinist only make a lot noise about the extremely few fossils (often only a few bones) that can be used to support their theory. Now all they seems to be looking for is an ape that could walk upright. So if an ape did happen to walk upright, would that suddenly make them human? It seems that modern humans did in fact had small skulls.

 

[troodon]

Never mind

 

[Mallon]

Not only that but they put Lucy together with the idea there were no modern humans around at the time even though they found modern man's footprints not far where they found Lucy. Thus for all we know it very possible some of Lucy's bones look human because some of them were human. Fossils like Lucy were found scattered all over the place with lots of other fossil bones. They put fossils together by how they image they look like. Slapping bones together is not a exact science unless of course the fossil was found complete which is very rare.

You do realize that we have many more skeletons like Lucy, right? Lucy isn't the only one of her kind. Nor is she a chimaera.
Your attempts to discredit the human characteristics of Lucy are getting pretty desperate (and plain wrong).

Even taking Lucy at face value, the more they learn for her the more ape-like she appears. She was more likely a tree dwelling ape.

What makes you say that? Almost everything about the anatomy of Australopithecus suggests they were upright plain dwellers, not tree dwellers. We've even found their footprints to corroborate the former hypothesis.

They used to believe that humans brain/skull got bigger with time (smaller skulls = ape-like) until they found a lot of modern day humans with a very small skulls. They have found thousands of human fossils yet most of them look modern and/or they don't fit into Darwin theory. Darwinist only make a lot noise about the extremely few fossils (often only a few bones) that can be used to support their theory. Now all they seems to be looking for is an ape that could walk upright. So if an ape did happen to walk upright, would that suddenly make them human? It seems that modern humans did in fact had small skulls.

Don't be daft, Smidlee. No one here is arguing that Lucy was human. But she does share more characters in common with humans than she does with apes. The argument is that she shares a common ancestor with humans apart from chimps.

 

[brinny]

No, I didn't state a hypothesis anywhere in the post you quoted.

As i read the article, didn't IT state this is all a hypothesis, all of the information shared in the article? I wasn't speaking about what YOU said.

 

[Mallon]

As i read the article, didn't IT state this is all a hypothesis, all of the information shared in the article? I wasn't speaking about what YOU said.

The article compares two hypotheses:
(1) That Lucy is "just" an ape.
(2) That Lucy is intermediate in form between apes and humans.
The article then tests these hypotheses by carefully comparing the skeleton of Lucy to those of a chimp and human. The test refutes hypothesis (1) and supports hypothesis (2). That's science.

 

[brinny]

The article compares two hypotheses:
(1) That Lucy is "just" an ape.
(2) That Lucy is intermediate in form between apes and humans.
The article then tests these hypotheses by carefully comparing the skeleton of Lucy to those of a chimp and human. The test refutes hypothesis (1) and supports hypothesis (2). That's science.

Exactly. Both are hypotheses. Thank you for sharing these hypotheses. Any others?

 

[Mallon]

Exactly. Both are hypotheses. Thank you for sharing these hypotheses. Any others?

The difference is that one is a falsified hypothesis and one is a supported hypothesis. That makes one wrong and the other NOT wrong. They are not on the same level simply because they are both hypotheses. Understand?

 

[brinny]

The difference is that one is a falsified hypothesis and one is a supported hypothesis. That makes one wrong and the other NOT wrong. They are not on the same level simply because they are both hypotheses. Understand?

yet, the latter is still hypothesis, yes?

 

[Mallon]

yet, the latter is still hypothesis, yes?

Given that it has been supported time and again by multiple independent lines of evidence, we might call it a theory.

 

[brinny]

Given that it has been supported time and again by multiple independent lines of evidence, we might call it a theory.

yet it is still hypothesis, yes?

 

[Mallon]

yet it is still hypothesis, yes?

Yes, but a well-supported one. We call well-supported hypotheses "theories".
The existence of atoms is likewise a well-supported hypothesis.

 

[troodon]

yet, the latter is still hypothesis, yes?

It can never be proven that early hominids are human ancestors. We could find thousands of skeletons representing every single major change along the way from apes to humans, we could find every single "missing link" Creationists have ever asked for in human evolution, and we still wouldn't be able to call it "proven". It would still be a hypothesis.

Getting stuck on the word is rather silly.

 

[Smidlee]

Except the fossil record doesn't show a clear line from these mythological ape-like creature to human. Thus it is not a very good hypothesis. The evidence points more the sudden appearances of both apes and modern man (as well as other species). Even some paleontologist have admitted this before even though they are still evolution believers.
The one area science can try to reproduce is abiogenesis which is why Darwinist wants evolution to be separate. They don't want to take any risk of evolution being falsified.

 

[Mallon]

Except the fossil record doesn't show a clear line from these mythological ape-like creature to human.

The fossil record disagrees:

 

[troodon]

Except the fossil record doesn't show a clear line from these mythological ape-like creature to human. Thus it is not a very good hypothesis.

So you're under the impression that, if humans evolved from apes in subsaharan Africa, we should be able to find a clearer fossil progression? What knowledge about hominid lifestyles and African depositional systems do you have to base this claim on?