Lucy

[DaisyDay]

The number of bones found in the "Lucy" discovery was so small that any extrapolation, interpretation, assumption that fabricated the complete "lucy" is more of a guess than a fact.

Lucy was only one specimen of several, not the only one.

From the neck up, her brain was 1/4 the size of a human's, her jaw was circular, like a gorilla and her teeth were way larger than human's.

Pictures copied from GoogleBooks - Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind - from which the OP quote mined:

From the neck down there was very little human like connections. This ape might have walked a bit more upright but was designed to dwell in trees.

This debate will never go away. It is apparent that Johanson was already premeditating a human ancestor fabrication as all HE needed was an elbow, or to be exact, a little bit of an elbow, to create this link. See his quote:

"I happened to glance over my right shoulder . . .and there on the surface of the ground was a little bit of an elbow, I recognized it immediately as belonging to a human ancestor."

Right then and there he had his missing link, come hell or high water, it was in the books. Truth be damned.

You should actually read the books.

The links given more than once above to Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind discusses how invaluable his colleague's, Tim White's, equal bias that Australopithecus afarensis was NOT hominid caused them both to rigorously assess the available evidence, much more rigorously than either would have done on his own. They fought to know the truth to the best of their abilities - just the opposite of your claim.

 

[pshun2404]

You should read some of the context: GoogleBooks: Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind - if you think this in anyway debunks the Theory of Evolution.

Also, what the Cadet said. The book is pretty interesting. You should read it.

I never said it debunks the theory of evolution just Lucy's alleged role in the ape to human scenario...

The facts do not support the story we are fed about this particular ape. And I sense people have tried to imply I was using this man who has been repudiated but in actuality he has not (but he has been attacked by a few). Then of course there is the run of the mill secondary default to "well his research was too old" (typical)....but there have been many even in more recent times because as more and more researchers gained access to the fossils, Lucy’s “hominid” status began to be questioned...for example

Stern and Susman (American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 60, Issue 3, March 1983) remarked: “It is demonstrated that A. afarensis possessed anatomic characteristics that indicate a significant adaptation for movement in the trees” (1983, pg. 280). They went on to comment: “The AL 333-91 pisiform (bone of the hand) is ‘elongate and rod shaped’ and thus resembles the long, projecting pisiform of apes and monkeys”.

Their research demonstrated that Lucy's hands and feet show ZERO normal human qualities one would assign to human hands and feet! Lucy has long curved fingers and toes typical of arboreal primates. Yet one zoo in St. Louis, Missouri, deceptively displays a replica of Lucy but she has perfectly formed human hands and feet!?! Why the need for such a deception? These people are literally lying in the name of truth….sounds rather Geobbels to me...


They further commented: “The overall morphology of metacarpals II-V is similar to that of chimpanzees and, therefore, might be interpreted as evidence of developed grasping capabilities to be used in suspensory behavior” (pg. 283)”. In other words they were made for tree swinging...

This was confirmed upon close examination of the morphology of the fingers, they affirmed "The markedly curved proximal phalanges indicate adaptation for suspensory and climbing activities which require powerful grasping abilities.... The trapezium and first metacarpal are very chimpanzee-like in relative size and shape.... Enlarged metacarpal heads and the mildly curved, parallel-sided shafts are two such features of the Hadar metacarpals not seen in human fingers. The distal phalanges, too, retain ape-like features in A. afarensis.... On the other hand, the Hadar fossil falls within the range of each ape and less than 1 (standard deviation) unit away from the means of gorilla and orangutan ( pg. 284).”


Finally, Stern and Susman tell us “It will not have escaped the reader’s attention that the great bulk of evidence supports the view that the Hadar hominid was to a significant degree arboreal.... We discovered a substantial body of evidence indicating that arboreal activities were so important to A. afarensis that morphologic adaptations permitting adept movement in the trees were maintained (pg. 313).

Peter Schmid of the Anthropological Institute in Zurich, Switzerland in Leakey and Lewin’s, ORIGINS RECONSIDERED, 1992, pp. 193-194 is quoted as saying "When I started to put the skeleton together, I expected it to look human. Everyone had talked about Lucy as being very modern, very human, so I was surprised by what I saw. I noticed that the ribs were more round in cross-section, more like what you see in apes. Human ribs are flatter in cross-section. But the shape of the rib cage itself was the biggest surprise of all. The human rib cage is barrel shaped, and I just couldn’t get Lucy’s ribs to fit this kind of shape. But I could get them to make a conical-shaped rib cage, like what you see in apes.”

So again this raises serious and legitimate question with this particular fossil? I believe every Evolutionary Biologist and all others should have asked…

Why would anybody try to get the ribs to fit any kind of shape? Why not leave them as is, and let the actual data speak for itself? Why make it TRY to say something that it clearly does not?

In my opinion, objectivity should always be the case where any semblance of intellectual integrity is held to be important. Especially in science! Why make something not true appear to be as if it is true to convince people...to shape (engineer) the public's opinion? Was it not a great find on its own?

It makes one wonder did some higher up person, or special interest group, have an expectation that this is what they should have done? If they would have been able to do it, would we have just continued to be intentionally misled?

And with this admission one must ask "How many times has such deception making the lie appear to be the truth happened before that we do not know about? How many other bones have been reshaped, filed and stained, or taken from other creatures and added in so that the evidence is MADE to fit the conclusion instead of dictating it? Doesn't truth matter?

Paul

 

[Armoured]

Kitenge: This is the earliest known fossil of a human being. It's over two million years old.
Homer: (Makes rude noise) I've got more bones that that guy. If you're trying to impress me, you've failed.

Kitenge: It's not the number of bones, sir, it's the...
Homer: You have failed

 

[pshun2404]

Seems like kind of a crux point, actually...

If the remains of like creatures younger then Lucy show no such "in betweenism" what happened? Their evolution just stopped? Pishtosh! There is actually no evidence the so called "pelvic" evidence was not positioned on purpose (see my last post) or even that we did not have the remains of two creatures at the same spot (like with Dubois' Java Man) one ape and one human...

 

[pshun2404]

Dr. Brian Richmond of George Washington University working at the Smithsonian said “We saw something that talked about special knuckle walking adaptations in modern African apes…I could not remember ever seeing anything about wrists in fossil hominids...Across the hall was a cast of the famous fossil Lucy. We ran across and looked at it and bingo, it was clear as night and day” (seeAncestors walked on Knuckles, Dr. Brian Richmond, BBC News, March 12, 2000).

The March 29, 2000 San Diego Union Tribune reported “A chance discovery made by looking at a cast of the bones of “Lucy,” the most famous fossil of Australopithecus afarensis, shows her wrist is stiff, like a chimpanzee’s, Brian Richmond and David Strait of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., reported. This suggests that her ancestors as well as Lucy herself walked on their knuckles.”

In addition, Richmond and Strait’s research found in “Evidence that humans evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor”, Nature 404, 382-385 (23 March 2000), tell us that only knuckle-walking apes have a mechanism that locks the wrist into place in order to stabilize this joint. In their report, they noted: “Here we present evidence that fossils attributed to Australopithecus anamensis and A. afarensis (Lucy) retain specialized wrist morphology associated with knuckle-walking” (2000, 404, pg. 382).

Thus when Johanson and his coworkers admitted in an article in the March 31, 1994 issue of Nature that Lucy possessed chimp-proportioned arm bones and that her alleged descendants (e.g., A. africanus and H. habilis) had ape-like limb proportions as well—which as I can see it is a clear indication that she had not evolve into something more human, they were not lying. She was an ape some have tried to make more human...

 

[pshun2404]

Lucy was only one specimen of several, not the only one.


Pictures copied from GoogleBooks - Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind - from which the OP quote mined:

You should actually read the books.

The links given more than once above to Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind discusses how invaluable his colleague's, Tim White's, equal bias that Australopithecus afarensis was NOT hominid caused them both to rigorously assess the available evidence, much more rigorously than either would have done on his own. They fought to know the truth to the best of their abilities - just the opposite of your claim.

Actually Daisy I have never been to Google Books but thanks for the false accusation. Your artistic recreations only prove to me she was a vegetarian variety of APE...I did not claim they did not fight to know the truth, I implied they merely let the evidence speak for itself (true science)...

And why is it whenever a supporter of the ape to human scenario (even Darwin did not believe that) quotes sections of other scientists work it is called "legitimate" support, but whenever one who doubts it does the exact same thing (creationist or not and those I have given are NOT) it is simply chalked off as "quote mining"? Do you think the accusation makes such hypocrisy okay? Is it just a necessary evil to force the data into the theory or to convince the less educated? Think about it!

 

[DaisyDay]

Actually Daisy I have never been to Google Books but thanks for the false accusation.

What false accusation? The quote mine? That's not false as the quote is so out of context as to pervert its meaning.

Why would you use a quote from a book you haven't read and evidently won't read?

Your artistic recreations only prove to me she was a vegetarian variety of APE...I did not claim they did not fight to know the truth, I implied they merely let the evidence speak for itself (true science)...

Those aren't mine, those are from the book by the man whose quote you mined. Aren't most apes of the vegetarian variety? I think man is exceptionally carnivorous among the great apes.

And why is it whenever a supporter of the ape to human scenario (even Darwin did not believe that) quotes sections of other scientists work it is called "legitimate" support, but whenever one who doubts it does the exact same thing (creationist or not and those I have given are NOT) it is simply chalked off as "quote mining"? Do you think the accusation makes such hypocrisy okay? Is it just a necessary evil to force the data into the theory or to convince the less educated? Think about it!

What makes it quote mining is when the quote is truncated in such a way as to deceive as to the author's actual intent. In this particular case, Johanson admits that he was biased in the beginning and that it was his colleagues vigorous opposition to his bias that led him to a greater understanding of Lucy's place on the family tree - intermediate, perhaps closer to ape than man, but definitely towards man.

 

[DaisyDay]

I never said it debunks the theory of evolution just Lucy's alleged role in the ape to human scenario...

It doesn't debunk that.

The facts do not support the story we are fed about this particular ape. And I sense people have tried to imply I was using this man who has been repudiated but in actuality he has not (but he has been attacked by a few). Then of course there is the run of the mill secondary default to "well his research was too old" (typical)....but there have been many even in more recent times because as more and more researchers gained access to the fossils, Lucy’s “hominid” status began to be questioned...for example

Stern and Susman (American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 60, Issue 3, March 1983) remarked: “It is demonstrated that A. afarensis possessed anatomic characteristics that indicate a significant adaptation for movement in the trees” (1983, pg. 280). They went on to comment: “The AL 333-91 pisiform (bone of the hand) is ‘elongate and rod shaped’ and thus resembles the long, projecting pisiform of apes and monkeys”.

Johanson has not been repudiated. He himself, along with Tim White, vigorously questioned A. afarensis' hominid status. They concluded that A. afarensis was neither one nor the other but intermediate. This has not been successfully repudiated. Perhaps it will be upon further evidence or perhaps it will be strengthened.We certainly don't know everything.

Their research demonstrated that Lucy's hands and feet show ZERO normal human qualities one would assign to human hands and feet! Lucy has long curved fingers and toes typical of arboreal primates. Yet one zoo in St. Louis, Missouri, deceptively displays a replica of Lucy but she has perfectly formed human hands and feet!?! Why the need for such a deception? These people are literally lying in the name of truth….sounds rather Geobbels to me...

"Lucy" had neither hands nor feet. Later fossils did. Projections are revised on new evidence.

One zoo in Missouri is inaccurate in its depiction of Lucy's feet? Oh heavens!

They further commented: “The overall morphology of metacarpals II-V is similar to that of chimpanzees and, therefore, might be interpreted as evidence of developed grasping capabilities to be used in suspensory behavior” (pg. 283)”. In other words they were made for tree swinging...

This was confirmed upon close examination of the morphology of the fingers, they affirmed "The markedly curved proximal phalanges indicate adaptation for suspensory and climbing activities which require powerful grasping abilities.... The trapezium and first metacarpal are very chimpanzee-like in relative size and shape.... Enlarged metacarpal heads and the mildly curved, parallel-sided shafts are two such features of the Hadar metacarpals not seen in human fingers. The distal phalanges, too, retain ape-like features in A. afarensis.... On the other hand, the Hadar fossil falls within the range of each ape and less than 1 (standard deviation) unit away from the means of gorilla and orangutan ( pg. 284).”

The hands and feet are ape-like but the pelvis, leg bones and teeth place A. afarensis at the bottom of the hominid bush. A. afarensis is intermediate - bipedal.

Finally, Stern and Susman tell us “It will not have escaped the reader’s attention that the great bulk of evidence supports the view that the Hadar hominid was to a significant degree arboreal.... We discovered a substantial body of evidence indicating that arboreal activities were so important to A. afarensis that morphologic adaptations permitting adept movement in the trees were maintained (pg. 313).

Peter Schmid of the Anthropological Institute in Zurich, Switzerland in Leakey and Lewin’s, ORIGINS RECONSIDERED, 1992, pp. 193-194 is quoted as saying "When I started to put the skeleton together, I expected it to look human. Everyone had talked about Lucy as being very modern, very human, so I was surprised by what I saw. I noticed that the ribs were more round in cross-section, more like what you see in apes. Human ribs are flatter in cross-section. But the shape of the rib cage itself was the biggest surprise of all. The human rib cage is barrel shaped, and I just couldn’t get Lucy’s ribs to fit this kind of shape. But I could get them to make a conical-shaped rib cage, like what you see in apes.”

Another quote from another book you haven't read? Doesn't it detract from your actual understanding not to have read the source material?

So again this raises serious and legitimate question with this particular fossil? I believe every Evolutionary Biologist and all others should have asked…

Why would anybody try to get the ribs to fit any kind of shape? Why not leave them as is, and let the actual data speak for itself? Why make it TRY to say something that it clearly does not?

It was to test their theory on what they should expect to see. Make a theory, then see if the evidence fits. This is part of how science works.

In my opinion, objectivity should always be the case where any semblance of intellectual integrity is held to be important. Especially in science! Why make something not true appear to be as if it is true to convince people...to shape (engineer) the public's opinion? Was it not a great find on its own?

It makes one wonder did some higher up person, or special interest group, have an expectation that this is what they should have done? If they would have been able to do it, would we have just continued to be intentionally misled?

And with this admission one must ask "How many times has such deception making the lie appear to be the truth happened before that we do not know about? How many other bones have been reshaped, filed and stained, or taken from other creatures and added in so that the evidence is MADE to fit the conclusion instead of dictating it? Doesn't truth matter?

Paul

Are you interested in the truth? You don't seem to have read much of the original source material.

 

[The Cadet]

And I sense people have tried to imply I was using this man who has been repudiated but in actuality he has not (but he has been attacked by a few).

http://europepmc.org/abstract/MED/16769561

Solly Zuckerman's work has been largely dismissed or marginalized by both historians of primatology and primatologists. This paper, using archival and published materials, re-examines both his life and his research into primate sexuality and sociology in the 1920s, endocrinology in the 1930s, and the effects of bomb blast in the 1940s. Despite the many flaws in his work, which is now largely outdated, his career reveals a great deal about the audiences for primatological knowledge in pre-war and wartime Britain; the interlocking circles of the scientific community that impinged on primatology; and competing ideas of what constituted a scientifically correct methodology for the observation of primate behaviour. Also noted is the gap between Zuckerman's self-presentation as the scourge of anthropomorphism and the anthropomorphism of his remarks in private notebooks.​

Solly Zuckerman's work has been largely dismissed. In fact, almost none of it holds up to scrutiny. It's simply not a good source to be quoting. The only people who still hold Zuckerman to be a legitimate source on primatology are creationists who really want his research to be legitimate, because if it is, they get to claim that some icons of evolution don't apply.

Then of course there is the run of the mill secondary default to "well his research was too old" (typical)....but there have been many even in more recent times because as more and more researchers gained access to the fossils, Lucy’s “hominid” status began to be questioned...for example

Stern and Susman (American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Vol. 60, Issue 3, March 1983) remarked: “It is demonstrated that A. afarensis possessed anatomic characteristics that indicate a significant adaptation for movement in the trees” (1983, pg. 280). They went on to comment: “The AL 333-91 pisiform (bone of the hand) is ‘elongate and rod shaped’ and thus resembles the long, projecting pisiform of apes and monkeys”.

Does that imply that Lucy is not a transitional form? No. Do Stern and Susman think that Lucy was a quadruped? No. To take it from this NYT article, there was universal agreement that when Lucy walked, it was on two legs. The question here was whether Lucy was primarily a walker or whether she spent more time in the trees. You don't seem to understand the significance of the research you're citing or how it fits into the debate, historically.

Their research demonstrated that Lucy's hands and feet show ZERO normal human qualities one would assign to human hands and feet!

So what? It's a 3-million-year-old transitional fossil. It's clear that it will look more like a more traditional ape than a human.

Peter Schmid of the Anthropological Institute in Zurich, Switzerland in Leakey and Lewin’s, ORIGINS RECONSIDERED, 1992, pp. 193-194 is quoted as saying "When I started to put the skeleton together, I expected it to look human. Everyone had talked about Lucy as being very modern, very human, so I was surprised by what I saw. I noticed that the ribs were more round in cross-section, more like what you see in apes. Human ribs are flatter in cross-section. But the shape of the rib cage itself was the biggest surprise of all. The human rib cage is barrel shaped, and I just couldn’t get Lucy’s ribs to fit this kind of shape. But I could get them to make a conical-shaped rib cage, like what you see in apes.”

So again this raises serious and legitimate question with this particular fossil? I believe every Evolutionary Biologist and all others should have asked…

Why would anybody try to get the ribs to fit any kind of shape? Why not leave them as is, and let the actual data speak for itself? Why make it TRY to say something that it clearly does not?

Because the bones are a puzzle. We usually don't have a full, perfect skeleton encased in rock, and in this case, the fossils had to be reassembled. So you try various things to see how it fits together. You try to solve the puzzle of how this fossil might have looked. You can't let the actual data speak for itself because, as your quote put it, he had to put the skeleton together first! And the correct result did come out, because paleontologists aren't just gluing one bone to another. We are long past the days of iguanadons having horns. Please, if you know nothing about a field and have no experience therein, don't try to critique its findings. It's phenomenally arrogant.

 

[DaisyDay]

Dr. Brian Richmond of George Washington University working at the Smithsonian said “We saw something that talked about special knuckle walking adaptations in modern African apes…I could not remember ever seeing anything about wrists in fossil hominids...Across the hall was a cast of the famous fossil Lucy. We ran across and looked at it and bingo, it was clear as night and day” (seeAncestors walked on Knuckles, Dr. Brian Richmond, BBC News, March 12, 2000).

The March 29, 2000 San Diego Union Tribune reported “A chance discovery made by looking at a cast of the bones of “Lucy,” the most famous fossil of Australopithecus afarensis, shows her wrist is stiff, like a chimpanzee’s, Brian Richmond and David Strait of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., reported. This suggests that her ancestors as well as Lucy herself walked on their knuckles.”

Here is a link to the actual BBC article the quote is from. Did you read the original article?

"Walking upright is the hallmark of humanity. It is the feature that defines all of our ancestors to the exclusion of our ape relatives."

Lucy, who lived in Africa between 4.1 and 3 million years ago, did walk upright. Her hip and leg bones make that clear...

...Experts say humans, chimps, gorillas and other apes descended from a common ancestor and evolved independently...

...Lucy has it too. Dr Richmond said it was not until Australopithecus africanus emerged, about 2.5 million years ago, that the wrist became mobile like that of modern humans.​

See, you have to read the whole article, not just the quote mine, to understand what the author is getting at. In this case, Dr. Richmond clearly considers Lucy an early ancestor.

In addition, Richmond and Strait’s research found in “Evidence that humans evolved from a knuckle-walking ancestor”, Nature 404, 382-385 (23 March 2000), tell us that only knuckle-walking apes have a mechanism that locks the wrist into place in order to stabilize this joint. In their report, they noted: “Here we present evidence that fossils attributed to Australopithecus anamensis and A. afarensis (Lucy) retain specialized wrist morphology associated with knuckle-walking” (2000, 404, pg. 382).

Thus when Johanson and his coworkers admitted in an article in the March 31, 1994 issue of Nature that Lucy possessed chimp-proportioned arm bones and that her alleged descendants (e.g., A. africanus and H. habilis) had ape-like limb proportions as well—which as I can see it is a clear indication that she had not evolve into something more human, they were not lying. She was an ape some have tried to make more human...

Her arms were not chimp-proportioned. When you compare the length of the upper arm bone, the humerus, to the length of the thigh bone, the femur, you get the humerofemoral index, which in chimps is about 100% (1 to 1 equal) and in humans is about 70% (the arm bone is shorter than the thigh bone). In Lucy, the index is intermediate - 85%. (These numbers are from Richard Leakey's Origins Reconsidered - link given above in a previous post. I do thank you for these sources as they are interesting).

 

[pshun2404]

What false accusation? The quote mine? That's not false as the quote is so out of context as to pervert its meaning.

My dear Daisy you implied I quote-mined google books....thus a false accusation. Don't fret, its okay to be wrong once on a while. The evidence, as seen by many who have examined the fossils, say Lucy was a knuckle walker...

 

[The Cadet]

My dear Daisy you implied I quote-mined google books....thus a false accusation. Don't fret, its okay to be wrong once on a while. The evidence, as seen by many who have examined the fossils, say Lucy was a knuckle walker...

Who claims that today? Please cite their work in context.

 

[DaisyDay]

What false accusation? The quote mine? That's not false as the quote is so out of context as to pervert its meaning.

My dear Daisy you implied I quote-mined google books....thus a false accusation. Don't fret, its okay to be wrong once on a while.

No, I said you quote mined period.

With your quotes, you supplied a source, the name of the book, the author and the page number. Then I supplied a link to the source you cited, via GoogleBooks, for easy look-up of the context of the complete quote so you and everyone else can compare your truncation with the larger passage for meaning.

Are you claiming that the online version of the book is different than the print copy?

I suspect you didn't obtain your quote from the original source you cited at all as you pretty evidently didn't read much of anything else in it (or even recognize the pictures). Where did you get the quote mine from?

The evidence, as seen by many who have examined the fossils, say Lucy was a knuckle walker...

She was stiff-wristed AND bipedal. She seems to be a very early ancestress - no one claims she is human, thus the Australopithecus genus and not Homo genus.

 

[pshun2404]

"Ancestors" is a matter of "interpretation". The references I gave are of course sections and conclusions by these non-creationist scientists. The quotes are not their conclusions but observations within their greater works. The point is that on many occasions the same evidence can offer different perspectives.

For example (not to take the discussion on a tangent) there is a number of "Ancestor" finds that equally can be "interpreted" as containing evidence for early humans...but because it does not fit the "consensus" view such an interpretation is automatically rejected and/or not even considered. You will never hear of this equally plausible interpretation in textbooks...

Every person I cited is a believer in evolution (as am I) but they point out issues in the evidence that must be considered and accounted for and not just ignored, discarded,or re-explained to discredit. I read Johanson's book in 1992 while at Boston State (he definitely believed she was a prehistoric human ancestor when Lucy was discovered) but that does not negate his additional observations over a decade ...many Australopithicenes demonstrate the physiology of knuckle walking and some form of bipedalism at the same time.

Whether or not she was an "Ancestor" or merely a less successful variety of Ape is simply a matter of OPINION based on how one sees/interprets the evidence. It is not necessary she must be either but both are plausible interpretations.

So I would ask you cease the typical anti-creationist accusations and DISCUSS the evidence. I am saying that both characteristics are indicated (do you agree or not, why?)...for example..when Lovejoy published his plaster reconstruction (American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 1979), no one was being deceived. He was reporting honestly FROM HIS PERSPECTIVE what he thought the original would have looked like. He hid nothing…anyone could explore his work. But he was not the only one with an opinion, but because his model supported the theory it was the one accepted by the pedagoguery. This has happened before in science and eventually over time I am sure the truth will reveal something different than what we were taught (time has that effect on science).

Anyway, 15 years later, after some had questioned his particular filing and shaping of the plaster molds, evolutionist Christine Berge went back to the same original fossils (still available) and did her own reconstruction. Now she (like myself) did in no wise deny Lucy’s bipedalism but she did not see the same “fit” that Lovejoy had seen. She reported, “The results clearly indicate that australopithecine bipedalism differs from that of humans. The extended lower limb of australopithecines would have lacked stabilization during walking; and the lower limb would have shown greater freedom for motion, which can be interpreted as the retention of a partly arboreal behavior.” (See “How did the australopithecenes walk? A biomechanical study of the hip and thigh of Australopithecus afarensis”, Journal of Human Evolution, 1994, 26, no. 4:259–273)

Should one simply negate or disregard or try to discredit this assessment simply because it differs from the favored hypothesis or brings doubt to that which had already been accepted and hailed as gospel? No, as scientists one should always keep an open mind, and always include the evidence that speaks contrary to their conclusions, and allow that alternative perspectives on EVIDENCE should always be considered objectively (not boxed into a category that is automatically dismissed).

She carefully says it "CAN BE" interpreted in this way (allowing for the possibility of any interpretation being flawed) and herself uses the wording "retains partial" arboreal behavior....but still she notes the difference...why should that strike a nerve in open minded objective people...

Paul

 

[pshun2404]

I guess the first issue for me is whether or not the Lucy's hand/wrist fossils actually do indicate arboreal behaviors? Was this Ape a knuckle walker? These scientists say yes///perhaps there are some who say no....what do you say?

 

[The Barbarian]

Zuckerman did not say that Australopithecines were knuckle-walkers. Even a cursory look at the hip and knees would remove any notion of that. Zuckerman claimed that they were bipedal apes, using a different form of bipedal locomotion than modern humans.

Notice the slightly knock-kneed stance of humans and Australopithecines, indicating a bipedal form of motion. Chimps can walk on two legs, but have to do a clumsy rocking gait which is highly inefficient. The other two were capable of an efficient, striding gait.

 

[The Barbarian]

The finger bones of Australopithcines are more like those of humans, more curved than ours, but less curved than those of chimps. Likely, they were pretty proficient climbers, even if they walked on two legs.

 

[pshun2404]

Zuckerman did not say that Australopithecines were knuckle-walkers. Even a cursory look at the hip and knees would remove any notion of that. Zuckerman claimed that they were bipedal apes, using a different form of bipedal locomotion than modern humans.

Notice the slightly knock-kneed stance of humans and Australopithecines, indicating a bipedal form of motion. Chimps can walk on two legs, but have to do a clumsy rocking gait which is highly inefficient. The other two were capable of an efficient, striding gait.

Nice artist creations....I noted he said "different"....but did you look at the actual fossils? Very different from the drawings...

The finger bones of Australopithcines are more like those of humans, more curved than ours, but less curved than those of chimps. Likely, they were pretty proficient climbers, even if they walked on two legs.

You guys compare them to "chimps" not me....Lucy's hands are ape hands, not human....not even semi-human in my opinion, just a variety of ape-kind....

 

[pshun2404]

deleted

 

[pshun2404]

or

Which is real? Both claim to be true, of course the first is a creatively added to plaster representation ...still both are more apelike then human...you choose....