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I once spent 4 months rebuilding a scapula (shoulder blade) that had been worked into a prehistoric tool. I had to use a microscope to place the hundreds of bone fragments together one at a time. After 3 months I could tell that somewhere I had made a bad error, the shape was all wrong. The outer edge was curving. I checked all the fragments on my work table without any good result. Then I carefully tore apart all the paper bags the bones had been stored in, and I found two tiny fragments I had missed. They had been trapped in the paper seams of the bags.
And with those two fragments, I was able to take apart the failed reconstruction, and properly finish the job correctly.
If you think that Lovejoy did anything less than a good honest job, you are delusional. If you have never tried this sort of work, you have no credibility at all. Ask a plumber to do your heart surgery.
When you try to grasp at reality (it might be difficult) also recognize that we have many other Au. afarensis pelvi. "Lucy" was not the only one.
Lovejoy ground away bone to make them fit his pre-conceived notion of what Lucy "must" habe looked like.
There are several immature Astralopith fossils with pelvic bones, but even limiting this to adult skeletons only we have adequate comparative materials. Here are the fossil catalog numbers for the best preserved examples, and what I think are better published studies.
A.L. 288–1 (Lucy), A.L. 438-1
William H. Kimbel and Lucas K. Delezene 2009 "‘Lucy’ Redux: A Review of Research on Australopithecus afarensis" YEARBOOK OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 52:2–48
KSD-VP-1/1d
Haile-Selassie, Y., Latimer, B. M., Alene, M., Deino, A. L., Gibert, L., Melillo, S. M., ... & Lovejoy, C. O. 2010 "An early Australopithecus afarensis postcranium from Woranso-Mille, Ethiopia" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(27), 12121-12126.
You are badly mistaken that the pelvic studies of the A. africanus are not applicable. In fact, Tim White was arguing that africanus and afarensis could be combined in a single species based on skeletal bone, and that only cranial bones and teeth really separated them. Later studies mentioned below both find some post-cranial differences that indicate the A. afarensis are more human-like than the A. africanus.
Dobson, S. D. 2005 "Are the differences between Stw 431 (Australopithecus africanus) and AL 288-1 (A. afarensis) significant?" Journal of human evolution, 49(1), 143-154.
Dobson found that Stw 431 has only a significantly smaller lumbosacral joint which means that A. afarensis was a better walker.
Green, D. J., Gordon, A. D., & Richmond, B. G. 2007 "Limb-size proportions in Australopithecus afarensis and Australopithecus africanus" Journal of human evolution, 52(2), 187-200.
Green et al found that the body proportions of A. afarensis were more similar to Homo habilus than the africanus fossils.
Stw 431 and Sts 14 (africanus)
StW 441/465
Kibii, J.M., Clarke, R.J.
2008 "A reconstruction of the Stw 431 Australopithecus pelvis based on newly discovered fragments" South African Journal of Science Vol 99:5&6, 225-226
But the real question is what does this tell us about human evolution? Two good reviews are;
Gruss LT, Schmitt D. 2015 "The evolution of the human pelvis: changing adaptations to bipedalism, obstetrics and thermoregulation" Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 370:20140063
Lewton, K. L. 2012 "Evolvability of the primate pelvic girdle" Evolutionary Biology, 39(1), 126-139
I found Lewton's article particularly interesting as she relates the genetic control network for the individual bones of the pelvis as they could evolve in some sense independently of one another.
I should have added that I only refer to fossils, and published articles that anyone can freely review.
It was YOU (Dr. of Anthropology?) who said "When you try to grasp at reality (it might be difficult) also recognize that we have many other Au. afarensis pelvi. "Lucy" was not the only one."
Hominid is a classification based on the theory.
Even I use the term but it is relatively meaningless...a man made construct to compartmentalize one variety of samples found. Originally it meant humans and very few closest relatives (like cro-magnon, neanderthal, and others, all who were varieties of human) and later it was expanded by EBs to blur the line between human and ape...
Accepted! Please post some of the plenty other A. Afarensis pelvi fossils...show me them...I do not see them...plenty of skull bones, elbows, a few vertebra, but only the same two or three pelvic examples...
To me, plenty other is more than a total of a few...
Afarensis and Africanus and Sediba are all DIFFERENT varieties....Africanus and Sediba ARE NOT Afarensis so your references again DO NOT APPLY....
Why is it no can get this? The mind seems not to be able to grasp simple logic...