First published: Creation 21(2):49 March 1999 Browse this issue Subscribe to Creation Magazine

Evolutionists 'go ape' over new fossils
But ho, hum—it’s just another australopithecine.

It’s already being hailed as a ‘momentous discovery’—the ultimate ‘missing link’ in human evolution. This is despite the reality that it could take more than a year to finish the excavation of this skeleton enough for definitive analyses to take place. The foot bones of this creature, dubbed ‘Little Foot,’ have been known for some years. Some clever detective work located the rest of the skeleton, which is encased in a stalagmite in a cave at Sterkfontein in South Africa.

Preliminary indications are that Little Foot¹ is an australopithecine, an ape-like creature about four feet tall with a brain one-third the size of modern humans.

Confusion in press circles about human evolution seems to mirror the confusion in [human] evolutionary circles. London’s Times on 4 August 1998 reported that the famous ‘Lucy’ (so-called Australopithecus afarensis) ‘may not be a human ancestor after all.’ London’s Daily Telegraph, reporting on the Little Foot find on 10 December, featured Australopithecus ramidus (complete with suitable ‘upright’ reconstruction), as an ancestor, seemingly unaware that this has now been renamed to a different genus (Ardipithecus) and quietly shuffled off our family tree.

Actually, analysis of a whole bunch of australopithecine bones by top-flight anatomists² long ago concluded that it was unlikely that they had ‘transitional’ anatomy. While they may have walked for short spells ‘upright’ (as do some modern apes), this was not in the human manner, but was a unique, rolling type of locomotion, the result of being primarily tree-dwellers.

We agree with those experts who, despite being evolutionists, insist that australopithecines were not in the human line, but were a unique group which spent most of their time in the trees. If anything, they were somewhat like today’s pygmy chimps. In other words, just another type of ape.

The fact that they did not walk upright in the human manner³ was further ‘clinched’ by Dr Fred Spoor’s team using CAT scans on the skull to study the organ of balance. The results on australopithecines to date show they walked like apes, not humans. There is no reason to expect any different result if similar scans are permitted on Little Foot.

Little Foot may be relatively complete, which is important for creationists in that it will now be much harder for evolutionary inventiveness to ‘fill in the missing bits.’ As paleoanthropologist Phillip Tobias says, ‘It’s now going to be possible to see what joins onto what, what kind of teeth go with what kind of hands and what kind of feet.’⁴

On reflection, this is quite an indictment on the confident way the public has been told about the ‘evidence’ for human evolution. Remove the guiding faith that humans evolved—somehow—and the evidence is consistent with successive post-Flood migrations of a handful of separate created kinds, as discussed by University of Munich paleoanthropologist, Dr Sigrid Hartwig-Scherer.⁵

References and notes

1. The name has been superseded. The official name is StW 573 pending renaming.
2. E.g. Charles Oxnard, currently Professor of Anatomy at the University of Western Australia, a recognized authority on human evolution.
3. Of course, even if some creature other than man were truly bipedal, it would not prove human evolution, but our point here is that to date even non-human primate bipedalism seems most unlikely.
4. Ellen Bartlett, Move over, Lucy, New Scientist 160(2165/6/7):15, 19/26 December 1998–2 January 1999.
5. Featured in the video, The Image of God (available from addresses on p. 2).