Near-complete australopithecine fossil found in South Africa

Newspapers around the globe have been proclaiming the news of the recent fossil find in a South African cave of a nearly complete Australopithecus skeleton. Evolutionists are hailing the find as an important step to understanding the evolution of man, as this is supposed to be one of our earliest ancestors. They claim that it lived approximately 3.2 to 3.6 million years ago. This four-foot-tall “hominid” supposedly both swung from a tree and walked upright.

Evolutionists believe that somewhere around five million years ago, or longer, the ancestors to modern man branched off from the apes and other primates. Some claim the earliest is Australopithecus while others say that Australopithecus was nothing more than an ape, not related to humans at all. In Marvin Lubenow”s book, Bones of Contention, he clearly shows that the australopithecine fossils are ape fossils and not those of any human ancestor.

Dr. Lubenow also furnishes this explanation of the term “hominid”:

“The word is used by the evolutionist community to mean "humans and their evolutionary ancestors." It includes the genus Homo, the genus Australopithecus, and all creatures in the family Hominidae. As an evolutionist term it is meaningless in a creationist worldview. The creationist counterpart would be the term human. I use the term human to refer to those who are descendants of Adam” (p. 12).

Therefore, the term “hominid” is an invalid and meaningless term. “Human”, would include only members of the genus Homo, such as Homo erectus, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens, which Lubenow shows are all modern humans. Starting from a Biblical framework, all these are descendants of Adam, through Noah. All of the other so-called hominids, such as the australopithecines, may be nothing more than extinct apes or ape-like creatures.

The paleoanthropologist Dr. Sigrid Hartwig-Scherer, of the University of Munich, regards australopithecines, modern apes and humans as separate basic types. Anatomist Dr. Charles Oxnard performed detailed analysis of different bones of Australopithecus africanus and concluded that it did not walk upright in the human manner and was more d istinct from both humans and chimpanzees than these are from each other.¹ More recently, Oxnard made the following comments about the australopithecines, including “Lucy”:

“It is now recognized widely that the australopithecines are not structurally closely similar to humans, that they must have been living at least in part in arboreal [tree] environments, and that many of the later specimens were contemporaneous [living at the same time] or almost so with the earlier members of the genus Homo.”²

Oxnard, an evolutionist, is one of several experts who do not believe that the australopithecines were on the human line.

The method used to date the fossil is also questionable. It is a form of paleomagnetism. Evolutionists measured the magnetic orientation of certain minerals, such as magnetite, found in the layers of rock and assigned particular orientations to certain time periods. When they discover a fossil such as this one from South Africa, they determine the direction of the magnetic orientation of the minerals from the surrounding rock and match it to that which has already been assigned to a specific time period. However, there is evidence that that the magnetic field has reversed extremely rapidly over periods of only a few days, as shown by patterns in a thin lava flow. This is documented from secular geophysical sources in the article “The earth”s magnetic field: evidence that the earth is young” by Dr. Jonathan Sarfati (Creation 20(2):15–17). See online article.

At this time, we would venture to say that the fossil in question is nothing more than another extinct ape that has nothing to do with the origin of man and that the dating method used is highly questionable. We should carefully look at the original paper³ when available, rather than rely on media sensationalisation. Indeed, young-earth creationists look forward to the thorough examination of this fossil find. Because it is apparently fairly complete, it could settle the irrelevancy of australopithecines to human origins once and for all. In particular, X-ray analysis of the semicircular canals will probably show that this specimen did not walk upright like humans—just as has been shown with Australopithecus africanus, Australopithecus robustus and Homo habilis.⁴

References

1. C.E. Oxnard, Nature 258:389–395, 1975. Return to text.
2. C.E. Oxnard, The Order of Man, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1984. Return to text.
3. R.J. Clarke, South African Journal of Science 94:460–463, 1998; cited in a brief report by Henry Gee, “The face of Cinderella”, Nature 396(6711):521, 10 December 1998. Return to text.
4. F. Spoor, B. Wood and F. Zonneveld, “Implications of early hominid morphology for evolution of human bipedal locomotion”, Nature 369(6482):645–648, 1994. Return to text.

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