Fossil Man: Part II

By Jon A. Covey, B.A., MT(ASCP)
Edited By Anita Millen, M.D., M.P.H., M.A.

There is much more to say about Lucy and the australopithecines, but we won’t be able to get much further this time because we have important details to look at concerning alleged human evolution. Charles Oxnard, formerly professor of Anatomy, Cell Biology, and Biological Sciences, and Dean of the USC Graduate School of Medicine, previously Dean of the College at the Universities of Chicago, now holding the Directorship of Anatomy at the university in Perth, Australia, was exceptionally thorough in analyzing australopthecine remains. He observed that fossil hunters, laboratory personnel who work on the fossils, and the general public think that studying human evolution seems to be a matter of going from ‘missing’ to ‘found’ links. In other words, as Oxnard outlines:

"The problem seems to be the discovery of ancestors."

Dr. Oxnard says attempting to find our evolutionary ancestors is not an acceptable agenda. I mentioned last month that finding just one ancestor would be lucky. Oxnard says:

"But what is the reality of such an endeavor? Even from a population as large and concentrated as that of any major metropolitan area, the statistical chances of any particular individual ever becoming fossilized and found by a paleontologist millions of years later must be almost infinitesimal. How much less must be the chances of finding representatives of populations of perhaps only a few thousand, scattered over an area of the world as large as Africa or Asia, during periods of time measured in hundreds of thousands, even millions of years." [Oxnard, p. 1]

Last month we saw that Lucy and her kind are extinct apes which were at home in the trees. These australopithecines were not our distant ancestors, but chimp-like creatures who lived at the same time we did. There is so much variation within the chimps that the australopithecines might fit within their group. Why do I say this? Fig. 1 shows the profile of the most recently discovered A. afarensis skull. [Science, p. 34] Notice that this skull is nearly like the chimpanzee’s in Fig. 3. The artists favored a more human-like appearance for the australopithecines, although from Fig. 1 it is clear they bear a very strong resemblance to the male chimpanzee in Fig. 4.

In Fig. 2 we see the comparison between the profile of the skull belonging to Australopithecus (unbroken line) and a chimpanzee (dotted line) as it appeared in The Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Evolution of Man. [Jelinek, p. 50]. This comparison was based on the best preserved skull of A. africanus from Sterkfontain which bears a strong resemblance to the A. afarensis in Fig. 1, so the artist was not justified in giving it the less ape-like appearance. Lucy was an A. afarensis. What’s the difference between the two? There may be no significant difference. The differences could easily be explained by sexual dimorphism, meaning ‘two forms or appearances’ due to sex (male, larger more robust skeletal features or female, smaller, bony ridges, crests not pronounced or missing). Louis Leakey once thought the differences between the robust and the gracile forms of the australopithecines could be explained on this basis. Later, he rejected this explanation. A. africanus is supposedly more modern. Lucy’s group is allegedly more ancient and closer to the assumed common ancestor of man and apes.

Dr. Oxnard spends much time going over the clear evidence for sexual dimorphism among primates. In Fig. 4, he shows the differences between male and female gorillas and orangutans. He shows other such examples in his book, but nowhere is the tactical deception of presenting alleged human ancestors more poignantly illustrated than in Fig. 5. [Oxnard, p. 8] Oxnard is clearly an evolutionist and has no intention of debunking evolution, but in this drawing, he makes it clear that you can make an australopithicine seem more human if you compare it to a male ape on the one hand and a human on the other, which is what Colbert does in his book.

Continued in Part III

References

Colbert, Edwin H., Evolution of the Vertebrates, 4th ed., John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, p. 283, 1991.

Jelinek, J., The Pictorial Encyclopedia of The Evolution of Man, Hamlyn, Prague, 1975.

Lubenow, Marvin, Bones of Contention, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, 1992.

"’Lucy,’ Crucial Early Human Ancestor, Finally Gets a Head," Science 264:34,1994. Also see Nature 368:450, 31 March 1994. The frontal view shows the strongly ape appearance.

Oxnard, Charles, Fossils, Teeth and Sex, Hong Kong University of Press, Seattle, 1987.

Note: Dr Oxnard refused to grant permission to use the drawings referred to in this article. Unable or unwilling to make a refutation, he threatened to sue me if I quoted any part of his book, possibly hoping I would remove the article from the internet. The United States Fair Use law protects the original author's material while allowing reasonable quotes of that material by other writers. According to Fair Use, I am probably allowed to use one drawing from his original material.