Foot Fault
Evolutionists put a gorilla’s foot in their mouths.
Here’s how Science News reported a discovery published in Nature.
 | Eight toe bones (shown in the outline of a gorilla foot) found in Ethiopia belonged to a 3.4 million-year-old human ancestor that combined tree climbing with awkward walking. |
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An ancient member of the human evolutionary family has put what’s left of a weird, gorilla-like foot forward to show that upright walking evolved along different paths in East Africa.
A 3.4 million-year-old partial fossil foot unearthed in Ethiopia comes from a previously unknown hominid species that deftly climbed trees but walked clumsily, say anthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and his colleagues. Their report appears in the March 29 Nature.
To the scientists’ surprise, this creature lived at the same time and in the same region as Australopithecus afarensis, a hominid species best known for a partial skeleton dubbed Lucy.
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There is nothing surprising, or weird, about this discovery—unless you are an evolutionist. They are perfectly normal gorilla foot bones, as you can see from the picture. The authors of the Nature article compared metatarsal ratios of humans and many different kinds of apes with these newly discovered bones and plotted them. These newly discovered bones fell right in the middle of the gorilla measurements, as shown by the solid black diamond in their Figure 4.
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Figure 4: Principal component analysis (PCA) of metatarsal ratios. 2
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There is absolutely nothing unusual about these perfectly normal gorilla foot bones; but evolutionists can’t believe they are gorilla foot bones because they are too old. Modern gorillas had not yet evolved 3.4 million years ago! Therefore, evolutionists believe they must have come from an unknown human ancestor.
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A newly discovered partial hominin foot skeleton from eastern Africa indicates the presence of more than one hominin locomotor adaptation at the beginning of the Late Pliocene epoch. Here we show that new pedal elements, dated to about 3.4 million years ago, belong to a species that does not match the contemporaneous Australopithecus afarensis in its morphology and inferred locomotor adaptations, but instead are more similar to the earlier Ardipithecus ramidus in possessing an opposable great toe. This not only indicates the presence of more than one hominin species at the beginning of the Late Pliocene of eastern Africa, but also indicates the persistence of a species with Ar. ramidus-like locomotor adaptation into the Late Pliocene.
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Evolutionists believe that Australopithecus afarensis, commonly known as “Lucy,” walked upright, despite the fact they never found any of her foot bones. They believe this because they found modern footprints in nearby rocks of the same geologic age. But now they believe they have found evidence that our presumed ancestors didn’t walk upright, so they are confused. It is difficult for me to explain their illogical reasoning logically, so I’ll let them speak for themselves.
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The limitations of the fossil record leave ample room for debate about human origins. But most palaeoanthropologists agree that selection for bipedalism was instrumental in setting the human lineage on its separate evolutionary path from the chimpanzee lineage. And, as with any journey, it was probably sensible for our ancestors to put their best foot forward when starting out. The big question is, what kind of foot? On page 565 of this issue, Haile-Selassie and colleagues present findings from a partial foot fossil which suggest that the feet of early hominins (species more closely related to humans than to chimpanzees), and hence their locomotor behaviour, were more diverse than was previously thought, and that the diversity lasted for much longer than was thought.
… An absence of fossil feet older than those of Australopithecus led palaeoanthropologists to believe that humanlike feet helped guide the way in human evolution, by enabling early hominins to walk effectively as bipeds, even while they retained some features that helped them to climb trees. In addition, the origin of the genus Homo, to which modern humans belong, was thought to have involved only minor modifications to foot anatomy, perhaps to improve our ancestors' ability to run long distances, although at the expense of climbing.
Recent discoveries have made that simple narrative more complex.
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“Haile-Selassie’s discovery highlights our lack of knowledge about hominid feet,” White says.
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Falsification
We’ve heard evolutionists say that all it would take to falsify the geologic timescale is to find modern bones in ancient rocks. But when modern gorilla foot bones are found in ancient rocks, evolutionists don’t admit they were wrong about the age of the rocks. Instead, they claim the bones came from some unknown, imaginary human ancestor. So, the geologic timescale isn’t really falsifiable because evolutionists refuse to accept any evidence to the contrary.
Ancestors
Even if these gorilla foot bones came from some species other than a gorilla, and even if they are 3.4 million years old, it still doesn’t prove that species is a human ancestor. George Washington lived and died long before I was born. That doesn’t prove I’m a descendant of George Washington.
Footnotes:
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Science News, May 5, 2012, “Ancient ancestor climbed, walked”, page 18, http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/339522/title/New_ancestor_grasped_at_walking
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Yohannes Haile-Selassie et al., Nature, 29 March 2012, “A new hominin foot from Ethiopia shows multiple Pliocene bipedal adaptations”, pp 565–569, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/nature10922.html
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ibid.
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Lieberman, Nature, 29 March 2012, “Those feet in ancient times”, pp 550-551, http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483550a.html
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Science News, May 5, 2012, “Ancient ancestor climbed, walked”, page 18, http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/339522/title/New_ancestor_grasped_at_walking