Replies

==1. Ardi does not replace Lucy but is a likely ancestor to her as well as to later hominids.

Replacement is a perfect word. The Temple of Darwin has kicked Lucy to the back of the bus, and replaced her with Ardi. C. Owen Lovejoy explains the reasons for this evo-religious update in Science:

"Even as its fossil record proliferated, however, Australopithecus [Lucy and her friends] continued to provide only an incomplete understanding of hominid origins. Paradoxically, in light of Ardipithecus, we can now see that Australopithecus was too derived—its locomotion too sophisticated, and its invasion of new habitats too advanced—not to almost entirely obscure earlier hominid evolutionary dynamics."

http://creationsafaris.com/crev200910.htm#20091002a

==2. Ardi was most likely female, this was not a choice of the artist or the "evolutionist conspiracy".

"Most likely"?...LOL! Where do you suppose they found her human-shaped breasts, and the rest of her human looking sex organs?

==3. The artist was constrained by the fossils recovered both in terms of size and facial construction. Also, the reconstruction was of one individual fossil. The small canine tooth gives the face a distinctly different look than a chimp. The upright posture is determined for the fossil as well. Ardi was bipedal.

LOL...Ardi's fossils were supposedly trampled by what they suspect was a herd of hippos, and were in such poor condition that they fell apart or turned into dust at the slightest touch. Indeed, the fossils were in such poor condition that it took your Temple of Darwin co-religionists over 15 years to reconstruct Ardi, and only then with digital reconstruction technology. And after all that, this is all they were able to come up with:

And from that, somehow the evo-artist came up with this...LOL!!!

we can now see that Australopithecus was too derived—its locomotion too sophisticated, and its invasion of new habitats too advanced—not to almost entirely obscure earlier hominid evolutionary dynamics

What this means is that Lucy must have had bipedal ancestors and Lucy was not the hominid that signaled the break between the evolutionary line leading to humans on one side and apes on the other.

Ardi's fossils were supposedly trampled by what they suspect was a herd of hippos, and were in such poor condition that they fell apart or turned into dust at the slightest touchThis is why, in the interest of accuracy, Tim White took so long to complete his study. In other creationist diatribes, I have read the critique that White was reporting "old" news since the fossil had been discovered in the 1990's. These rim shots are exactly why I seldom engage creationists in any debate. Your ridicule is your best weapon. I really don't know how else a female would be portrayed other than how ardi has been.

Bye now, I have got to sacrifice a titmouse to my bust of Darwin.

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Ardi displaces Lucy as oldest hominid skeleton

“The novel anatomy that we describe in these papers fundamentally alters our understanding of human origins and early evolution,” said anatomist and evolutionary biologist C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University, a scientist with the project. In a summary article in Science, Lovejoy wrote that these and other behaviors “would have substantially intensified male parental investment a breakthrough adaptation with anatomical, behavioral, and physiological consequences for early hominids and for all of their descendants”

The last line is typical of the puffery of Ardi from a crumbling bone fragments into something phantasmagorical.

www.bio-medicine.org/.../Ardi-displaces-Lucy-as-oldest-hominid-skeleton-10222-2/ -

“Replacement is a perfect word. The Temple of Darwin has kicked Lucy to the back of the bus, and replaced her with Ardi. C. Owen Lovejoy explains the reasons for this evo-religious update in Science:”

—It sounds like you are trying to defend ICR and creationsafaris by changing what they mean by “replacement”. They don’t appear to mean it in some metaphorical sense as just meaning that Ardi may now be more famous or in some ways more important; they seem to mean it as Lucy literally being replaced in the evolutionary chain leading to us.

Creationsafaris especially makes it clear what they mean:
“The scoop is this: Lucy had nothing to do with our family tree after all. She and her kinds were on a separate branch that did not lead to us.”

As usual, creationsafaris and ICR didn’t do their homework and are clueless.

Even in the sense that you seem to mean it, ‘replacement’ is a odd and extremely misleading word. Both Lucy and Ardi are links in the chain. Each gives us unique information. When it comes specifically to the moment of the beginning of the Hominini (I hate the new terms), Ardi tells us more – because it’s closer to that event and has fewer derived features.

“”Most likely”?...LOL! Where do you suppose they found her human-shaped breasts, and the rest of her human looking sex organs?”

—Actually (as I explained in a previous post) I think they copied chimp breasts more than human ones.

“Indeed, the fossils were in such poor condition that it took your Temple of Darwin co-religionists over 15 years to reconstruct Ardi, and only then with digital reconstruction technology.”

—Actually, separate teams used different methods of reconstructing Ardi. One team used digital reconstruction, and another used plaster casts of the bones: “Restoration was undertaken independently using casts (Berkeley, CA) and digital data (Tokyo, Japan).”