Australopithicus Sediba Missing Link

[retroHelen]

The 2 partial skeletons' 4 year research conclusions have been all over the News this week and hailed by scientists as the nearest to the missing link.These sinkhole finds from a cave in Malapa South Africa are of skeletons of a chimplike animal around four feet tall. They are convinced by the wear on the hip/knee joints on one skeleton that it walked upright. They therefore present this skeleton as standing upright for news pictures. Despite no evidence for a foot and evidence from the lower leg remains that it had no heels, some newspapers and science reports claim that scientists say that it had flat feet with possibly and arch and humanlike achilles tendon! Searching about on the Internet for other opinions, you can also find other scientists who say that how it walked is based on looking at the evidence for only one of the partial skeletons, where only one set of lower body joints can be considered, and is not enough to conclusively say that the chimp-like Sediba represents a family of emerging apes who walked mostly upright. Studying the upper body balance would tell if the Sediba could keep such a position ongoing and so far scientists do mostly agree that the the way the shoulder bones are set, merely indicate a large chimp that would find walking upright all the time difficult. The walking gait would have been uncomfortable - what doctors would call hyperpronation because the skeleton has no proper heels for walking upright like humans have, so would have a twist about it's way of walking upright, just as apes do now when they try. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/11/science/la-sci-australopithecus-20130412 Due to previous skeleton finds in Asia that had confused human bones and apes found in the same cave, when some newspaper reports say that there were 2 skeletons studied here, an adult and infant, then say that the arms are long and the hands are small, showing it's hand is becoming human, is it of the same creature or discussing a combination of the 2 skeletons? I cannot find the separating evidence here. The hand will be small if they are speaking of an adult arm with an infant hand. Other news reports say that parts of several skeletons or five skeletons were found in this cave in 2008. When you look at a reconstruction of the skeletons, you have to be aware of how much is missing and therefore conjectural - there's too much of the rib-cage missing, for instance, to know for sure what it resembled. One skeleton does not have any cranium and the surviving cranium finds are small and chimp-like anyway. Why do they say it's nose would project like a human's when the small skull they have resembles a chimp skull with the flaring upper lip area that would take a chimp nose easier than a human one? The hand bones are slightly shorter than modern chimp - but is this an immature example - they admit this would give good dexterity for tree climbing, but then add the suggestion that it would also be good for tool use - any better than chimps already have though? Zeresenay Alemseged, head of the anthropology department at the California Academy of Sciences, described the work as a "fantastic discovery."However, he questioned the claim that this may be the closest ancestor of modern man.The link to homo is not well established. The torso, the clavicle, the foot have many primitive (in other words apelike) characteristics," he added.

This photograph taken from a news article and shows what bits of skeletons they actually have, around which they have constructed whole skeletons on which to describe their theories.

[retroHelen]

Could it be that the wear on the hips and knees was because the ape had fallen down a sinkhole, like the one it was found in, and was upright for sometime desperately trying to get out , hence the unusual wear on the hip and knee bones?Had this one ape sustained upper body shoulder or arm ligament/muscle tears from an accident in it's life to stop it from tree climbing and walking on all 4 limbs like other apes for a long enough time to cause it to wear knee and hip joints as it did? These considerations could therefore indicate not evolution, just living with injury that offspring would not inherit. As the finds were chipped out of solid stone, how much is not wear and is actually damage due to being fossilized and lost as the rest of the skeleton was? How much wear may be damage when chipped out? Having only one skeleton studied for these conclusions is therefore not enough evidence to say the wear means it was upright, let alone the fact that they agree that this possible uprightness was unusual for the overall design of the animal. Some scientists commenting on these finds wish the press, in cahoots with other scientists, would stop calling anything a 'transitional fossil' or 'missing link' as they admit, even if they ardently believe in evolution, that every fossil found so far was a fully functioning reproducing creature, not something sitting starving or lacking in some other way because it was waiting for itself or it's offspring becoming something else. They admit therefore that, if you are going to believe that evolution happened with slow mutations from one species to another (macroevolution), then there are evolutionary gaps in all the fossil finds, particularly those of apes to so-called hominids that scientists have concentrated on lately. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100104050/australopithecus-sediba-can-we-stop-calling-it-a-missing-link/ Other scientists follow the argument that has been going since 1957 when evolutionist Ashley Montague concluded that Australopithacus type apes were a large ape species that totally died out and cannot be used as an ancestor of anything else. The scientists of the French Museum of natural History and Lord Solly Zuckerman, after decades of research in the 1960-70's came to the same conclusion. Australopithacus teeth and faces are ape and their gait and body are more ape not human - concluding that they are extinct apes nothing to do with humans. My opinion is as I have seen before - photographing one ape in an upright position, this time because of some perceived wear on it's joints that doesn't match it's actual skeleton design for all fours, seems a bit misleading.

This photograph shows the finder with the cranium so you can see the size of a human compared to the chimplike skull

[Lin ASL Ebron]

Here's my opinion: Human science is extremely limited. It is also "agenda" driven. Humans are not all knowing. They can find so-called evidence and provide what ever explanations that fit their preferred narrative. The bottom line is this: human science seeks to find explanations that glorify human ingenuity and not God. This highlights the absolute truth of (Hebrews 11:6) . . .he that approaches God must believe that he is. . .

People who are righteously disposed acknowledge human inability to "understand" everything about Jehovah's creation and they certainly don't look for things to disprove what Jehovah has said.

Humans under demonic influence will always feel they've "found" something to disprove Jehovah as the Creator of all living things.

So that's all I have to say about that (Forrest Gump).

Agape',

Lin

[Jordan]

Here's a few books I think every witness should read --

http://www.amazon.com/The-Edge-Evolution-Search-Darwinism/dp/1437968619/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366088755&sr=8-1&keywords=edge+of+evolution

http://www.darwinsdoubt.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Politically-Incorrect-Darwinism-Intelligent-Design/dp/1596980133/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1366089168&sr=1-1&keywords=the+politically+incorrect+guide+to+darwinism

http://www.amazon.com/Slaughter-Dissidents-Jerry-Bergman/dp/0981873405/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1366089549&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=the+slaughter+of+the+disidents

and here's a few sites you should read as well:

http://www.evolutionnews.org/intelligent_design/

http://www.trueorigin.org/

These are pretty good to start with. They really demolish Darwinism. Completely...

[rbrown1205]

Sadly, many evolutionists concede that Darwin's theory in its strictest sense (that says that survival of the fittest, that leads to adaptation, also drives the evolution or development of new kinds) does not make sense in view of the fossil record. Richard Lenski's experiment (completed last year) on 50,000 generations of E. coli bacteria, for instance, demonstrated a few negative changes to the DNA due to broken chains, etc, and a few changes due to different enviironments imposed by the scientists, and no crossovers or development into new species. In other words, in the equivalent of millions of years of human history, there was no macro evolution. Interestingly, this experiment was presented as being some kind of accomplishment for evolution, so go figure.

http://myxo.css.msu.edu/lenski/pdf/1997,%20Nature,%20Sniegowski%20et%20al.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment

I personally have a suspicion that this Australopithicus Sediba is going to turn out to be the Piltdown Man of our generation. Too many little bones here and there, and too many alternate explanations for their presence.

[Just Bill]

In the meantime, chariots have been found in the Red Sea, Noah's ark found on a mountaintop in Turkey and the both the ark of the covenant and the precise location of Jesus death found near Jerusalem. Supposedly. I mean ... it said so on the internet, so it must be true ... right?

 

So what, exactly, would finding some "missing link" accomplish? We've been waiting over 50 years for science to make good on its promise to discover how to create life in a test tube "in the next few years".