KNUCKLE WALKERS, LUCY, HUMAN WRIST BONES, ARBOREAL, PRIMATES

OH THOSES BONE—KNUCKLES AND WRISTS!

Good afternoon all you good people out there! I have had and struggle this past week to get into the mode for productivity. Sometimes I just feel like I’m dragging along and can’t get into the swing of things!

Speaking of swinging, this week we are going to look into the differences between a knuckle walking ape, arboreal (tree

swinging) apes, and total bipedalism (walking upright) such as us humans do, and how all that comes into play with the “missing link species” presented as fact to the world.

Gibbon

So from the point of view from an evolutionist, half-ape/half-human transitional forms needed to have their hands free for other uses. But that doesn’t make any sense because all the knuckle walkers currently proposed as candidates for human ancestors logically could not have been our ancestors because the knuckle walkers needed their hands for locomotion. Examples of missing links thought (or even still presented) as our ancestors that have since been reassigned to the primate family often include, extinct species of chimpanzees, gibbons and even gorillas.

Let’s take a look at just one such famous candidate; Lucy. Lucy,

Since there were no bones found
for Lucy’s feet and hands, why
are they  depicted as human? This
is false information.

(Australopithecus afarensis), is often depicted as a very convincing missing link. But “Oddly enough, though, some of the most convincing evidence against Lucy’s proposed bipedalism comes not from her lower extremities but from her wrists. Evolutionists Brian Richmond and David Strait compared the skeletal morphology of living knuckle-walking primates to the bones of Australopithecus afarensis. Lucy’s

Lucy’s skeletion. The
v-shpaed jaw bone and
the pelvis indicate this
creature was a primate,
not human or something
in between.

bones show the features used to lock the wrist for secure knuckle-walking seen in modern knuckle-walkers.

“In addition to wrists designed for knuckle-walking, Richmond and Strait noted that Lucy also had neck, shoulder, arm, finger, and toe anatomy suited to arboreal life. They believed Lucy was adding bipedal abilities to her already efficient ‘repertoire consisting of terrestrial knuckle-walking, arboreal climbing and occasional suspensory activities, not unlike that observed in chimpanzees today.’ They question why such a creature would evolve bipedalism. Bipedal locomotion would likely make a forest creature more visible and vulnerable to predators. Thus, even if one were to accept Berge’s implications that a different kind of bipedalism had evolved in Lucy without loss of her arboreal abilities, one would

Take a look at the human wrist and finger bones…completely different. There is no other
“species” that has mankind’s skeleton. We are unique, just as God intended.

still need to explain how the simple addition of an upright walking posture would be selected as a survival advantage and retained by evolutionary pressures.”¹ And all this from two evolutionist scientists! It’s good to see that at least some atheists are willing to look at fossils without pre-assumed bias and stick to the facts.

The depiction on the left labeled “Pan” is that of a
chimpanzee.

In addition a study by Kivell TL, & Schmitt D (2009) for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America PMID: 19667206, show that “Gorillas are physically larger than chimpanzees, so it might be expected that

they would have more rigid wrists that would help stabilize them as they walked around on their knuckles. This is not what Kivell and Schmitt found. Not only did gorillas have a much greater range of wrist motion than chimpanzees, but it was the chimpanzees that had adaptations in their wrists to increase stability. Despite being more terrestrial and knuckle-walking on the ground more often gorillas actually showed fewer “classic” knuckle-walking adaptations in their wrist bones than chimpanzees did! 

“As Kivell and Schmitt note, gorillas and chimpanzees are not the

Gorilla knuckle-walking

same when it comes to knuckle-walking. It seems that gorillas have more wrist flexibility because they hold their lower arms and wrists in a columnar fashion which gives them the support they need. Chimpanzees, on the other hand, bend their wrists backwards in an “extended” position when supporting themselves on their knuckles, and their range of motion is restricted by the shape of the wrist bones. Why do gorillas and chimpanzees differ in this way?

“Surprisingly, some of the “knuckle-walking features” of the chimpanzee wrist are seen in arboreal, quadrupedal primates. It may be, then, that the traits of the chimpanzee wrist commonly associated with knuckle-walking are actually adaptations to climbing in the trees. Perhaps, the authors hypothesize, this is because the primates that exhibit this wrist-limiting morphology extend their wrists to grasp with their hands while moving on all fours in trees. If they are correct the wrist

Skeleton of a gorilla hand. Note the finger bones
themselves are curved, not just the hand.

morphology of chimpanzees may have more to do with what the apes do in the trees than what they do on the ground.”

All of the proposed missing human links have features that show they were either knuckle walking/arboreal apes or humans. Only true humans have human wrists and knuckle/finger bones. Imagine that. You could almost think everything was intelligently designed! Lol!

Until next week, God bless, and take care!

Willow Dressel

This week in the night skies: The new moon was last night, so look for a very slime crescent in the skies tonight. For all of you who have missed the equinox…it was exactly one month ago today (March 20th). Also for all of you living south of the equator, there have been a lot of aurora alerts this past two weeks.I recommend  astroblogger.blosgspot.com  for fairly good, up-to-date info on that.

References:

https://answersingenesis.org/human-evolution/lucy/a-look-at-lucys-legacy/