I’m a little surprised to find you so unapologetically advancing ridiculous rumors about the Lucy pelvis. Is it actually your plan to repeat every unfounded discussion promoted by any YEC page you read? The only way these Lucy rumors would make any sense is if Lucy’s pelvis is the only one we have for her hominid group - and that it was only her pelvis that demonstrated her upright walking. It is not the only pelvis. And her pelvis was not the only anatomically convincing aspect of her gait!
Below is a fulsome discussion of Lucy’s Pelvis:
Correcting Creationists Redux…Was Lucy’s Pelvis Reconstruction A Fraud?
Northstate Science
A source of reason and logic in a world increasingly hostile to both.
Posted by: cjobrien | 1 January 2011
“I happened across an article by Matthew Murdock in the 2006 Journal of Creation. What Murdock does, remarkably, is present a fairly accurate presentation of hominid locomotor capability based on fossil evidence. Moreover, he quite bluntly lambastes his fellow creationists for not reporting the fossil evidence honestly. Here are a few snippets from his article that are relevant to the discussion at hand:”
“Reading the popular literature (non technical papers), one would get the impression that there has only been one australopithecine pelvis found: the one belonging to A.L. 288-1 (‘Lucy’).Students sometimes get the notion that from this pelvis alone that australopithecine locomotion has been determined. The truth is there are several pelves belonging to australopithecines, some partial, some complete, and the evidence for australopithecine bipedality was establishedlong before the skeleton of Lucy was even discovered…”
“When I placed a cast of the unrestored ilium next to the sacrum, the distorted auricular surface forced the ilium into an anatomically incorrect position (figure 5). It is rotated to a right angle of where it should be no matter what the posture of this individual was (biped or quadruped). No animal alive or dead has a pelvis orientated this way, and this was clearly not its position during life, and no other australopithecine has this problem. It is clearly a case of post mortem distortion in this specimen (A.L. 288-1) only. As such, some repair had to be done to this surface (see postscript)….”
“I have seen a few creationists claim that it was this restoration that gave Lucy her upright posture. It does not appear as if these people have studied the skeleton in any detail (even if only through the writings of others). For if they did, they would see that it is not just the pelvis of Lucy that makes her bipedal, but her entire skeleton. Curvature of the spine (lumbar lordosis), length and angulation of the femur and tibia/fibula, and the hand and foot skeleton all indicate bipedal locomotion…”
“Did Lovejoy’s restoration give Lucy a bipedal pelvis? No, she already had one. In fact, even if this damaged part of the pelvis had not been found, we could still determine Lucy’s posture and gait from the rest of her pelvis (and skeleton)…”
