Fossil “human ancestor” jaw found, according to a report in BBC News 11 July 2007, entitled “Ethiopia yields ancestral fossils”. A research team from Cleveland Museum of Natural History has found several jaws and one partial skeleton of “early human ancestors” in the Afar region of Ethiopia. The fossils are dated as being 3.5 to 3.8 million years old and the researchers believe they fit into a gap in the fossil record between Australopithecus afarensis and an older species named Australopithecus anamensis. Yohannes Haile-Selassie, one of the team's leaders, said the new dig sites also contained the bones of “many monkeys, antelopes and wild pigs, suggesting that the hominids lived in a far greener and more wooded countryside than the bare stony Afar desert region seen today”. Meanwhile, the bones of the most famous Australopithecine, Lucy, which are normally kept in a museum in Ethiopia are being taken on a tour of American museums.


Editorial Comment: The name “Australopithecine” means “southern ape” and professional palaeontologists admit that these fossils are a group of extinct apes. However, because they fit into a place in the evolutionary timetable when humans are believed to have started evolving from apes, Australopithecines, are described in the popular media as human ancestors. If these new fossils are a different species from A. afarensis andA anemensis it will provide no evidence for any theories about apes turning into people. All it will prove is that once there were more apes in the world than there are now. This is the opposite of evolution. The finding of many other fossils indicating that Australopithecines lived in a “far greener and more wooded countryside than the bare stony Afar desert region today” also fits with the Biblical history of conditions on planet earth degenerating to the present.

Evidence News 15th August 2007