Page 178 - The Transitional Form Dilemma

THE TRANSITIONAL-FORM DILEMMA

(Collège de France) and Brigitte Senut (National Museum of Natural
History, Paris) claimed that this species walked on two legs. Yet this
view has not received wide acceptance among evolutionists. Most evo-
lutionists think that this species could not have walked in a bipedal
manner. Professor Leslie Aiello of the University of London thinks that
the claim that the species was in fact bipedal is not based on sound
foundations, and even that the species might be the ancestor of apes, not
of human beings. 164
Under these circumstances, evolutionists, who hoped to regard the
fossil as human-like, had to throw the Lucy fossil—on whose behalf
they had engaged in so much propaganda—into the trash bin. That was
because the researchers who discovered Orrorin tugenensis suggested
that in morphological terms, this species was closer to the genus Homo
than to the Australopithecines, in other words, that it was closer than
Australopithecus afarensis, to which Lucy belongs, and A. amanensis. The
researchers maintain that evolution cannot have worked backwards
and recommend that the genus Australopithecus be removed from the
family tree. 165

Fossil findings of Orrorin tugenensis, known as Millennium Man.

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