Page 670 - Atlas of Creation Volume 2

Femur KNM-ER 1472. This femur is no different from that of today's man. The finding of this fossil in the same
layer as Homo habilis fossils, although a few kilometers away, gave rise to incorrect opinions, such as that
Homo habilis was bipedal. Fossil OH 62, found in 1987, showed that Homo habilis was not bipedal, as had
been believed. Many scientists today accept that Homo habilis was a species of ape very similar to
Australopithecus.

indeed no different from Australopithecus. The skull and skeletal fossil OH62 found by Tim White
showed that this species had a small cranial capacity, as well as long arms and short legs, which en-

abled them to climb trees just like today's apes do.
The detailed analyses conducted by American anthropologist Holly Smith in 1994 indicated that
Homo habilis was not Homo, in other words, human, at all, but rather unequivocally an ape. Speaking of
the analyses she made on the teeth of Australopithecus, Homo habilis, Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalen-
sis, Smith stated the following;

Restricting analysis of fossils to specimens satisfying these criteria, patterns of dental development of gracile aus-

tralopithecines and Homo Habilis remain classified with African apes. Those of Homo erectus and Neanderthals
are classified with humans. 153
Within the same year, Fred Spoor, Bernard Wood and Frans Zonneveld, all specialists on anatomy,

reached a similar conclusion through a totally different method. This method was based on the compara-
tive analysis of the semicircular canals in the inner ear of humans and apes, which allow them to main-
tain their balance. Spoor, Wood and Zonneveld concluded that:

Among the fossil hominids the earliest species to
The claim that Australopithecus and Homo habilis walked
demonstrate the present day human morphology is upright was disproved by inner ear analyses carried out by
Homo erectus. In contrast, the semi-circular canal di- Fred Spoor. He and his team compared the centers of bal-

mensions in crania from southern Africa attributed ances in the inner ears, and showed that both moved in a
similar way to apes of our own time.
to Australopithecus and Paranthropus resemble those
of the extant great apes. 154

Spoor, Wood and Zonneveld also studied a
Homo habilis specimen, namely Stw 53, and
found out that "Stw 53 relied less on bipedal be-
havior than the australopithecines." This meant
that the H. habilis specimen was even more ape-

like than the Australopithecus species. Thus they
concluded that "Stw 53 represents an unlikely
intermediate between the morphologies seen in
the australopithecines and H. erectus." 155

This finding yielded two important results:
1. Fossils referred to as Homo habilis did not actu-
ally belong to the genus Homo, i.e., humans, but to
that of Australopithecus, i.e., apes.
2. Both Homo habilis and Australopithecus were creatures that
walked stooped forward—that is to say, they had the skeleton of

an ape. They have no relation whatsoever to man.

The Misconception about Homo rudolfensis

The term Homo rudolfensis is the name given to a few
fossil fragments unearthed in 1972. The species suppos-
edly represented by this fossil was designated Homo

rudolfensis because these fossil fragments were found in
the vicinity of Lake Rudolf in Kenya. Most paleoanthropol-

Fred Spoor

668 Atlas of Creation Vol. 2