And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind....
Genesis 1:24
"Professor Michel Brunet of the University of Poitiers, France, 
described
a tiny fossil ape skull nicknamed Toumaï as an upright walking human
ancestor.
This ancient skull and other possibly associated partial bones from Chad belong to the Sahelanthropus kind.
Though Brunet enjoyed fame for finally finding a missing link in human
evolution, some of his colleagues were and remain convinced that the
Toumaï individual walked on four limbs like regular apes after all.
--One might expect science to have progressed over the last few decades.
--New evidence should have clarified issues, and experts should have
objectively followed that evidence toward a data-driven consensus.
--Instead, new analyses of the old limb bones have merely rekindled the
same disagreement—a debate that signals something is wrong with this
kind of science.
The story seemed perfect for human evolution. Just when pre-humans began
to diverge from pre-chimpanzees at seven million supposed years ago,
the very chimp-like Sahalanthropus evolved the ability to walk
on two legs—a bipedal ape.
Surely this Toumaï specimen captured the
moment our ancestors took their first steps toward becoming human.
Unfortunately for this tale, Brunet’s colleagues took the opposite
position just a few months after his 2002 report.
These skeptics pointed to places on the Toumaï skull where muscles
attached it to the neck. Those muscles pin to the bottom of human skulls
to hold our heads up, but they attach toward the back of ape skulls to
hold their heads forward as they walk on all fours. The team interpreted
this fossil as a female gorilla with a thick eyebrow ridge. Did Toumaï walk like a man or like an ape? Why can’t experts agree on an answer after 20 years?
A 2020 analysis concluded that the associated femur most likely belonged to a quadruped—a four-legged walker. That would match the diagnosis of Sahelanthropus as an extinct ape.
Not to be outdone, the group that still wants Sahelanthropus to have walked on two legs recently published an article saying so.
They pointed to a femur feature called a calcar femorale and to a
certain twist in the bone as evidence for upright walking. But it turns
out that neither feature is diagnostic for walking. The calcar femorale,
a ridge structure, doesn’t help answer the question since it occurs in
orangutans (quadrupeds). People are bipeds, but only some of us have a
calcar femorale. And the same burial pressures that warped the bone could be responsible for its unique twist.
Bernard Wood, a palaeoanthropologist at George Washington University in
Washington DC, co-authored the 2020 study that concluded that the leg
belonged to an ape. What does he think about the 2022 article that
doubled down on the two-legged stance? He told Nature news,
“They cherry-pick what they think is information which is consistent
with the femur shaft being a biped, and they studiously ignore
information to the contrary.”
Q: What does this, and so many similar squabbles between scientists reveal?
A: Perhaps paleoanthropology contains more speculation than fact. Back in
1990, James Shreeve told Discover magazine, “Everybody knows fossils are fickle; bones will sing any song you want to hear.”
It looks like that same subjectivity prevails.
Meanwhile,
the possibility that Sahelanthropus was a variation within the created gorilla kind fits both the Bible and its bones."
ICR
