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by Roger Marshall
Senator The Reverend Dr. John A. Rogers, Rector of the St. George Parish Church, approvingly referred to the fossil find Australopithecus Afarensis as “the oldest ancestor of human beings” in his recent sermon to mark African Heritage Day, in which he claimed the first eleven chapters of Genesis “are myth”.
However, the belief that the Australopithecines are our ancestors is the real myth in the room. Lucy was discovered in 1974 in the Afar region of Ethiopia by evolutionist Donald Johanson. He called it Australopithecus Afarensis (the “southern ape from Afar”) it was nicknamed “Lucy” because the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” sung by the rock band the Beatles was playing on the radio when he discovered the fossil.
With a height of 3ft 7ins tall and dated at 3.2 million years old it is said to have walked upright and is believed to be a missing link between apes and humans. However, chimps are also known to walk upright but that does not make them a human ancestor.
Subsequent discoveries showed that Lucy had shoulders like a gorilla ideal for tree swinging, locking wrists, curled fingers and short legs like quadruped apes, and other features which showed the creature was ideally suited for tree dwelling and walked on all fours. Lucy and her other Australopithecine relatives were simply apes and not ancestors of Africans or any other human being.
The fossil record, from the “Laetoli Footprint Trail” discovered in Tanzania and dated at 3.5 million years old (according to the evolutionary time scale) and deemed by evolutionary anthropologist R.H. Tuttle as “indistinguishable from those of habitually barefoot Homo sapiens [modern humans]” (“The Pattern of Little Feet”, American Journal of Physical
Anthropology, 1989) to the Kanopoi elbow fossil (KNM-KP271) discovered Southwest of Lake Rudolf in northern Kenya dated at 4.5 million years and similarly deemed by evolutionary anthropologist Henry McHenry as “indistinguishable from modern Homo Sapiens . . .” (“Fossils and the Mosaic Nature of Human Evolution”, Science Magazine, 1975), all reveal that humans were always humans (Homo sapiens) and lived contemporaneously with their supposed evolutionary ancestors.
In light of the Kanopoi elbow fossil find anthropologist and creationist, Professor Marvin Lubenow said: “ . . . the oldest human fossil ever found – Skimpy as it is – reveals that man was virtually the same 4.5 million years ago (on the evolutionary time scale) as he is today and suggests that humans appeared on the scene suddenly and without evolutionary ancestors.” (Lubenow, “Bones of Contention”, 1992).
Genesis teaches that man has always been man from the dawn of time. That is no myth.