Claim CC050:

All hominid fossils are fully human or fully ape.

Response:

1. There is a fine transition between modern humans and australopithecines and other hominids. The transition is gradual enough that it is not clear where to draw the line between human and not.
   
   Intermediate fossils include
   
   
   • Australopithecus afarensis, from 3.9 to 3.0 million years ago (Mya). Its skull is similar to a chimpanzee's, but with more humanlike teeth. Most (possibly all) creationists would call this an ape, but it was bipedal.
   • Australopithecus africanus (3 to 2 Mya); its brain size, 420-500 cc, was slightly larger than A. afarensis, and its teeth yet more humanlike.
   • Homo habilis (2.4 to 1.5 Mya), which is similar to australopithecines, but which used tools and had a larger brain (650-cc average) and less projecting face.
   • Homo erectus (1.8 to 0.3 Mya); brain size averaged about 900 cc in early H. erectus and 1,100 cc in later ones. (Modern human brains average 1,350 cc.)
   • A Pleistocene Homo sapiens which was "morphologically and chronologically intermediate between archaic African fossils and later anatomically modern Late Pleistocene humans" (White et al. 2003, 742).
   • A hominid combining features of, and possibly ancestral to, Neanderthals and modern humans (Bermudez de Castro et al. 1997).
   
   And there are fossils intermediate between these (Foley 1996-2004).
   
   
2. Creationists themselves disagree about which intermediate hominids are human and which are ape (Foley 2002).
   
   
3. There is abundant genetic evidence for the relatedness between humans and other apes:
   • Humans have twenty-three chromosome pairs; apes have twenty-four. Twenty-two of the pairs are similar between humans and apes. The remaining two ape chromosomes appear to have joined; they are similar to each half of the remaining human chromosome (chromosome 2; Yunis and Prakash 1982).
   • The ends of chromosomes have repetitious telomeric sequences and a distinctive pretelomeric region. Such sequences are found in the middle of human chromosome 2, just as one would expect if two chromosomes joined (IJdo et al. 1991).
   • A centromere-like region of human chromosome 2 corresponds with the centromere of the ape chromosome (Avarello et al. 1992).
   • Humans and chimpanzees have innumerable sequence similarities, including shared pseudogenes such as genetic material from ERVs (endogenous retroviruses; Taylor 2003; Max 2003).

Links:

Foley, Jim. 1996-2004. Fossil hominids: The evidence for human evolution. http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/

Drews, Carl, 2002. Transitional fossils of hominid skulls. http://www.theistic-evolution.com/transitional.html

References:

Further Reading:

Johanson, D. C., and B. Edgar, 1996. From Lucy to Language. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Leakey, M. and A. Walker, 1997. Early hominid fossils from Africa. Scientific American 276(6) (June): 74-79.

Tattersall, Ian, 1995. The Fossil Trail. New York: Oxford.

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