Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain
Where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies
Everyone smiles as you drift past the flowers
That grow so incredibly high…
— ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ by Lennon-McCartney
I’ve never tried LSD, but I did listen to the Beatles sing about it. Even though they denied the song was about LSD. You can’t believe everything people tell you.
I’m tempted, however, to believe Dr. Donald Johanson’s story about how the fossilized bones his team found in Ethiopia, 50 years ago, ended up with the name “Lucy”. As he tells it, his team of fossil hunters began celebrating their discovery, and someone slipped a Beatles cassette into the tape player. The first song to play was “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”.
Dr. Johanson and his team were looking for the evolutionary “missing link”… the creature who had evolved from a plain old ape, but wasn’t quite Homo sapiens yet. At that time — 1974 — most of the “missing link” fossils consisted of maybe a kneecap, or a tooth. Not much to go on, by way of providing evidence for the Theory of Evolution.
Finding more than a quarter of the bones in a 3-million-year-old skeleton was an amazing discovery, back then. And it’s still amazing, today, if you’re in the mood to be amazed.
However, there was a time not so long ago, when practically everyone was convinced that God had made the world, pretty much the way it looks today, and did the whole job in seven days. Actually, six, counting that he took Sunday off. (Or maybe it was Saturday.) Apparently, after the work involved in making male and female humans on the sixth day, God needed a rest.
This story was easy to believe, because it had been published in a book, printed in black and white.
Fossils… they’re a lot more ambiguous. You have to make up your own story.
Today, let’s consider Lucy’s hands and feet, which were missing in 1974. And are still missing. Other parts were found, but not her hands and feet.
When the parts were assembled, her arms resembled chimpanzee arms and her skull suggested a chimpanzee’s skull. But her pelvis looked a bit like a human pelvis, which might cause one to believe that she walked upright, like a decent human, even if she stood only 3 1/2 feet tall.
We’re talking about hands and feet, because when the paleoantropologists didn’t find evidence of big brains in their “missing link” fossils, they took a different approach to asserting that the fossils supported the Theory of Evolution — namely, that the creatures walked upright. Humans are rather proud of walking upright, and also thankful for massage therapists.
Of course, chimps and gorillas can also walk upright, especially if they are performing in a Tarzan movie.
But apes are also really good at climbing trees, thanks to their specialized hands and feet. That’s where apes gather the fruit that forms a major part of their diet… in trees.
Humans aren’t as good at climbing trees, so our actual ancestors probably picked up the spoiled fruit off the ground.
If Lucy were really an “human-like ape” — but sadly, without a big brain — we would want her to be walking upright, rather than climbing trees. So we’d expect her to have “human-like” hands and feet. Which we actually know nothing about, since they were never found.
Could Lucy climb around in trees, like a chimp? Maybe so. But maybe she shouldn’t have. In 2016, a team of scientists determined that Lucy died from falling out of a tree. They analyzed Lucy’s fossil bones, which were broken in several places, and then published a paper in the magazine Nature.
John Kappelman, an anthropologist who published the “findings”, explained the unfortunate events from 3 million years ago, in some detail.
Lucy fell from at least 40 feet up and hit the ground at 35 miles per hour. She landed on her feet before twisting and falling. Such an impact would have caused internal organ damage. Fractures on her upper arms suggest she tried to break her fall. Dr. Kappelman theorized that “Lucy’s walking ability may have caused her to be less adept at climbing trees, making her more vulnerable to falling from heights.” But somehow she managed to get 40 feet up.
The paper didn’t explain why, after the fatal fall, Lucy’s hands and feet and most of her head subsequently went missing, along with half of each leg, half of her pelvis, both shoulder blades and most of her ribs and spine.
I would classify this story, published in Nature, as the likely result, not of scientific analysis, but of an LSD trip.
For all we know, Lucy is indeed a “missing link” in evolution… but maybe she represented a human-like creature slowly evolving into a chimpanzee. (Apparently, scientists have never uncovered any chimpanzee fossils.)
We understand that certain scientists nowadays feel like they are in a life and death struggle with the Creationists. There are so many holes in the Theory of Evolution, that the Creationists — who argue that God has had His hands firmly on the wheel this entire time — find it easy to get the Evolutionists riled up about why different species exist, and how we evolved to the point where we can get paid a handsome salary to make up stories about human-like chimpanzees falling out of trees 3 million years ago.
On the one hand, we have the Bible, which is old, but not as old as Lucy. In the Bible, God made everything, and then, for the icing on the cake, He created humans. A week of work, total.
Another version of the story has Creation taking a longer time, but with God still making the final decisions. And especially, with humans made in God’s image, as the crown of creation.
But certain scientists — also believing humans to be the crown of creation — came up with an even better version of the story, involving “natural selection”… where the best man gets the best girl and together they have the best babies, who then grow up to be even better men and women, and the species continually improves. It just happens. No need for God to lend a hand. We can handle this whole thing ourselves, thank you.
These certain scientists desperately want us — humans — to be the ones in charge of our own destiny.
Which brings us to the present day, and the recent election of a convicted felon as U.S. President.
What would Lucy think? If she were here today?