Footprints

 In an article titled “The Scientific Evidence for the Origin of Man,” David Menton discussed Dr. Leakey’s self-proclaimed views on this matter. In a recent lecture in St. Louis, Mary Leaky pointed out one additional feature of her footprints that one does not often see mentioned in the literature; all of the larger foot prints of the trail have a smaller footprint superimposed on them! Mary Leaky herself conceded that it appears that a child was intentionally lengthening its stride to step in an elder’s footprints! It shouldn’t be necessary to emphasize that this is a far more sophisticated behaviour than one expects from apes. In addition there were thousands of tracks of a wide variety of animals that are similar or identical to animals living in the area today including antelopes, hares, giraffes, rhinoceroses, hyenas, horses, pigs and two kinds of elephants. Even several birds’ eggs were found and many of these could be easily correlated with eggs of living species (1988, emp. added).

Yet most evolutionists insist upon ascribing the footprints to A. afarensis—on the assumption that humans simply could not have lived as far back as 3.7 million years. The specialist who carried out the most extensive study to date of the Laetoli footprints, however—and who did so at the personal invitation of Mary Leakey herself—is Russell Tuttle of the University of Chicago. He noted in his research reports that the individuals who made the tracks were barefoot and probably walked habitually unshod. As part of his investigation, he observed seventy Machiguenga Indians in the rugged mountains of Peru—people who habitually walk unshod. After analyzing the Indians’ footprints and examining the available Laetoli fossilized toe bones, Tuttle concluded that the apelike feet of A. afarensis simply could not have made the Laetoli tracks (see Bower, 1989, 135:251). In fact, he even went so far as to state: A barefoot Homo sapiens could have made them. ...In all discernible morphological features, the feet of the individuals that made the trails are indistinguishable from those of modern humans (as quoted in Anderson, 1983, 98:373, emp. added).

 Several years later, in an article on the Laetoli footprints in the February 1989 issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Dr. Tuttle wrote: “In discernible features, the Laetoli G prints are indistinguishable from those of habitually barefoot Homo sapiens” (78[2]:316, emp. added). One year later, he then went on to admit in the March 1990 issue of Natural History: In sum, the 3.5 million-year-old footprint traits at Laetoli site G resemble those of habitually unshod modern humans. None of their features suggests that the Laetoli hominids were less capable bipeds than we are. If the G footprints were not known to be so old, we would readily conclude that they were made by a member of our genus, Homo.Inany case, we should shelve the loose assumption that the Laetoli footprints were made by Lucy’s kind, Australopithecus afarensis (p. 64, emp. added). Louise Robbins, the anthropologist who worked closely with Mary Leakey on the Laetoli project, commented: “The arch is raised—the smaller individual had a higher arch than I do —and the big toe is large and aligned with the second toe.… The toes grip the ground like human toes. You do not see this in other animal forms” (1979, 115:196-197, emp. added).

Interestingly, Mary Leakey originally labeled the Laetoli footprints as “Homo sp. indeterminate,” indicating that she was willing to place them into the genus of man, but was unwilling to designate them as Homo sapiens—which they clearly were. It is obvious, of course, why she was unwilling to call them Homo sapiens. Since the tracks (3.7 million years old) are dated as being older than Lucy (3.5 million years old), and since Lucy is supposed to have given rise to humans, how could humans have existed prior to Lucy in order to make such footprints? [See Lubenow, 1992, pp. 45-58 for a more detailed refutation of Lucy, and pp. 173-176 for a discussion of the Laetoli footprints.]