"Lucy" and the Pygmy Human Hypothesis.

There are two primary views within the creation community with respect to the taxonomic identity of "Lucy" and her kind, Au. afarensis. The first view posits Lucy and her species were an extinct quadrupedal ape. Adherents of this view (Quadrupedal Ape Hypothesis) focus on the ape-like features of specimens assigned to the Australopithecus genus and reinterpret features which suggest human-like obligate bipedality. Meanwhile, there is a growing number of creationists who recognize bipedal morphologies in the partial skeleton of Lucy and the broader Australopithecus genus. Proponents of this second view (Bipedal Ape Hypothesis) argue Lucy's kind had an ape-like cranium yet walked upright in a manner similar to modern humans. In this paper, several reputed "Australopithecus-like" traits are examined and compared to features found in small-bodied adult human paleontological specimens such as the Flores "Hobbit" and H. naledi. Features commonly interpreted as indicators of arboreal propensities are found in these small-bodied adult humans. Since these same traits occur in humans, they cannot be considered diagnostic of Australopithecus taxa. This paper further identifies features in Lucy's skeleton that are entirely consistent with H. sapiens. These findings call into question the taxonomic assignment of numerous human-looking fossils attributed to Australopithecus. These lines of evidence support a new hypothesis, that Lucy was a genetically isolated small-bodied human, drawn from a pygmy population that lived in the Hadar region of East Africa, during the post-Flood African Humid Period (Pygmy Human Hypothesis). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]