The evolutionary shoe doesn’t fit

The old saying goes, “If the shoe fits, wear it!”  In some cases, though, people are determined to squeeze their feet into shoes that just don’t fit.  In the original story by Brothers Grimm, one of Cinderella’s step sisters cut off her toes to try to fit her foot into the glass slipper.  The other sister cut off her heel.  Yikes!!  Yet as extreme as that sounds, evolutionary scientists seem to go to similar lengths to force human footprints into evolutionary shoes.

Some years back, The Guardian reported, “Earliest human footprints found in Kenya.”  I’ve included a photo of the subject print below.  The prints are surprisingly like modern humans’ with a large toe parallel to the other toes and an upright stride matching someone who would have been about 5’ 9”.  An archeologist on site describes them this way:

It was kind of creepy excavating these things to see all of a sudden [a footprint] that looks so dramatically like something that you yourself could have made 20 minutes earlier in some kind of wet sediment just next to the site…. These could quite easily have been made on the beach today.

A Reuters story covering the same find said this about the footprints:

The size, spacing and depth of the footprint impressions allowed the scientists to estimate weight, stride and gait, which all were found to be within the range of modern humans. [bold added]

However, in spite of their very human-like characteristics, the prints are in sediment believed by evolutionists to be ~1.5 million years old.  Uh oh!  Modern humans are only supposed to have evolved only about 200,000 years ago, but here are human footprints in rocks that are supposed to be 1.5 million years old. Do you see the problem?

Richard Dawkins once spoke a great lie saying, “Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.”  Well, Mr. Dawkins, here you go.  Here are footprints of a species supposedly 200,000 years old found in rocks supposedly 1,500,000 years old.  Consider your theory disproved!  Alas, no.  It doesn’t work like that.  They’re going to force these feet into evolutionary shoes!

The Reuters’ story reports that the footprints were assigned to Homo erectus (subspecies, Home ergaster) which they believed could be in that area about that time.  It’s kind of weird, though, that they would have evidence of a creature with the height, weight, stride, and footprint within the range of modern humans but refuse to consider if it’s a modern human.

This phenomenon of assigning human footprints to non-human (at least non-Homo sapien) species isn’t unique to the Kenya find.  An even more famous example would be the Laetoli Footprints. In Tanzania, a trail of human-like footprints were found in volcanic ash they claim was 3.7 million years old.  Like the Kenya footprints, the prints in Laetoli match human patterns very closely.  Here’s a description from the Wiki article:

Analysis of the Laetoli footprints indicated the characteristics of obligate bipedalism: pronounced heel strike from deep impressions, lateral transmission of force from the heel to the base of the lateral metatarsal, a well-developed medial longitudinal arch, adducted big toe, and a deep impression for the big toe commensurate with toe-off….  The feet do not have the mobile big toe of apes; instead, they have an arch typical of modern humans. The hominins seem to have moved in a leisurely stroll.

In other words, these are prints very similar to a person walking heel-to-toe, where his heel strikes first, he transfers his weight forward, then pushes off on his big toe.  That’s how I walk.  That’s how everyone walks.  The only thing that makes these prints interesting is they’re found in rocks that are supposed to be millions of years older than modern humans.

Since there aren’t supposed to be modern humans walking around 4 million years ago, the Laetoli prints have been tentatively assigned to Australopithecus afarensis - as in the famous “Lucy” skeleton on display in nearly every museum around the world.  

This brings me to another point.  The Wiki article discussing Laetoli mentions that other prints found in the area show the presence of other animals like hyenas, baboons, boars, giraffes, and rhinos.  I’m not a hunter, but in Kentucky, I see footprints from a lot of different critters: racoons, deer, rabbits, etc.  It’s very easy to identify an animal from its tracks.  Are you ready for this - how do they know these other prints belonged to giraffes or rhinos?  Think about it:

They find giraffe tracks and assign them to giraffes.

They find boar tracks and assign them to boars.

They find hyena prints and assign them to hyenas.

They find human prints and assign them to Australopithicenes?

So again, as the old saying goes, “If the shoe fits, wear it!”  When I see a human footprint, I know it was made by a human.  Just like I know deer tracks were made by a deer.  Duh!  That doesn’t work for evolution, though.  A 4 million year old human footprint can’t be a modern human.  A 1.5 million year old human footprint can’t be a modern human.  Just like Cinderella’s wicked step-sisters, they’ll do anything to fit human footprints into the shoes of our supposed non-human ancestors.  It’s too bad for them that the shoe doesn’t fit!