Them dry bones

 

Last week, I had the privilege of spending the entire week with my student Peter as we worked together on his Sanders Scholarship research.  We have been studying the "postcranial" skeleton (everything from the neck down) of hominins, as we continue to learn how to recognize what is human in the fossil record.  This work flows from my ongoing baraminology research project studying the skulls of fossil hominins.  In that research, I've found repeatedly a relatively clear distinction between human and nonhuman, most of which has been described here on my blog:

The lingering issue that has always bothered me is the importance of the skeleton.  It was the skeletal similarities, for example between Homo sapiens and the Nariokotome Homo erectus skeleton, that led me to strongly suspect that humans were recognizable from their skeletons.  Likewise, the differences between even a Homo erectus skeleton and an australopith skeleton are pretty big.  This has also played out in lots of different creationist writings on hominin fossils, where the skeletal differences were highlighted as really important for distinguishing human from ape.

Because of all that, I've been pretty interested in expanding my sample of characteristics to the rest of the body and not just the skull.  With a lot of newly discovered skeletal material, I think we're at a point where we can start that process, and I've been working on it for about 18 months now.  Last week's work was a huge leap forward.

Part of our process is to compare all the fossils to things where we already know the answer: living humans, chimps, and gorillas.  Replica human skeletons are not difficult to come by, and Bryan College has a real one that I can examine as well.  But chimps and gorillas are harder to come by.  Thanks to some friendly (and providential) conversations unrelated to this project, I learned about gorilla and chimp skeletons that were available for study.  We were given access to these skeletons last week, and we put in 9-hr days studying these remains to fill in missing information in our set of characteristics.  We went from ~40% coverage for chimp and gorilla to 97% coverage.  That was a gigantic boost to our work.

We couldn't have done any of this without support from the Sanders Scholarship Fund for my student Peter.  This is the first time we've done an in-house project, and I was very excited to see firsthand what a difference these funds can make.  To everyone who has ever contributed to the Sanders Scholarship Fund, THANK YOU!  Your generosity makes a big difference in the lives of students and mentors and to the further growth of creationism.  If you'd like to make a contribution to the fund, click that donate button at the bottom of this post.  And thank you too!

If you'd like more detail on what we did, including a sneak peek at some very early results, check out my Research Reports on Patreon.  I have a summary of each day's work there, and you can read 48 other posts on studies related to human origins, archaeology, inspiration, inerrancy, and other topics.  I update there multiple times a week, and you can leave comments and questions if you want to interact with my work.  All that for just $4 a month!  All the money raised goes to Core Academy to continue funding this work and other student mentoring projects.  Check it out right here.

Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com. If you enjoyed this article, please consider a contribution to Core Academy of Science. Thank you.


Have you read my book?  You should check that out too!