Hominin vistas
In my "spare time," when I'm not writing a huge book or running Core Academy or supervising student research projects, I try to keep up with what's happening in paleoanthropology and keep track of what those results might mean for my own creationist perspective. Here at the beginning of February, I thought I'd make a little update in part to help organize my own thoughts. I'll put everything in convenient categories.
Podcast episodes. Last fall, I viewed the Lucy skeleton at the exhibition at the National Museum in Prague, which was a lot of fun. In my previous post on this subject, I promised three full episodes on the subject, and they have all been released. Not surprisingly the third episode where we visit Dolni Vestonice is the least popular, which is a shame, since I think that's probably the best one of all. Check them out at the Let's Talk Creation YouTube channel: Viewing Lucy, Discussing Selam, and Dolni Vestonice.
Paranthropus. A fantastic announcement last fall gave us our first good look at the hand of a Paranthropus from fossils found at Koobi Fora. We know the bones are Paranthropus because they were found in close proximity to Paranthropus teeth. The fingers are broad and look kind of like gorilla fingers. That discovery inspired me to start looking for other purported Paranthropus bones with the idea that maybe we could add them to my post-cranial character matrix that we published in the 2023 ICC proceedings. So I went through the public database and collected a bunch of scans of Paranthropus postcranial fossils. I worked a little bit on that at the beginning of the year, but I probably won't come back to that until April. I have writing deadlines. Meanwhile, check out that hand, the paper is open access:
Mongle et al. 2025. New fossils reveal the hand of Paranthropus boisei. Nature 647:944–951.
Homo habilis. The so-called "handy man" Homo habilis has been a kind of disputed or doubted taxon for some time. Creationists in particular are quick to tell you that H. habilis is an invalid taxon based on the opinion of Marvin Lubenow in the original Bones of Contention, published in 1992. That was about the same time anthropologist Bernard Wood published his assessment of "early Homo" fossils that in my opinion gave a blueprint for resolving Lubenow's concerns. But I recognize there's a lot of uncertainty over the miscellaneous fossils from east Africa, where at least ten hominin taxa lived, and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I understand that there will be a lot of uncertainty about fragmentary remains. So I've been collecting casts and scans of bones attributed to H. habilis sensu lato, some of which I put in that picture at the top of this post. This project doesn't have a goal other than to better understand the H. habilis material. This interest got a big boost in January with the publication of a partial skeleton, easily the best anyone's found so far, from Ileret in Kenya. The skeleton consists of arm bones from both arms, collar bones, dentition, and pieces of a shoulder blade and pelvis. Great stuff.
Grine et al. 2026. New partial skeleton of Homo habilis from the upper Burgi Member, Koobi Fora Formation, Ileret, Kenya. Anatomical Record DOI 10.1002/ar.70100.
What do Paranthropus and Homo habilis have to do with human creation? Excellent question, and that's ultimately what I'm trying to illuminate with this research. We've known about Paranthropus for a very long time, and my prior research always indicated that this unusual creature was not human. Fossils attributed to Homo habilis have routinely and firmly shown up in the same group with humans, which I have taken to mean it's human. The tricky bit is that some of the fossils placed in this category might not belong together, so there's concern that I might be getting a false signal from mixing fossils from different sources. That's quite legitimate, and that's why I'm trying to be more careful with those fossils. I might need to revisit that previous research. Whatever happens I'll definitely have a few papers at ICC in 2027. I hope to see you there.
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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!
