--- quoting a New York Times article on Lucy ---
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A03EED61538F930A35756C0A965948260&sec...

Certain bones in Lucy's hand, the pisiform and trapezium, for example,
are ''primitive in a pongid direction,'' Dr. Susman said, meaning that
they are slender and curved like an ape's finger bones.
... (snipped)
Finally, according to Dr. Susman and Dr. Stern, Lucy's foot, while
similar to that of a human, shows a retention of grasping tendencies
with long and curved digits. The middle part of the foot is more
humanlike than the forefoot and toes. The foot is 40 percent
oversized, compared to that of modern man.

--- end quoting NYT on Lucy fossil ---

So let me apply the Finger-Toe Index or the Hand-Foot Index (use which
ever one you want
to call it depending on specifics). Let me apply it to Lucy who is
dated at 3 million years
old and using Orrorin as reference who is 6 million years old. We have
obviously finger
and toe bones of Lucy, but we do not have finger and toe bones of
Orrorin to compare and
make a Index for Orrorin. We do know Orrorin was biped.

Does Lucy have the same "femur groove" that Orrorin had to prove
bipedalism? I would suspect
so.

What help does the Hand-Foot Index lend to Lucy? It says that since
Orrorin was already
a biped throwing species and 6 million years old, that the foot of
Lucy should have been
far more developed tending towards a human foot since it is only 3
million years ago. This
implies that Lucy was an line of hominids that would *not* be the
human line. Suggests that
the "human line" was present and extincted the Lucy line.

We know that there was a Neanderthal line that was not the human line
of descendents and
the Neanderthal line was extincted.

Has anyone compared the foot and hand bones of Neanderthal to that of
Lucy? Are the toe digits
of Neanderthal long digits? What is most alarming about Lucy is the
long toe digit. The long
toe digit and only 3 million years old, implies nonhuman descendent.

Another possibility is that Lucy is a graveyard of the young of her
time and the Lucy fossil
is not one individual but rather a mix of individuals. Perhaps it is a
site where our ancestors
caught and killed and the bones were mixed together, so that part of
the Lucy fossil is one
species and the other part is our ancestor species.

We may encounter such a mix-up at a Neanderthal site where some of the
fossil bones
belong to Neanderthal but the other belongs to the species that
extincted them.

I rather agree with the skeptics of the Lucy fossil based on my Hand-
Foot Index, that
Lucy was a divergent line and not our ancestral line. Can a species
have evolved bipedalism
without the pressure of increasing throwing abilities? That is what
Lucy fossil suggests. If Orrorin
was making a living by Throwing and if Orrorin's foot was clearly more
humanlike than apelike
some 6 million years ago, then Lucy cannot have a more primitive Foot
compared to
Orrorin and still be classified as human ancestor.

Since there was a Neanderthal extinction by Human Ancestor-line, it is
reasonable to think
that 3 million years ago there were many more side-species of various
forms of throwing and
bipedalism for which in the end, only one would come through.

It maybe that Orrorin is our direct line of descent 6 million years
ago, or that there were 10
or 20 or hundreds of groups of evolving species with variations of
hand and foot for Throwing.

Is there some other fossil record that deals with 10 million year time
period and which there
is a dynamic evolving trait or characteristic such as Throwing? When
you have some trait
like Throwing come along, it seems reasonable to expect that you would
have many species
of various efficiencies of throwing during that 10 million year
interval.

Now what the New York Times and the scientists who found Lucy should
do is to actually
measure the Hand-Foot Index or the Finger-Toe Index. Where they give
the measure in
millimeters of the digits as I have given for my own index measure.
And then we can compare
the Lucy measure with the existing ape measure. The NYT scientists say
the toes of
Lucy are "long". Well, it is far better if they actually gave a
millimeter account of all the
toe and finger digits of Lucy and then said "these measures compare
more to modern ape"

Now I do not know if Orrorin fingers or toes were found. And certainly
a millimeter measure
would be helpful.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies