Homo habilis is often included in ‘elephant hurled’ lists which some evolutionists use on the internet to ‘prove’ human evolution. This is misleading. Most researches agree that habilis is a ‘waste taxon’. It contains fossils of Australopithecines and Homo erectus, and therefore cannot be used as a transitional form. Milford Wolpoff told us that some used habilis ‘as a garbage bag’.
Tattersall and Schwartz described ‘the status of H. habilis as an all-embracing “wastebasket” species into which a whole heterogeneous variety of fossils could be conveniently swept’. Bernard Wood also noted:
“Advances in techniques for absolute dating and reassessments of the fossils themselves have rendered untenable a simple unilineal model of human evolution, in which Homo habilissucceeded the australopithecines and then evolved via H. erectus into H. sapiens.”
The fossils in the category either belong to Australopithecus or Homo erectus. And so, this is not a half-human/half-ape species — just either apes or human specimens, although most are ape Australopithecines:
“The obvious taxonomic alternative, which is to transfer one or both of the taxa to one of the existing early hominin genera, is not without problems, but we recommend that, for the time being, both H. habilis and H. rudolfensis should be transferred to the genus Australopithecus.”
Any serious evolutionist will realize that habilis can never be used as evidence for human evolution.
- Wolpoff, M.H., Paleoanthropology, Second Edition, McGraw-Hill, Boston, p. 358, 1999.Back to text
- Tattersall, I. and Schwartz, J.H., Extinct Humans, Westview Press, New York, p. 111, 2001.Back to text
- Wood, B., “Origin and evolution of the genus Homo,” Nature 355:783, 1992. Back to text
- Wood, B. and Collard, M., “The human genus,” Science 284(5411), 1999. p. 70. Back to text