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DeWitt’s digital manipulation of skull 1470

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To the left is a typical legacy news media reconstruction. David DeWitt at Liberty University  offers a digital manipulation with some notes: (Here, if you can’t see it. We had trouble with that last week, so we have republished the story with some technical glitches, we hope, ironed out.)

 

The skull as presented in the news websites has some significant issues that suggests that the facial reconstruction is seriously off.

1. When you look at a side view of an ape as well as a human skull, the jaw lines up essentially parallel with the ground. This one is on about a 15% angle and that doesn’t account for the upper teeth. I put our Ardipithecus jaw under our 1470 skull and it creates a similar appearing skull. This is unlike every other ape and hominid skill that we have including Neanderthal, Australopithecine, Homo erectus, gorilla, orangutan, chimpanzee… This is evidence that the maxilla is not reconstructed properly.

2. The facial angle in the reconstruction is determined by a tiny bone on part of the left side of the nose. This piece doesn’t exactly fit right when you examine models of the skull like the one we have. A slight pivot here and the entire maxilla angles forward. If the face is sloped rather than flat, it will actually come out close to right. If you look at the bottom of the 1470 models (which almost no one can unless you have a model) you can see that the pieces that connect the maxilla to the rest of the skull are missing so it is not clear what the angle is supposed to be.

3. The jaw is seriously robust and would require major muscles to attach. This makes sense considering the large zygomatic arch and pinched fore skull. But this is all the more reason that the jaw should be parallel to the ground rather than significantly angled.

Skull 1470, it turns out, has a multiple personality disorder, Part II Here’s Part I.

(Earlier, many people could not see the photos, please write in to say if you cannot do so now. We think we have fixed the problem, but they were never invisible to us, so ….)

 DeWitt had earlier offered these notes:

This evening I worked on a crude digital manipulation of the image that was shown on the news websites. Importantly, the skull and jaw are from two separate individuals. That has to be kept in mind.

To obtain the second image, I rotated the jaw and parts of the maxilla to align them properly with the skull. The muscle that allows the jaw to close passes under the cheek bone and attaches across the skull. This muscle significantly affects the shape of the face. Stronger muscles make the face shorter while weaker muscles will make the face longer. The difference occurs because bone is continuously remodeled and affected by forces including that of the muscles.

I am making this assessment based on the news image and a model of 1470 from Bone Clones.

Comments
> Importantly, the skull and jaw are from two separate individuals. Is this DeWitt's interpretation, or is it agreed upon by everyone? Is there an external source for this?JoeCoder
August 16, 2012
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Brilliant! David DeWitt photoshopped a digital image of a fossil. And this proves what exactly?timothya
August 15, 2012
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Of related note: ENV just posted this: A Big Bang Theory of Homo - Casey Luskin - August 13, 2012 http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/08/a_big_bang_theo063141.htmlbornagain77
August 13, 2012
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Attention News: You may be interested in posting a link to this recent video: Dr. William Dembski, "An Informative-Theoretic Proof of God's Existence" - video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuarexO9p0gbornagain77
August 13, 2012
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News, as you noted elsewhere, DeWitt is not the only one to notice how fast and loose Darwinists are with this 1470 fossil evidence: “Dr. Leakey produced a biased reconstruction (of 1470/ Homo Rudolfensis) based on erroneous preconceived expectations of early human appearance that violated principles of craniofacial development,” Dr. Timothy Bromage http://www.geneticarchaeology.com/research/Mans_Earliest_Direct_Ancestors_Looked_More_Apelike_Than_Previously_Believed.asp "One famous fossil skull, discovered in 1972 in northern Kenya, changed its appearance dramatically depending on how the upper jaw was connected to the rest of the cranium. Roger Lewin recounts an occasion when paleoanthropologists Alan Walker, Michael Day, and Richard Leakey were studying the two sections of skull 1470. According to Lewin, Walker said: You could hold the [upper jaw] forward, and give it a long face, or you could tuck it in, making the face short…. How you held it really depended on your preconceptions. It was very interesting watching what people did with it. Lewin reports that Leakey recalled the incident, too: Yes. If you held it one way, it looked like one thing; if you held it another, it looked like something else." Roger Lewin, Bones of Contention, Second Edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), p 160 https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/human-evolution-skull-1470-it-turns-out-has-a-multiple-personality-disorder/ "National Geographic magazine commissioned four artists to reconstruct a female figure from casts of seven fossil bones thought to be from the same species as skull 1470. One artist drew a creature whose forehead is missing and whose jaws look vaguely like those of a beaked dinosaur. Another artist drew a rather good-looking modern African-American woman with unusually long arms. A third drew a somewhat scrawny female with arms like a gorilla and a face like a Hollywood werewolf. And a fourth drew a figure covered with body hair and climbing a tree, with beady eyes that glare out from under a heavy, gorilla-like brow." “Behind the Scenes,” National Geographic 197 (March, 2000): 140 https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/human-evolution-skull-1470-it-turns-out-has-a-multiple-personality-disorder/bornagain77
August 13, 2012
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We have written to him and are trying to get it fixed. Thanks for patience.News
August 10, 2012
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Also, the image link is broken. Probably a google docs sharing issue?JoeCoder
August 10, 2012
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Then what is the source of the quoted text? Is it a private communication with DeWitt?JoeCoder
August 10, 2012
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It is posted here.News
August 10, 2012
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Is this posted somewhere? The link is to DeWitt's CV.NickMatzke_UD
August 10, 2012
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