More on Ardi the "Missing Link"

Some more here on Ardi:

Casey Luskin at the Discovery Institute explains. Ardi was discovered in the early 1990s and has undergone significant reconstructive surgery to the pelvis, which was crushed when found. Science magazine itself reported this in 2002. Now that's significant because it's the pelvis that is the primary clue to how a creature moves. In other words, the headline about Ardi's signficance is an interpretation based on massive reconstruction of a pelvis that was in tiny, little pieces.

Science Magazine itself reports doubt about the interpretation that was blared in the headlines.

However, several researchers aren’t so sure about these inferences. Some are skeptical that the crushed pelvis really shows the anatomical details needed to demonstrate bipedality. The pelvis is “suggestive” of bipedality but not conclusive, says paleoanthropologist Carol Ward of the University of Missouri, Columbia.

We already knew of upright walking / tree-climbing, small-brained hominids—that’s what Lucy, an australopithecine, was. We already knew that there were australopithecine fossils dating back to before 4 million years, and this fossil is only a little bit older. So what does this fossil teach us? Assuming all the reconstructions of Ardi's crushed bones are objective and accurate, this fossil teaches us at least one very important thing: prevailing evolutionary explanations about how upright walking supposedly evolved in humans, confidently taught in countless college-level anthropology classes, were basically wrong.