It's essential to creationism that there is a great yawning unbridgeable abyss between ape and human ... but identifying which fossils are on which side of this unbridgeable gap is evidently a matter of hairsbreadth distinctions of infinitesimal subtlety.
Time to trot out Jim Foley's classic web page from 2008,
Comparison of all skulls, part of his
Fossil Hominids: The Evidence for Human Evolution FAQ (last updated May 2011) in the
talkorigins archive.
The point he makes is that while creationists are in complete agreement that there is a very definite and distinct line dividing humans and non-human apes, such that every fossil can be determined as being either 100% human or 100% ape with nothing in the middle, they cannot agree with each other or even with himself which fossil belongs in which group: some they do agree on, some they don't agree on with some creationists calling the fossil human and others calling it ape, and sometimes the same creationist will classify the fossil differently in different of his books.
Similarly, one of my earliest encounters with creationists in 1982 was in
a televised debate of sorts on CBN:
quote:
I first saw creationists in action one night in 1982 on CBN. A Tennessean host would run various debates (I believe it was David Ankerberg). This particular night, a creationist was debating a scientist (kind of looked like Drs. Morris and Awbrey, though I cannot be sure since I didn't know of either of them at the time). I remember that the scientist showed several slides of hominid fossils, such as knee joints (to show evidence of developing bi-pedalism). Then he showed slides of a human pelvis and chimpanzee pelvis side-by-side. First from the side, then from the top, he pointed out two sets of characteristics that clearly distinguish the one from the other (i.e. whether viewed from the side or from the top, the pelvis could be positively identified as human or chimpanzee). Next he showed both views of a hominid pelvis. From one view it was definitely ape, from the other it was definitely human; thus demonstrating it to be a intermediate form. The creationist then proclaimed the hominid pelvis to be 100% ape and not the least bit human by completely ignoring the human characteristic (even when reminded of it repeatedly by his opponent) and concentrating solely on the view that displayed the ape characteristic. Of course, the host declared this to be a creationist victory and threw in the standard gross misinterpretation of punctuated equilibrium for good [?] measure.
This event made a lasting impression on me. The creationist's steadfast ignoring of the blatantly obvious evidence that was repeatedly pointed out to him is a selective blindness that I have found to pervade much of the creationist literature.