Once Owen had restored the left side of the pelvis, he sculpted a mirror image of the right side in plaster and placed Lucy s sacrum in between to complete his masterpiece. When Owen brings a human pelvis, a chimp pelvis, and a cast of Lucy s pelvis into an elementary-school classroom, the children have no trouble deciding which two look alike. Lucy s pelvis has a bowl shape like a human pelvis, but it is not as deep. So, Lucy's left-half pelvis you saw above isn t one piece. It is about forty pieces that have been carefully shaped to remove the distortion they experienced during burial.
Distortion is, by definition, a deviation from the normal shape.
All they have is a pre-conceived notion of what it should look like. Australopithecus means southern ape . The human characteristics are from the waist down. As far as we can tell, the bones that Johanson actually found indicate that Australopithecus afarensis is an extinct ape. Furthermore, by his own reckoning, he found bones that span more than one million years with very little variation in them.