Click the entry title to go to the NY Times article.
Showing posts with label floresiensis. flores. Show all posts
Showing posts with label floresiensis. flores. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
A First Look at the Bones of a ‘Hobbit’
"A cast of the skull and bones of the hominid Homo floresiensis will be displayed for the first time at a public symposium titled “Hobbits in the Haystack.”
Click the entry title to go to the NY Times article.
Click the entry title to go to the NY Times article.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Debate Over ‘Little People’ Intensifies After Recent Island Discovery
From the New York Times:
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
The dispute over the “little people” of Flores continues, unabated.
The bones and a single skull of these “little people” are believed to be remains of a separate species of the human family that lived about 18,000 years ago on an island in Indonesia, as the scientists who made the sensational discovery concluded in 2004.
But persistent skeptics have contended in a recent flurry of scientific reports that they were nothing more than modern humans with unusually small bodies possibly malformed by genetic or pathological disorders.
Neither side is backing off in this sometimes bitter row, which intensified last week with the announcement of the discovery that in Palau, in the Western Caroline Islands of Micronesia, other abnormally small-bodied people had lived long ago. Their bones were found in two caves and described in the online journal PloS One.
Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and his colleagues said the Palauan bones, representing at least 25 individuals, were from modern humans about four feet tall, close in size to some pygmies living in this region of the Pacific. Populations on isolated islands with limited resources often evolve short statures.
The Palauan specimens shared facial, chin and dental traits with the Flores people, the scientists said, but had larger braincases “possibly at the very low end or below that typically observed in modern, small-bodied humans.”
For these and other reasons, the scientists say, these Palauan people, who lived from 1,400 to 3,000 years ago, suggest the possibility that the Flores people were not a distinct species, designated Homo floresiensis, but “simply an island adapted population of Homo sapiens, perhaps with some individuals expressing congenital abnormalities.”
In previous reports and interviews, other skeptical scientists have contended that the extremely small brain size of the Flores people, close to that of a chimpanzee, was more likely a consequence of any number of growth disorders. Teuku Jacob, an Indonesian paleoanthropologist who was one of the first to examine the Flores bones, immediately suspected microcephaly, a genetic condition causing a small head.
This hypothesis has been argued back and forth, and last month an Australian scientist offered another possible explanation. The scientist, Peter Obendorf of RMIT University in Melbourne, reported that an image of the base of the Flores skull showed evidence of an enlarged pituitary gland, suggesting the individual may have suffered from cretinism, which can cause stunted growth and a small brain.
The two principal scientists who advanced the separate-species thesis — Peter Brown, a paleoanthropologist, and Michael Morwood, an archaeologist, of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia — have said they are unmoved by the criticism. And prominent experts on early humans have endorsed the new-species interpretation, including Tim D. White of the University of California, Berkeley, and Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.
After the publication of Dr. Berger’s findings, Bernard Wood, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University, said, “Obviously the Flores material came as a bit of a surprise to many of us, but it was not a surprise that might not have been anticipated.”
Dr. Wood, who was not involved in the original research, said the one fairly complete Flores skeleton and other fragments have got “all sorts of intriguing morphology” that distinguishes the individuals from modern humans. He and a group of other scientists have prepared their own assessment in a report to be published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“All of these exotic explanations being proposed require the suspension of any fragment of common sense,” Dr. Wood said. “They are seeking a much more exotic explanation than the one for a distinct species that looks like an earlier Homo.”
Dean Falk, an anthropologist at Florida State University who has examined casts of the Flores braincase, disputed the microcephaly argument and the Berger paper.
In a study comparing the Flores specimen with known microcephalics, Dr. Falk and researchers at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University concluded three years ago that the ancient individual did not suffer such a disorder. Its wide brain and frontal lobes, she said, were not like the brains of microcephalics.
“Suites of features from head to feet set the Flores individuals apart from Homo sapiens, which is why this is a new species,” she said in an interview.
William L. Jungers, a paleoanthropologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who has worked closely with the Flores researchers, said in an e-mail message that the Berger paper “is really much ado about nothing,” adding that modern human pygmies of the size reported on Palau “are old news in this part of the world.”
Dr. Jungers said that none of these small-bodied humans “are as short as the various individuals of Homo floresiensis” or have similar limb proportions, cranial capacity, jaw anatomy, wrist bones and other characteristics.
The new-species proponents concede that they would have a stronger case if it rested on more than a single skeleton with a skull and assorted bones of about 12 other individuals.
Dr. Berger, whose research at Palau was supported by the National Geographic Society, emphasized in an interview, “I’m not on either side of this debate.” But he defended his report, which he said was preliminary yet based on substantial fieldwork and analysis, as a contribution to “the discussion of modern human variations that has been missing in the Flores debate.” These variations, he added, “occur with high frequency or we would not have found them so readily.”
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
The dispute over the “little people” of Flores continues, unabated.
The bones and a single skull of these “little people” are believed to be remains of a separate species of the human family that lived about 18,000 years ago on an island in Indonesia, as the scientists who made the sensational discovery concluded in 2004.
But persistent skeptics have contended in a recent flurry of scientific reports that they were nothing more than modern humans with unusually small bodies possibly malformed by genetic or pathological disorders.
Neither side is backing off in this sometimes bitter row, which intensified last week with the announcement of the discovery that in Palau, in the Western Caroline Islands of Micronesia, other abnormally small-bodied people had lived long ago. Their bones were found in two caves and described in the online journal PloS One.
Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and his colleagues said the Palauan bones, representing at least 25 individuals, were from modern humans about four feet tall, close in size to some pygmies living in this region of the Pacific. Populations on isolated islands with limited resources often evolve short statures.
The Palauan specimens shared facial, chin and dental traits with the Flores people, the scientists said, but had larger braincases “possibly at the very low end or below that typically observed in modern, small-bodied humans.”
For these and other reasons, the scientists say, these Palauan people, who lived from 1,400 to 3,000 years ago, suggest the possibility that the Flores people were not a distinct species, designated Homo floresiensis, but “simply an island adapted population of Homo sapiens, perhaps with some individuals expressing congenital abnormalities.”
In previous reports and interviews, other skeptical scientists have contended that the extremely small brain size of the Flores people, close to that of a chimpanzee, was more likely a consequence of any number of growth disorders. Teuku Jacob, an Indonesian paleoanthropologist who was one of the first to examine the Flores bones, immediately suspected microcephaly, a genetic condition causing a small head.
This hypothesis has been argued back and forth, and last month an Australian scientist offered another possible explanation. The scientist, Peter Obendorf of RMIT University in Melbourne, reported that an image of the base of the Flores skull showed evidence of an enlarged pituitary gland, suggesting the individual may have suffered from cretinism, which can cause stunted growth and a small brain.
The two principal scientists who advanced the separate-species thesis — Peter Brown, a paleoanthropologist, and Michael Morwood, an archaeologist, of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia — have said they are unmoved by the criticism. And prominent experts on early humans have endorsed the new-species interpretation, including Tim D. White of the University of California, Berkeley, and Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London.
After the publication of Dr. Berger’s findings, Bernard Wood, a paleoanthropologist at George Washington University, said, “Obviously the Flores material came as a bit of a surprise to many of us, but it was not a surprise that might not have been anticipated.”
Dr. Wood, who was not involved in the original research, said the one fairly complete Flores skeleton and other fragments have got “all sorts of intriguing morphology” that distinguishes the individuals from modern humans. He and a group of other scientists have prepared their own assessment in a report to be published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“All of these exotic explanations being proposed require the suspension of any fragment of common sense,” Dr. Wood said. “They are seeking a much more exotic explanation than the one for a distinct species that looks like an earlier Homo.”
Dean Falk, an anthropologist at Florida State University who has examined casts of the Flores braincase, disputed the microcephaly argument and the Berger paper.
In a study comparing the Flores specimen with known microcephalics, Dr. Falk and researchers at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University concluded three years ago that the ancient individual did not suffer such a disorder. Its wide brain and frontal lobes, she said, were not like the brains of microcephalics.
“Suites of features from head to feet set the Flores individuals apart from Homo sapiens, which is why this is a new species,” she said in an interview.
William L. Jungers, a paleoanthropologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook who has worked closely with the Flores researchers, said in an e-mail message that the Berger paper “is really much ado about nothing,” adding that modern human pygmies of the size reported on Palau “are old news in this part of the world.”
Dr. Jungers said that none of these small-bodied humans “are as short as the various individuals of Homo floresiensis” or have similar limb proportions, cranial capacity, jaw anatomy, wrist bones and other characteristics.
The new-species proponents concede that they would have a stronger case if it rested on more than a single skeleton with a skull and assorted bones of about 12 other individuals.
Dr. Berger, whose research at Palau was supported by the National Geographic Society, emphasized in an interview, “I’m not on either side of this debate.” But he defended his report, which he said was preliminary yet based on substantial fieldwork and analysis, as a contribution to “the discussion of modern human variations that has been missing in the Flores debate.” These variations, he added, “occur with high frequency or we would not have found them so readily.”
Thursday, March 06, 2008
‘Hobbits’ linked to nutritional deficiency
"MSNBC staff and news service reports
updated 12:43 p.m. ET, Wed., March. 5, 2008
HONG KONG - Small humanlike skeletons found in a cave on a remote Indonesian island were actually human, and their miniature features were probably due to nutritional deficiency, researchers in Australia have suggested.
Writing in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, the scientists said these were more likely to be cretin offspring of normal mothers who suffered from iodine and other dietary deficiencies. Cretinism is a condition of severely stunted physical and mental growth due to a congenital deficiency of thyroid hormones.
Ever since the 18,000-year-old skeletons were found in Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores, four years ago, anthropologists have debated whether or not they represented a previously unseen species of dwarf hominid — or merely a group of deformed humans. The newly published research opens an additional argument for the latter view.
"We believe they were Homo sapiens, but with this disorder ... cretins born without the thyroid gland," Peter Obendorf of the School of Applied Sciences at RMIT University in Melbourne told Reuters in a telephone interview. "The mothers would be iodine- and selenium-deficient, and would be exposed to certain plant food that would release cyanide into the body."
Obendorf said the fossils were found inland, where their communities were cut off from seafood, a key source of iodine.
They probably relied on bamboo shoots and certain tubers, which could have released cyanide into their bodies given the primitive cooking methods they were using.
These plants are still found in forests in Flores.
"When there's a drought, people utilize them. In modern times, they are cooked better," he said.
‘Hobbits’ debated
Initially, the fossils were classified as a new species called Homo floresiensis, considered an offshoot of Homo erectus. Based on measurements of the skulls and skeletons, scientists said the hominids stood about 3 feet (1 meter) tall and had brains roughly the size of grapefruits.
The fossils were quickly dubbed "Hobbits," referring to the diminutive inhabitants of Middle Earth in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
Some skeptics argued that the small size of the Flores skulls more likely resulted from a genetic condition known as microencephaly, characterized by a small head and short stature. Other scientists sought to put those doubts to rest by citing comparative measurements of skeletal dimensions.
Obendorf and his colleagues put forth a different argument against the designation of a new species, contending that the "Hobbits" were essentially modern humans affected by diet rather than genetics.
"We think the population was normal, but many of the women had goiter. In the middle of a drought, some were forced to eat unsuitable food ... and they had cretin children," Obendorf said.
The researchers said certain structures of the fossils, such as the arm bone, matched descriptions contained in medical literature of cretin skeletons found in Europe, especially Germany and Switzerland.
"The dwarf cretins in Europe have just the same structural rotation of the arm bone," Obendorf said.
This report includes information from Reuters and msnbc.com."
updated 12:43 p.m. ET, Wed., March. 5, 2008
HONG KONG - Small humanlike skeletons found in a cave on a remote Indonesian island were actually human, and their miniature features were probably due to nutritional deficiency, researchers in Australia have suggested.
Writing in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, the scientists said these were more likely to be cretin offspring of normal mothers who suffered from iodine and other dietary deficiencies. Cretinism is a condition of severely stunted physical and mental growth due to a congenital deficiency of thyroid hormones.
Ever since the 18,000-year-old skeletons were found in Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores, four years ago, anthropologists have debated whether or not they represented a previously unseen species of dwarf hominid — or merely a group of deformed humans. The newly published research opens an additional argument for the latter view.
"We believe they were Homo sapiens, but with this disorder ... cretins born without the thyroid gland," Peter Obendorf of the School of Applied Sciences at RMIT University in Melbourne told Reuters in a telephone interview. "The mothers would be iodine- and selenium-deficient, and would be exposed to certain plant food that would release cyanide into the body."
Obendorf said the fossils were found inland, where their communities were cut off from seafood, a key source of iodine.
They probably relied on bamboo shoots and certain tubers, which could have released cyanide into their bodies given the primitive cooking methods they were using.
These plants are still found in forests in Flores.
"When there's a drought, people utilize them. In modern times, they are cooked better," he said.
‘Hobbits’ debated
Initially, the fossils were classified as a new species called Homo floresiensis, considered an offshoot of Homo erectus. Based on measurements of the skulls and skeletons, scientists said the hominids stood about 3 feet (1 meter) tall and had brains roughly the size of grapefruits.
The fossils were quickly dubbed "Hobbits," referring to the diminutive inhabitants of Middle Earth in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
Some skeptics argued that the small size of the Flores skulls more likely resulted from a genetic condition known as microencephaly, characterized by a small head and short stature. Other scientists sought to put those doubts to rest by citing comparative measurements of skeletal dimensions.
Obendorf and his colleagues put forth a different argument against the designation of a new species, contending that the "Hobbits" were essentially modern humans affected by diet rather than genetics.
"We think the population was normal, but many of the women had goiter. In the middle of a drought, some were forced to eat unsuitable food ... and they had cretin children," Obendorf said.
The researchers said certain structures of the fossils, such as the arm bone, matched descriptions contained in medical literature of cretin skeletons found in Europe, especially Germany and Switzerland.
"The dwarf cretins in Europe have just the same structural rotation of the arm bone," Obendorf said.
This report includes information from Reuters and msnbc.com."
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Friday, September 21, 2007
Scientists say 'hobbit' was not modern human
"U.S. scientists, wringing their hands over the identity of the famed "hobbit" fossil, have found a new clue in the wrist.
A Homo Erectus skull, left, a cast taken from a skull that is said to be that of a new species in the evolution of man named 'Homo Floresiensis', center, and the cast of a modern Homo Sapiens skull
Since the discovery of the bones in Indonesia in 2003, researchers have wrangled over whether the find was an ancient human ancestor or simply a modern human suffering from a genetic disorder.
Now, a study of the bones in the creature's left wrist lends weight to the human ancestor theory, according to a report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
The wrist bones of the 3-foot-tall (0.91 meter) creature, technically known as Homo floresiensis, are basically indistinguishable from an African ape or early hominin-like wrist and nothing at all like that seen in modern humans and Neanderthals, according to the research team led by Matthew W. Tocheri of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.
That indicates that it is an early hominin and not a modern human with a physical disorder, they contend.
"It seals the deal," Tocheri said in a telephone interview.
The specimen he studied lived on the Indonesian island of Flores about 18,000 years ago, a time when early modern humans populated Australia and other nearby areas.
Scientists had thought humans had the planet to ourselves since Neanderthals died out about 30,000 years ago, and the discovery of Hobbits indicates another evolutionary cousin who coexisted longer, Tocheri said.
It is not known whether humans and Hobbits coexisted on that island, he said, but it is clear we shared the planet for some time.
"Basically, the wrist evidence tells us that modern humans and Neanderthals share an evolutionary grandparent that the hobbits do not, but all three share an evolutionary great-grandparent. If you think of modern humans and Neanderthals as being first cousins, then the hobbit is more like a second cousin to both," Tocheri said.
When the bones were first discovered some scientists declared them the remains of a new, dwarf species of human ancestors. Because of its tiny stature it was quickly dubbed the "Hobbit," from the creature in the books by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Dean Falk of Florida State University said the new report helps confirm that conclusion.
"This is exciting and should help settle things," she said. "The authors are to be congratulated, not only for describing important new details about 'Hobbit,' but for shedding light on the evolution of the wrist and how it might have related to tool production."
But others have questioned whether it was really a new species. Robert D. Martin of the Field Museum in Chicago and co-authors challenged the original classification, arguing that it appears to be a modern human suffering from microencephaly, a genetic disorder that results in small brain size and other defects.
There are things that can go wrong in the development of the wrist, Tocheri said, but they do not result in a complete change of design from modern human to chimpanzee or gorilla wrist.
Nonetheless, Martin said he is standing by his position.
"My take is that the brain size of (that specimen) is simply too small. That problem remains unanswered," he said in a telephone interview.
"People ask me whether this new evidence changes anything, well it doesn't," he said. "I think the evidence they've presented is fine, it's the interpretation that is problematic.""
Since the discovery of the bones in Indonesia in 2003, researchers have wrangled over whether the find was an ancient human ancestor or simply a modern human suffering from a genetic disorder.
Now, a study of the bones in the creature's left wrist lends weight to the human ancestor theory, according to a report in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
The wrist bones of the 3-foot-tall (0.91 meter) creature, technically known as Homo floresiensis, are basically indistinguishable from an African ape or early hominin-like wrist and nothing at all like that seen in modern humans and Neanderthals, according to the research team led by Matthew W. Tocheri of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.
That indicates that it is an early hominin and not a modern human with a physical disorder, they contend.
"It seals the deal," Tocheri said in a telephone interview.
The specimen he studied lived on the Indonesian island of Flores about 18,000 years ago, a time when early modern humans populated Australia and other nearby areas.
Scientists had thought humans had the planet to ourselves since Neanderthals died out about 30,000 years ago, and the discovery of Hobbits indicates another evolutionary cousin who coexisted longer, Tocheri said.
It is not known whether humans and Hobbits coexisted on that island, he said, but it is clear we shared the planet for some time.
"Basically, the wrist evidence tells us that modern humans and Neanderthals share an evolutionary grandparent that the hobbits do not, but all three share an evolutionary great-grandparent. If you think of modern humans and Neanderthals as being first cousins, then the hobbit is more like a second cousin to both," Tocheri said.
When the bones were first discovered some scientists declared them the remains of a new, dwarf species of human ancestors. Because of its tiny stature it was quickly dubbed the "Hobbit," from the creature in the books by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Dean Falk of Florida State University said the new report helps confirm that conclusion.
"This is exciting and should help settle things," she said. "The authors are to be congratulated, not only for describing important new details about 'Hobbit,' but for shedding light on the evolution of the wrist and how it might have related to tool production."
But others have questioned whether it was really a new species. Robert D. Martin of the Field Museum in Chicago and co-authors challenged the original classification, arguing that it appears to be a modern human suffering from microencephaly, a genetic disorder that results in small brain size and other defects.
There are things that can go wrong in the development of the wrist, Tocheri said, but they do not result in a complete change of design from modern human to chimpanzee or gorilla wrist.
Nonetheless, Martin said he is standing by his position.
"My take is that the brain size of (that specimen) is simply too small. That problem remains unanswered," he said in a telephone interview.
"People ask me whether this new evidence changes anything, well it doesn't," he said. "I think the evidence they've presented is fine, it's the interpretation that is problematic.""
Monday, January 29, 2007
Scientists: Flores island 'Hobbit' is new species
"New computerized casts of abnormally small Homo sapiens brains are reigniting the debate over the skeletal remains nicknamed "The Hobbit."
Ever since the 18,000-year-old remains of the three-foot-tall adult female hominid were unearthed in 2003 on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, scientists have argued whether the specimen was a human with an abnormally small head or represents a new species in the human family tree. The diminutive creature had a brain approximately one-third the size of modern adult humans.
Some scientists named the specimen Homo floresiensis, a dwarfed offshoot of Homo erectus, a human ancestor that lived as far back as 1.8 million years ago.
Critics dismissed the remains as that of a human with a pathological condition called microcephalia, characterized by a small head, short stature and varying degrees of mental retardation.
In the latest study, the evidence supports the claim of a new species. A team of scientists led by Dean Falk, a paleoneurologist at Florida State University, compared computer-generated three-dimensional reconstructions, called "endocasts," of brains from nine microcephalic modern humans with those of 10 normal modern-human brains.
"We asked, ‘Is there anything other than size of the brain that separates these two groups?'" Falk said.
According to the researchers, the answer is "yes." They found that two ratios, created using different skull measurements, could be used to accurately distinguish the normal humans from the microcephalics nearly 100 percent of the time.
For example, dividing the distance from the front of the frontal lobe to the back of the occipital lobe of the brain by the front of the frontal lobe to the back of the cerebellum gives a ratio that reveals how much the cerebellum protrudes from the back of the brain.
"In microcephalics, the cerebellum tends to stick out farther back than in normal people," Falk told LiveScience. "We were able to quantify this with a ratio."
The other ratio quantified how wide the frontal lobes were for each skull and, according to the researchers, also could be used to distinguish normal humans from microcephalics.
Falk's team then applied this classification system to a virtual endocast of the skull of LB1. According to the researchers, LB1's features are closer to a normal human skull than to a microcephalic.
"We have answered the people who contend that the Hobbit is a microcephalic," Falk said.
As a control, the researchers also analyzed the skull of a human dwarf that, like LB1, also stood at about 3 feet tall. The technique correctly placed the dwarf skull in the same category as normal humans.
The team's findings are detailed in the Jan. 30 issue of the journal for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Questions remain
While the new technique suggests LB1 was not a microcephalic, it does not rule out that it was not a Homo sapiens. As evidence of that, Falk points to what she says are several advanced features of LB1's brain that are unlike those of modern humans or any other known hominid species.
"What we have is a little tiny brain that has four features that you can see with your eyes that are advanced and distributed from front to middle to back," Falk said. "In other words, this thing appears to be globally rewired. Those are really advanced features. They're not like humans, they're not like anything."
Robert Martin, curator of Biological Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago, is not convinced by the new evidence.
One of his major criticisms has to do with the sample of microcephalic skulls the team used.
"They're being a bit naughty about this," Martin said in a telephone interview. "Four of the nine microcephalics were not adults."
Falk's team maintains their inclusion of young skulls is justified because microcephalics are generally believed to achieve maximum cranial capacity by around four years of age.
Martin, who criticized a similar comparison done by Falk's team in 2005 as flawed, again disagrees.
"What we're saying is LB1 was definitely an adult. If LB1 was a microcephalic, he was one with a mild condition who managed to survive into adulthood," he said. "So the proper comparison is with microcephalics with a mild condition who were adults."
"I don't have any problems with having new hominid species," Martin added. "I just don't think this is one of them."
Another expert in the field, Bernard Wood of George Washington University, spoke in favor of Falk's research.
"Dean Falk and her colleagues have injected some much needed scientific rigor into the debate about the brain of Homo floresiensis," Wood said. "They show that the microencephaly 'explanation' for its size and morphology is untenable. I hope we can now get down to the important task of trying to understand the biology of H. floresiensis without the distraction of non-existent pathology.""
Monday, August 21, 2006
Hobbit or not? Species debate flares up - LiveScience - MSNBC.com
"Skeletal remains said to be that of a new 'hobbit' species in 2004 do not represent a new species, as then claimed, but some of the ancestors of modern human pygmies who live on the island today, according to an international scientific team.
The remains were found in a cave on the island of Flores, Indonesia. The researchers say those remains show signs of microcephaly, a condition in which the head and brain are much smaller than average for the person's age and gender.
The skull specimen attributed to a newly designated species known as Homo floresiensis is at left. Researchers created computer images of the skull with the left side mirrored at the midline (center) and the right side mirrored at the midline (right) in an effort to show that there were growth abnormalities.
'Our work documents the real dimensions of human variation here,' says Dr. Robert B. Eckhardt, professor of developmental genetics and evolutionary morphology at Penn State.
The skeleton, dubbed LB1, "looks different if researchers think in terms of European characteristics because it samples a population that is not European, but Australomelanesian, and further because it is a developmentally abnormal individual, being microcephalic," Eckhardt said.
The new analysis, done by several researchers, argues that claims of a new species — "Homo floresiensis," commonly called hobbits — are incorrect.
The results were published Monday in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Those proposing a separate species had claimed that early human ancestors, Homo erectus, traveled to the island about 840,000 years ago and evolved into Homo floresiensis, based on the discovery of stone tools on the island. This claim assumed that there was no subsequent human migration to the island until after Homo floresiensis died out about 15,000 years ago.
In the newly published paper, the researchers contend that this is false, because pygmy elephants arrived on the island at least two separate times, and during periods of low sea levels Flores was isolated from other islands by only a few miles. Repeated influxes by later humans were not only possible, but likely, they argue.
For LB1'S cranium, face, dentition, skeleton, they find that many of the key features previously said to be diagnostic of a new species still are present in the Rampasasa pygmies on the island today, along with evidence for growth abnormalities.
"To establish a new species, paleoanthropologists are required to document a unique complex of normal traits not found in any other species," Eckhardt said in a statement. "But this was not done. The normal traits of LB1 were not unique, and its unusually small braincase was not normal."
The remains were found in a cave on the island of Flores, Indonesia. The researchers say those remains show signs of microcephaly, a condition in which the head and brain are much smaller than average for the person's age and gender.
The skull specimen attributed to a newly designated species known as Homo floresiensis is at left. Researchers created computer images of the skull with the left side mirrored at the midline (center) and the right side mirrored at the midline (right) in an effort to show that there were growth abnormalities.
'Our work documents the real dimensions of human variation here,' says Dr. Robert B. Eckhardt, professor of developmental genetics and evolutionary morphology at Penn State.
The skeleton, dubbed LB1, "looks different if researchers think in terms of European characteristics because it samples a population that is not European, but Australomelanesian, and further because it is a developmentally abnormal individual, being microcephalic," Eckhardt said.
The new analysis, done by several researchers, argues that claims of a new species — "Homo floresiensis," commonly called hobbits — are incorrect.
The results were published Monday in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Those proposing a separate species had claimed that early human ancestors, Homo erectus, traveled to the island about 840,000 years ago and evolved into Homo floresiensis, based on the discovery of stone tools on the island. This claim assumed that there was no subsequent human migration to the island until after Homo floresiensis died out about 15,000 years ago.
In the newly published paper, the researchers contend that this is false, because pygmy elephants arrived on the island at least two separate times, and during periods of low sea levels Flores was isolated from other islands by only a few miles. Repeated influxes by later humans were not only possible, but likely, they argue.
For LB1'S cranium, face, dentition, skeleton, they find that many of the key features previously said to be diagnostic of a new species still are present in the Rampasasa pygmies on the island today, along with evidence for growth abnormalities.
"To establish a new species, paleoanthropologists are required to document a unique complex of normal traits not found in any other species," Eckhardt said in a statement. "But this was not done. The normal traits of LB1 were not unique, and its unusually small braincase was not normal."
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
More bones of hobbit-sized humans discovered - Science - MSNBC.com
"Scientists digging in a remote Indonesian cave have uncovered a jawbone that they say adds more evidence that a tiny prehistoric Hobbit-like species once existed.
The jaw is from the ninth individual believed to have lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. The bones are in a wet cave on the island of Flores in the eastern limb of the Indonesian archipelago, near Australia.
The research team which reported the original sensational finding nearly a year ago strongly believes that the skeletons belong to a separate species of early human that shared Earth with modern humans far more recently than anyone thought."
The jaw is from the ninth individual believed to have lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. The bones are in a wet cave on the island of Flores in the eastern limb of the Indonesian archipelago, near Australia.
The research team which reported the original sensational finding nearly a year ago strongly believes that the skeletons belong to a separate species of early human that shared Earth with modern humans far more recently than anyone thought."
Friday, September 23, 2005
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | New 'Hobbit' disease link claim
"Scientists are to present new evidence that the tiny human species dubbed 'The Hobbit' may not be what it seems.
The researchers say their findings strongly support an idea that the 1m- (3ft-) tall female skeleton from Indonesia is a diseased modern human.
Their claims have been aired in a BBC Horizon programme screened on Thursday.
The Hobbit's discoverers are adamant it is an entirely separate human species, which evolved a small size in isolation on its remote island home of Flores.
The bones were unearthed during a dig at Liang Bua, a limestone cave deep in the Flores jungle. The discovery caused a sensation when it was announced to the world in 2004.
Analysis of the 18,000-year-old remains showed the Hobbit had reached adulthood, despite her diminutive size.
Long arms, a sloping chin, and other primitive features suggested affinities to ancient human species such as Homo erectus.
And Homo floresiensis, as science properly calls the creature, seems to exhibit other oddities, such as lower premolar teeth with twin roots. In most modern humans, the lower premolars have a single root.
Ancient roots
Australian anthropologists Peter Brown, Mike Morwood, Bert Roberts and others involved in the find, proposed that the Hobbit was a descendent of erectus or some other ancient species that reached Flores just under a million years ago.
Cut off from the rest of the world on this island, the species evolved small stature, much like the pygmy elephants it is thought to have hunted.
Sophisticated stone tools found nearby suggest they were not lacking in intelligence, even though the Hobbit specimen's brain was no larger than a chimpanzee's.
But it was not long before some scientists began to ask serious questions about the discovery team's conclusions.
Indonesian anthropologist Teuku Jacob controversially took possession of the remains and declared them to be those of a modern human with the condition microcephaly.
This disorder is characterised by a small brain, but it can also be associated with dwarfism, as well as abnormalities of the face and jaw. For this reason, some scientists believe the condition could cause a modern human to look primitive in evolutionary terms.
Jacob was soon joined by a handful of researchers in the belief that the discovery team had happened upon nothing more than a member of our own species with a rare disease.
Professor Bob Martin, one of the team that is set to publish new evidence challenging the discovery team's original interpretation, says the Hobbit's brain is "worryingly" small and contradicts a fundamental law of biology.
"What this law says in simple terms is that if you halve body size, brain size is only reduced by 15%," he told the BBC's Horizon programme.
"So if you halve body size you don't halve brain size, the brain is reduced far less than that."
Biological laws
Working under the assumption that the Hobbit was basically a shrunken form of Homo erectus, Professor Martin used this law to find out how big the Hobbit's brain should have been.
Starting with a height of 1.75m and a brain size of 990 cubic centimetres for Homo erectus, Professor Martin used the standard scaling formula to calculate that, given a height of 1m, the Hobbit's brain size should have been about 750 cubic centimetres.
"You can calculate what body height the Hobbit would need to get its brain down to this size, and the answer is... about the size of a meerkat," he said.
However, researchers who carried out the excavation at Liang Bua argue that island isolation can play strange evolutionary tricks.
"If they'd been isolated on this island for 800,000 years by themselves, genetically cut off from the rest of the world, where very few other animals could get to, we'd expect strange things," Mike Morwood of the University of New England, Australia, told Horizon.
But another piece of evidence challenging the discoverers' claims has come from one of the oldest anatomical collections in the world.
More remains
Ann MacLarnon of Roehampton University, UK, has discovered the skull of a microcephalic in the vaults of London's Royal College of Surgeons with a brain that matches that of the Hobbit for size.
"It showed that we really could demonstrate with a specimen that [microcephaly] could explain the Hobbit's small brain," she told Horizon.
But there's a problem with the sceptics' version of the story. The Hobbit team has found more human remains. These include a lower jaw with the same unusual features as the original find (including twin roots to the molars).
"Let's buy into [the sceptics'] argument just for a bit of fun," said Professor Bert Roberts of the University of Wollongong, Australia, a member of the discovery team.
"We've got a complete lower jaw that's identical to the first so there we have a situation where we've now got to have two really badly diseased individuals.
"We've got a diseased population like some sort of leper colony, living in Liang Bua 18,000 years ago. The probabilities have got to be vanishingly small."
The Hobbit team is now looking in other caves on Flores for more evidence of this ancient population.
The sceptics intend to publish their concerns in a scientific journal."
The researchers say their findings strongly support an idea that the 1m- (3ft-) tall female skeleton from Indonesia is a diseased modern human.
Their claims have been aired in a BBC Horizon programme screened on Thursday.
The Hobbit's discoverers are adamant it is an entirely separate human species, which evolved a small size in isolation on its remote island home of Flores.
The bones were unearthed during a dig at Liang Bua, a limestone cave deep in the Flores jungle. The discovery caused a sensation when it was announced to the world in 2004.
Analysis of the 18,000-year-old remains showed the Hobbit had reached adulthood, despite her diminutive size.
Long arms, a sloping chin, and other primitive features suggested affinities to ancient human species such as Homo erectus.
And Homo floresiensis, as science properly calls the creature, seems to exhibit other oddities, such as lower premolar teeth with twin roots. In most modern humans, the lower premolars have a single root.
Ancient roots
Australian anthropologists Peter Brown, Mike Morwood, Bert Roberts and others involved in the find, proposed that the Hobbit was a descendent of erectus or some other ancient species that reached Flores just under a million years ago.
Cut off from the rest of the world on this island, the species evolved small stature, much like the pygmy elephants it is thought to have hunted.
Sophisticated stone tools found nearby suggest they were not lacking in intelligence, even though the Hobbit specimen's brain was no larger than a chimpanzee's.
But it was not long before some scientists began to ask serious questions about the discovery team's conclusions.
Indonesian anthropologist Teuku Jacob controversially took possession of the remains and declared them to be those of a modern human with the condition microcephaly.
This disorder is characterised by a small brain, but it can also be associated with dwarfism, as well as abnormalities of the face and jaw. For this reason, some scientists believe the condition could cause a modern human to look primitive in evolutionary terms.
Jacob was soon joined by a handful of researchers in the belief that the discovery team had happened upon nothing more than a member of our own species with a rare disease.
Professor Bob Martin, one of the team that is set to publish new evidence challenging the discovery team's original interpretation, says the Hobbit's brain is "worryingly" small and contradicts a fundamental law of biology.
"What this law says in simple terms is that if you halve body size, brain size is only reduced by 15%," he told the BBC's Horizon programme.
"So if you halve body size you don't halve brain size, the brain is reduced far less than that."
Biological laws
Working under the assumption that the Hobbit was basically a shrunken form of Homo erectus, Professor Martin used this law to find out how big the Hobbit's brain should have been.
Starting with a height of 1.75m and a brain size of 990 cubic centimetres for Homo erectus, Professor Martin used the standard scaling formula to calculate that, given a height of 1m, the Hobbit's brain size should have been about 750 cubic centimetres.
"You can calculate what body height the Hobbit would need to get its brain down to this size, and the answer is... about the size of a meerkat," he said.
However, researchers who carried out the excavation at Liang Bua argue that island isolation can play strange evolutionary tricks.
"If they'd been isolated on this island for 800,000 years by themselves, genetically cut off from the rest of the world, where very few other animals could get to, we'd expect strange things," Mike Morwood of the University of New England, Australia, told Horizon.
But another piece of evidence challenging the discoverers' claims has come from one of the oldest anatomical collections in the world.
More remains
Ann MacLarnon of Roehampton University, UK, has discovered the skull of a microcephalic in the vaults of London's Royal College of Surgeons with a brain that matches that of the Hobbit for size.
"It showed that we really could demonstrate with a specimen that [microcephaly] could explain the Hobbit's small brain," she told Horizon.
But there's a problem with the sceptics' version of the story. The Hobbit team has found more human remains. These include a lower jaw with the same unusual features as the original find (including twin roots to the molars).
"Let's buy into [the sceptics'] argument just for a bit of fun," said Professor Bert Roberts of the University of Wollongong, Australia, a member of the discovery team.
"We've got a complete lower jaw that's identical to the first so there we have a situation where we've now got to have two really badly diseased individuals.
"We've got a diseased population like some sort of leper colony, living in Liang Bua 18,000 years ago. The probabilities have got to be vanishingly small."
The Hobbit team is now looking in other caves on Flores for more evidence of this ancient population.
The sceptics intend to publish their concerns in a scientific journal."
Monday, May 02, 2005
CBS News | In Search Of The Hobbit | May 1, 2005 23:49:15
The lastest on the 'Hobbit' species of humans, found last year on the island of Flores in Indonesia, from both '60 Minutes' and National Geographic magazine.
Thursday, March 03, 2005
'Hobbit' Brain Supports Species Theory
"Mar 3, 4:31 PM (ET)
By JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA
Scientists working with powerful imaging computers say the spectacular 'Hobbit' fossil recently discovered in Indonesia had distinctive brain features that could justify its classification as a separate - and tiny - human ancestor.
The new report, published Thursday in the online journal Science Express, seems to support the idea of a sophisticated human dwarf species marooned for eons while modern man proliferated.
The new research produced a computer-generated model that compared surface impressions on the inside of the fossil skull with brain casts of modern and ancient humans, as well as chimps and other primates.
Kirk E. Smith / Washington University, St. Louis
The scientists said the model shows that the 3-foot specimen, nicknamed Hobbit, had a brain unlike anything they had seen before in the human lineage. The brain is chimplike in size, about 417 cubic centimeters.
Yet the Hobbit's brain shared wrinkled surface features with the much larger brains of both modern humans and Homo erectus, a tool-making ancestor that lived in southeast Asia more than 1 million years ago. Some of those brain features are consistent with higher cognitive traits.
These brain features coincide with physical evidence of advanced behaviors, such as hunting, firemaking and the use of stone tools, which were found alongside the bones in a cave on the remote equatorial island of Flores. To some, this suggests an organized society of tiny hunters flourished on the island for millennia at a time when modern humans dominated the planet.
'This is a unique creature,' said Florida State University anthropologist Dean Falk, who led the study. 'We found amazing, specialized features across the surface from front to back.'
'These findings are consistent with the kinds of sophisticated behaviors that are hypothesized' for the Hobbit, Falk said, but she stopped short of saying the Hobbit was a tool-maker.
In October, scientists from Indonesia and Australia caused an international sensation with their report of a trove of tiny fossils. As many as eight individuals were represented in layers that were dated from 95,000 to 12,000 years ago. The Hobbit skeleton was the most complete specimen and contained the only skull.
In a project funded by the National Geographic Society, Falk and researchers from Washington University in St. Louis created a three-dimensional computer model of the brain using CT scans of the interior of the Hobbit's skull. Known as virtual endocasts, these images show the wrinkles, vessels and other surface features that made faint impressions on the skull's lining.
They compared that model with the brains of chimps, a female Homo erectus, a contemporary woman, a pygmy and a European specimen of a person with a small-brain syndrome known as microcephaly.
Scientists say its brain shape is most closely associated with that of Homo erectus. However, it also reflects some features of modern humans, including:
_A fissure near the back of the brain known as the lunate sulcus, similarly found in the modern human brain. "I almost fell over seeing this feature in something so small," Falk said.
_A swollen temporal lobe, the mid-brain area between the ears where hearing, memory, image identification and emotions are processed.
_A part of the frontal lobe near the eyes that is thought to be involved in planning and initiative-taking.
Such advanced brain features were especially surprising because the rest of the skeleton has more primitive traits like coarse teeth and an apelike pelvis similar to human ancestors that emerged in Africa some 4 million years ago.
"It's a really strange combination of traits," said Michael J. Morwood of the University of New England in Australia, one of the Hobbit's excavators. "It is a new, diminutive human species."
Whether the Hobbit evolved into a dwarfed form of Homo erectus or hails from another, older human cousin is unknown, he said.
Other human evolution specialists were split over the new report.
Katerina Semendeferi of the University of California-San Diego described it as a "cutting edge study." While the Hobbit brain does not fit neatly into an evolutionary pattern, she said it is too much to expect that all species would have brain sizes that would neatly transition in size from ape to modern human.
But some experts dismissed the brain-scan study as "trivial." Primatologist Robert Martin, provost of the Field Museum in Chicago, said the Hobbit probably was a modern human that suffered from a form of microcephaly.
But Falk said the Hobbit brain was quite different from the brain of a modern human with abnormal brain growth, or a human pygmy."
By JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA
Scientists working with powerful imaging computers say the spectacular 'Hobbit' fossil recently discovered in Indonesia had distinctive brain features that could justify its classification as a separate - and tiny - human ancestor.
The new report, published Thursday in the online journal Science Express, seems to support the idea of a sophisticated human dwarf species marooned for eons while modern man proliferated.
The new research produced a computer-generated model that compared surface impressions on the inside of the fossil skull with brain casts of modern and ancient humans, as well as chimps and other primates.
Kirk E. Smith / Washington University, St. Louis
The scientists said the model shows that the 3-foot specimen, nicknamed Hobbit, had a brain unlike anything they had seen before in the human lineage. The brain is chimplike in size, about 417 cubic centimeters.
Yet the Hobbit's brain shared wrinkled surface features with the much larger brains of both modern humans and Homo erectus, a tool-making ancestor that lived in southeast Asia more than 1 million years ago. Some of those brain features are consistent with higher cognitive traits.
These brain features coincide with physical evidence of advanced behaviors, such as hunting, firemaking and the use of stone tools, which were found alongside the bones in a cave on the remote equatorial island of Flores. To some, this suggests an organized society of tiny hunters flourished on the island for millennia at a time when modern humans dominated the planet.
'This is a unique creature,' said Florida State University anthropologist Dean Falk, who led the study. 'We found amazing, specialized features across the surface from front to back.'
'These findings are consistent with the kinds of sophisticated behaviors that are hypothesized' for the Hobbit, Falk said, but she stopped short of saying the Hobbit was a tool-maker.
In October, scientists from Indonesia and Australia caused an international sensation with their report of a trove of tiny fossils. As many as eight individuals were represented in layers that were dated from 95,000 to 12,000 years ago. The Hobbit skeleton was the most complete specimen and contained the only skull.
In a project funded by the National Geographic Society, Falk and researchers from Washington University in St. Louis created a three-dimensional computer model of the brain using CT scans of the interior of the Hobbit's skull. Known as virtual endocasts, these images show the wrinkles, vessels and other surface features that made faint impressions on the skull's lining.
They compared that model with the brains of chimps, a female Homo erectus, a contemporary woman, a pygmy and a European specimen of a person with a small-brain syndrome known as microcephaly.
Scientists say its brain shape is most closely associated with that of Homo erectus. However, it also reflects some features of modern humans, including:
_A fissure near the back of the brain known as the lunate sulcus, similarly found in the modern human brain. "I almost fell over seeing this feature in something so small," Falk said.
_A swollen temporal lobe, the mid-brain area between the ears where hearing, memory, image identification and emotions are processed.
_A part of the frontal lobe near the eyes that is thought to be involved in planning and initiative-taking.
Such advanced brain features were especially surprising because the rest of the skeleton has more primitive traits like coarse teeth and an apelike pelvis similar to human ancestors that emerged in Africa some 4 million years ago.
"It's a really strange combination of traits," said Michael J. Morwood of the University of New England in Australia, one of the Hobbit's excavators. "It is a new, diminutive human species."
Whether the Hobbit evolved into a dwarfed form of Homo erectus or hails from another, older human cousin is unknown, he said.
Other human evolution specialists were split over the new report.
Katerina Semendeferi of the University of California-San Diego described it as a "cutting edge study." While the Hobbit brain does not fit neatly into an evolutionary pattern, she said it is too much to expect that all species would have brain sizes that would neatly transition in size from ape to modern human.
But some experts dismissed the brain-scan study as "trivial." Primatologist Robert Martin, provost of the Field Museum in Chicago, said the Hobbit probably was a modern human that suffered from a form of microcephaly.
But Falk said the Hobbit brain was quite different from the brain of a modern human with abnormal brain growth, or a human pygmy."
Thursday, December 09, 2004
Hobbits? We've got a cave full
For further information on this, see my earlier posts:
Post 1
Post 2
By Deborah Smith, Science Editor, Fairfax Digital
December 6, 2004
"Chief Epiradus Dhoi Lewa has a strange tale to tell. Sitting in his bamboo and wooden home at the foot of an active volcano on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, he recalls how people from his village were able to capture a tiny woman with long, pendulous breasts three weeks ago.
'They said she was very little and very pretty,' he says, holding his hand at waist height. 'Some people saw her very close up.'
The villagers of Boawae believe the strange woman came down from a cave on the steaming mountain where short, hairy people they call Ebu Gogo lived long ago.
'Maybe some Ebu Gogo are still there,' the 70-year-old chief told the Herald through an interpreter in Boawae last week.
The locals' descriptions of Ebu Gogo as about a metre tall, with pot bellies and long arms match the features of a new species of human 'hobbits' whose bones were recently unearthed by Australian and Indonesian researchers in a different part of Flores in a cave known as Liang Bua.
The unexpected discovery of this tiny Homo floresiensis, who existed until at least 12,000 years ago at Liang Bua, before being apparently wiped out by a volcanic eruption, was hailed as one of the most important archaeological finds in decades when it was announced in October.
The chief adds that the mysterious little woman in Boawae somehow 'escaped' her captors, and the local police said they knew nothing of her existence when he quizzed them.
The prospect that some hobbits still exist in pockets of thick, fertile jungle on Flores is extremely unlikely, says Douglas Hobbs, a member of the team that discovered Homo floresiensis. But it is possible they survived near Boawae until 300 or so years ago, when the chief's ancestors moved into the area, he says.
The detailed stories that the villagers tell about the legendary Ebu Gogo on the volcano have convinced the Australian and Indonesian team to search for bones of hobbits in this cave when they return to the rugged island next year, says Hobbs, an emeritus archaeologist with the University of New England, who discussed excavation plans with the chief last week.
Getting to the cave on the 2100-metre-high Ebulobo volcano, however, will be no simple matter for the team led by Professor Mike Morwood of UNE. The blood of a pig must first be spilt in this society where Catholic faith is melded with animist beliefs and ancestor worship.
The sacrifice and the feast will please the ancestors and bring many villagers together to talk about the cave, says the chief, whose picture of his grandfather, the king, in traditional head-dress, sits framed on the wall next to images of Jesus.
Grandfather of Chief Epiradus Dhoi Lewa of Boawae.
Grandfather of Chief Epiradus Dhoi Lewa of Boawae.
If the right rituals are followed, 'then we will be able to find the road to the hole again', he says.
A Dutch palaeontologist, Dr Gert van den Bergh, a member of the team, was first shown the cave at a distance more than a decade ago, after hearing folk tales of the Ebu Gogo, which means 'grandmother who eats everything'.
People living around the volcano told him a consistent story of the hairy creatures that devoured whatever they could grasp in their long fingers. The villagers tolerated the stealing of food until the Ebu Gogo began to snatch babies and eat them too. They then set upon the little people, forcing them out of the cave with bales of burning grass.
Van den Bergh dismissed the tales as akin to those of leprechauns and elves, until the hobbit bones were found.
While the search for more bones is being planned, a political furore has broken out after a leading Indonesian palaeoanthropologist - with no connection to the find - last week 'borrowed' all the delicate remains from six hobbits found at Liang Bua against the wishes of local and Australian team members. Professor Teuku Jacob, of Gadjah Mada University, who has challenged the view that Homo floresiensis is a new species, had previously taken the skull and bones of the most complete specimen, a 30-year-old female hobbit, from the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta, where they had been kept.
Professor Morwood said it was wrong that the team who found the remains were unable to analyse them first. 'It is not good for the Indonesian researchers nor their institution.'
However, he said Professor Jacob had signed an agreement to return all the bones by January 1."
Post 1
Post 2
By Deborah Smith, Science Editor, Fairfax Digital
December 6, 2004
"Chief Epiradus Dhoi Lewa has a strange tale to tell. Sitting in his bamboo and wooden home at the foot of an active volcano on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, he recalls how people from his village were able to capture a tiny woman with long, pendulous breasts three weeks ago.
'They said she was very little and very pretty,' he says, holding his hand at waist height. 'Some people saw her very close up.'
The villagers of Boawae believe the strange woman came down from a cave on the steaming mountain where short, hairy people they call Ebu Gogo lived long ago.
'Maybe some Ebu Gogo are still there,' the 70-year-old chief told the Herald through an interpreter in Boawae last week.
The locals' descriptions of Ebu Gogo as about a metre tall, with pot bellies and long arms match the features of a new species of human 'hobbits' whose bones were recently unearthed by Australian and Indonesian researchers in a different part of Flores in a cave known as Liang Bua.
The unexpected discovery of this tiny Homo floresiensis, who existed until at least 12,000 years ago at Liang Bua, before being apparently wiped out by a volcanic eruption, was hailed as one of the most important archaeological finds in decades when it was announced in October.
The chief adds that the mysterious little woman in Boawae somehow 'escaped' her captors, and the local police said they knew nothing of her existence when he quizzed them.
The prospect that some hobbits still exist in pockets of thick, fertile jungle on Flores is extremely unlikely, says Douglas Hobbs, a member of the team that discovered Homo floresiensis. But it is possible they survived near Boawae until 300 or so years ago, when the chief's ancestors moved into the area, he says.
The detailed stories that the villagers tell about the legendary Ebu Gogo on the volcano have convinced the Australian and Indonesian team to search for bones of hobbits in this cave when they return to the rugged island next year, says Hobbs, an emeritus archaeologist with the University of New England, who discussed excavation plans with the chief last week.
Getting to the cave on the 2100-metre-high Ebulobo volcano, however, will be no simple matter for the team led by Professor Mike Morwood of UNE. The blood of a pig must first be spilt in this society where Catholic faith is melded with animist beliefs and ancestor worship.
The sacrifice and the feast will please the ancestors and bring many villagers together to talk about the cave, says the chief, whose picture of his grandfather, the king, in traditional head-dress, sits framed on the wall next to images of Jesus.
Grandfather of Chief Epiradus Dhoi Lewa of Boawae.
Grandfather of Chief Epiradus Dhoi Lewa of Boawae.
If the right rituals are followed, 'then we will be able to find the road to the hole again', he says.
A Dutch palaeontologist, Dr Gert van den Bergh, a member of the team, was first shown the cave at a distance more than a decade ago, after hearing folk tales of the Ebu Gogo, which means 'grandmother who eats everything'.
People living around the volcano told him a consistent story of the hairy creatures that devoured whatever they could grasp in their long fingers. The villagers tolerated the stealing of food until the Ebu Gogo began to snatch babies and eat them too. They then set upon the little people, forcing them out of the cave with bales of burning grass.
Van den Bergh dismissed the tales as akin to those of leprechauns and elves, until the hobbit bones were found.
While the search for more bones is being planned, a political furore has broken out after a leading Indonesian palaeoanthropologist - with no connection to the find - last week 'borrowed' all the delicate remains from six hobbits found at Liang Bua against the wishes of local and Australian team members. Professor Teuku Jacob, of Gadjah Mada University, who has challenged the view that Homo floresiensis is a new species, had previously taken the skull and bones of the most complete specimen, a 30-year-old female hobbit, from the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta, where they had been kept.
Professor Morwood said it was wrong that the team who found the remains were unable to analyse them first. 'It is not good for the Indonesian researchers nor their institution.'
However, he said Professor Jacob had signed an agreement to return all the bones by January 1."
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Miniature People Add Extra Pieces to Evolutionary Puzzle
A follow-up article in the NY Times about the Floresians -- the 'new' species of human recently found, and referred to as 'Hobbits' in my Oct. 29th entry below.
The original theory posited that they were a 'downsized' version of Homo Erectus. Now, there's a countervailing theory that they might have evolved from Homo Sapiens!
Here's the article for those who have trouble signing in to the NY Times site:
November 9, 2004
Miniature People Add Extra Pieces to Evolutionary Puzzle
By NICHOLAS WADE
The miniature people found to have lived on the Indonesian island of Flores until 13,000 years ago may well appeal to the imagination. Even their Australian discoverers refer to them with fanciful names. But the little Floresians have created something of a headache for paleoanthropologists.
The Floresians, whose existence was reported late last month, have shaken up existing views of the human past for three reasons: they are so recent, so small and apparently so smart. None of these findings fits easily into current accounts of human evolution.
The textbooks describe an increase in human brain size that parallels an increasing sophistication in stone tools. Our close cousins the chimpanzees have brains one third the size of ours, as do the Australopithecines, the apelike human ancestors who evolved after the split from the joint human-chimp ancestor six or seven million years ago. But the Australopithecines left no stone tools, and chimps, though they use natural stones to smash things, have no comprehension of fashioning a stone for a specific task.
The little Floresians seem to have made sophisticated stone tools yet did so with brains of 380 cubic centimeters, about the same size as the chimp and Australopithecine brains. This is a thumb in the eye for the tidy textbook explanations that link sophisticated technology with increasing human brain size.
The Australian and Indonesian researchers who found the Floresian bones have an explanation that raises almost as many questions as it resolves. They say the Floresians, who stood three and a half feet high, are downsized versions of Homo erectus, the archaic humans who left Africa 1.5 million years before modern humans. But some critics think the small people may have descended from modern humans - Homo sapiens.
Homo erectus had arrived on the remote island of Flores by 840,000 years ago, according to earlier findings by Dr. Mike Morwood, the Australian archaeologist on the team. The species then became subject to the strange evolutionary pressures that affect island species. If there are no predators and little food, large animals are better off being small. Homo erectus was sharply downsized, as was the pygmy elephant the little Floresians hunted.
But the Morwood theory is not universally accepted. Homo erectus is known to have made crude stone tools but is not generally thought to have spoken or been able to build boats.
Maybe Dr. Morwood's alleged stone tools were just natural pieces of rock. "Many researchers (myself included) doubted these claims," writes Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, adding that "nothing could have prepared me" for the surprise of the little Floresians.
It is surprising enough that Homo erectus managed to reach Flores. But not only have the Floresians evolved to be much more advanced than their ancestors ever were, as judged by the stone tools, but they did so at the same time that their brain was being reduced to one-third human size. Getting smaller brained and smarter at the same time is the exact reverse of the textbook progression.
The Floresians' other surprise lies in the time of their flourishing. The skeleton described in Nature lived as recently as 18,000 years ago, but Dr. Morwood said that in the most recent digging season he found six other individuals whose dates range from 95,000 to 13,000 years ago. Modern humans from Africa arrived in the Far East some time after 50,000 years ago and had reached Australia by at least 40,000 years ago.
There has been little evidence until now that Homo erectus long survived its younger cousins' arrival in the region. Modern humans probably exterminated the world's other archaic humans, the Neanderthals in Europe. Yet the little Floresians survived some 30,000 years into modern times, the only archaic human species known to have done so.
All these surprises raise an alternative explanation. What if the Floresians are descended from modern humans, not from Homo erectus?
"I think the issue of whether it derives from H. erectus or H. sapiens is difficult or impossible to answer on the morphology," says Dr. Richard Klein, an archaeologist at Stanford. And if the individual described in the Nature articles indeed made the sophisticated tools found in the same cave, "then it is more likely to be H. sapiens," he says.
The same possibility has been raised by two anthropologists at the University of Cambridge, Dr. Marta Mirazón Lahr and Dr. Robert Foley. Commenting on the sophisticated stone implements found in the cave with the Floresians, they write that "their contrast with tools found anywhere with H. erectus is very striking."
There is the basis here for a fierce dispute. Given what is on the record so far, the argument that the Floresians are descended from Homo sapiens, not erectus, has a certain parsimony. Moderns are known to have been around in the general area, and no Homo erectus is known to have made such sophisticated tools.
Dr. Morwood counters this thesis with data that he has not yet published, and which therefore does not strictly count in scientific arguments. The 95,000-year-old Floresians far antedate the arrival of modern humans in the area. There are modern human remains on Flores, Dr. Morwood says, but the earliest is 11,000 years old, suggesting there was not necessarily any overlap between the two human species.
His view is supported by Dr. G. Philip Rightmire, a paleoanthropologist at Binghamton University in New York and an expert on Homo erectus. "There is no ambiguity about the morphological pattern, and it is erectus-like," Dr. Rightmire says of the Floresian skeleton. "I'm not sure why it should be difficult to accept the reasoning that the little Floresians made progress with stone working and honed their hunting-butchering skills" during their long co-existence on Flores with the pygmy elephants, he said.
Dr. Morwood believes the little Floresians must have had language to cooperate in elephant hunts. Others are not willing to follow him so far, especially given Homo erectus's apparent lack of achievement. Even chimps can hunt cooperatively, Dr. Foley says.
Whether the Floresians' line of descent runs through Homo erectus or through Homo sapiens, a whole new line of human evolution has opened up, even though one that is now all but certainly extinct. The Floresians are not like human pygmies, which have almost normal-size brains but smaller bodies because their growth is retarded during puberty. Nor are they dwarves. The skeleton described last month could be a called a midget, in the sense of a tiny person with the head and body proportions of a full-size person, Dr. Klein said.
"I always tell my students that I've taught for 30 years and I've never given the same lecture twice. Hardly a year goes by when something new isn't found," says Dr. Leslie Aiello, a paleoanthropologist at University College London. Of the Floresian discovery she says, "It's a total knockout."
The original theory posited that they were a 'downsized' version of Homo Erectus. Now, there's a countervailing theory that they might have evolved from Homo Sapiens!
Here's the article for those who have trouble signing in to the NY Times site:
November 9, 2004
Miniature People Add Extra Pieces to Evolutionary Puzzle
By NICHOLAS WADE
The miniature people found to have lived on the Indonesian island of Flores until 13,000 years ago may well appeal to the imagination. Even their Australian discoverers refer to them with fanciful names. But the little Floresians have created something of a headache for paleoanthropologists.
The Floresians, whose existence was reported late last month, have shaken up existing views of the human past for three reasons: they are so recent, so small and apparently so smart. None of these findings fits easily into current accounts of human evolution.
The textbooks describe an increase in human brain size that parallels an increasing sophistication in stone tools. Our close cousins the chimpanzees have brains one third the size of ours, as do the Australopithecines, the apelike human ancestors who evolved after the split from the joint human-chimp ancestor six or seven million years ago. But the Australopithecines left no stone tools, and chimps, though they use natural stones to smash things, have no comprehension of fashioning a stone for a specific task.
The little Floresians seem to have made sophisticated stone tools yet did so with brains of 380 cubic centimeters, about the same size as the chimp and Australopithecine brains. This is a thumb in the eye for the tidy textbook explanations that link sophisticated technology with increasing human brain size.
The Australian and Indonesian researchers who found the Floresian bones have an explanation that raises almost as many questions as it resolves. They say the Floresians, who stood three and a half feet high, are downsized versions of Homo erectus, the archaic humans who left Africa 1.5 million years before modern humans. But some critics think the small people may have descended from modern humans - Homo sapiens.
Homo erectus had arrived on the remote island of Flores by 840,000 years ago, according to earlier findings by Dr. Mike Morwood, the Australian archaeologist on the team. The species then became subject to the strange evolutionary pressures that affect island species. If there are no predators and little food, large animals are better off being small. Homo erectus was sharply downsized, as was the pygmy elephant the little Floresians hunted.
But the Morwood theory is not universally accepted. Homo erectus is known to have made crude stone tools but is not generally thought to have spoken or been able to build boats.
Maybe Dr. Morwood's alleged stone tools were just natural pieces of rock. "Many researchers (myself included) doubted these claims," writes Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, adding that "nothing could have prepared me" for the surprise of the little Floresians.
It is surprising enough that Homo erectus managed to reach Flores. But not only have the Floresians evolved to be much more advanced than their ancestors ever were, as judged by the stone tools, but they did so at the same time that their brain was being reduced to one-third human size. Getting smaller brained and smarter at the same time is the exact reverse of the textbook progression.
The Floresians' other surprise lies in the time of their flourishing. The skeleton described in Nature lived as recently as 18,000 years ago, but Dr. Morwood said that in the most recent digging season he found six other individuals whose dates range from 95,000 to 13,000 years ago. Modern humans from Africa arrived in the Far East some time after 50,000 years ago and had reached Australia by at least 40,000 years ago.
There has been little evidence until now that Homo erectus long survived its younger cousins' arrival in the region. Modern humans probably exterminated the world's other archaic humans, the Neanderthals in Europe. Yet the little Floresians survived some 30,000 years into modern times, the only archaic human species known to have done so.
All these surprises raise an alternative explanation. What if the Floresians are descended from modern humans, not from Homo erectus?
"I think the issue of whether it derives from H. erectus or H. sapiens is difficult or impossible to answer on the morphology," says Dr. Richard Klein, an archaeologist at Stanford. And if the individual described in the Nature articles indeed made the sophisticated tools found in the same cave, "then it is more likely to be H. sapiens," he says.
The same possibility has been raised by two anthropologists at the University of Cambridge, Dr. Marta Mirazón Lahr and Dr. Robert Foley. Commenting on the sophisticated stone implements found in the cave with the Floresians, they write that "their contrast with tools found anywhere with H. erectus is very striking."
There is the basis here for a fierce dispute. Given what is on the record so far, the argument that the Floresians are descended from Homo sapiens, not erectus, has a certain parsimony. Moderns are known to have been around in the general area, and no Homo erectus is known to have made such sophisticated tools.
Dr. Morwood counters this thesis with data that he has not yet published, and which therefore does not strictly count in scientific arguments. The 95,000-year-old Floresians far antedate the arrival of modern humans in the area. There are modern human remains on Flores, Dr. Morwood says, but the earliest is 11,000 years old, suggesting there was not necessarily any overlap between the two human species.
His view is supported by Dr. G. Philip Rightmire, a paleoanthropologist at Binghamton University in New York and an expert on Homo erectus. "There is no ambiguity about the morphological pattern, and it is erectus-like," Dr. Rightmire says of the Floresian skeleton. "I'm not sure why it should be difficult to accept the reasoning that the little Floresians made progress with stone working and honed their hunting-butchering skills" during their long co-existence on Flores with the pygmy elephants, he said.
Dr. Morwood believes the little Floresians must have had language to cooperate in elephant hunts. Others are not willing to follow him so far, especially given Homo erectus's apparent lack of achievement. Even chimps can hunt cooperatively, Dr. Foley says.
Whether the Floresians' line of descent runs through Homo erectus or through Homo sapiens, a whole new line of human evolution has opened up, even though one that is now all but certainly extinct. The Floresians are not like human pygmies, which have almost normal-size brains but smaller bodies because their growth is retarded during puberty. Nor are they dwarves. The skeleton described last month could be a called a midget, in the sense of a tiny person with the head and body proportions of a full-size person, Dr. Klein said.
"I always tell my students that I've taught for 30 years and I've never given the same lecture twice. Hardly a year goes by when something new isn't found," says Dr. Leslie Aiello, a paleoanthropologist at University College London. Of the Floresian discovery she says, "It's a total knockout."
Friday, October 29, 2004
"Hobbit" Discovered: Tiny Human Ancestor Found in Asia
A fascinating discovery of fossils of a minature species of Homo (Homo floresiensis) on the Indonesian island of Flores. Amazingly, they apparently died out only 13,000 to 18,000 years ago! Although an isolated island, the fact that they lived contemporaneously with Homo Sapiens leaves one breathless with conjecture (or at least leaves me that way, as my boyhood dream was to be a physical anthropologist).
I'm surprised that the article's title made it through the National Geopgraphic editors, as the species is clearly not our 'ancestor', but rather a cousin (perhaps descended from Homo Erectus).
I'm surprised that the article's title made it through the National Geopgraphic editors, as the species is clearly not our 'ancestor', but rather a cousin (perhaps descended from Homo Erectus).
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