Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Desperate Anthropologists Try Again To Disprove "The Hobbit" as a Species

Don't these guys know that pygmy brains aren't as small as Hobbit brains, and that Hobbits had Homo Erectus wrists? Seems not...



New bones suggest 'hobbits' were modern pygmies

Now researchers have discovered that a nearby island was overrun by diminutive
humans as recently as 1400 years ago – but despite their size these people
clearly belonged to our species.


Lee Berger at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and
his team found the fragmentary remains of at least 26 individuals in two caves on
the Palauan archipelago in Micronesia, east of the Philippines.


“Some of the bones we found were very close in size to those from Flores,” says
Berger. “For example, one proximal tibia [upper shin bone] is only 1mm larger than
LB1 [the best preserved “hobbit” skeleton],” he says.


But when Berger’s team examined the jaw, they found a number of characteristics
unique to modern humans – enough to suggest that the tiny Palauans belonged to
our species.


The discovery implies that the small size of the Flores individual is not, in
itself, so unusual, says Berger.


“When Flores was first announced everyone was blown away by the supposed very
small body size,” he says. “What we and other researchers are now finding is
that humans can get that small.”


But others are not convinced by Berger’s arguments. “No one I know of thinks that
small stature alone distinguishes H. floresiensis as a species,” says Dean Falk
of Florida State University.


"LB1 has numerous primitive features spanning from head to feet that set it apart
from H. sapiens – the authors completely ignore the relevant literature," she
says.
...
“The authors are apparently unaware of published data on living Filipino 'pygmies'
that are just as small as these scrambled individuals from Palau,” says William
Jungers of Stony Brook University Medical Center, New York. “Modern human pygmies
of the size reported are old news in this part of the world.”


But for Robert Eckhardt of Pennsylvania State University, it is local knowledge
about the islands that demonstrates the Flores bones are from modern humans. He
says that the islands of Indonesia and Micronesia were unlikely to be isolated
long enough to birth a new species.


Palau is much harder to reach than Flores, but Eckhardt points out that even here,
any isolation was short-lived – the small bones were found beneath the remains of
normal-sized humans from four centuries later. “The paper confirms that small body
size on a tiny island provides no proof of isolation and endemic speciation,” he
says.
...
New Scientist
Share/Bookmark

No comments: