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New Hominid Species Unearthed in Indonesia
Radical Rad writes "ABC News is reporting that anthropologists have found the skeletal remains of seven hobbit sized hominids. The population may have been wiped out by a volcanic activity 12000 years ago or according to local legend may have lived up until the 1500's living on in caves and eating food the villagers would leave out for them. Also found were bones of giant lizards and miniature elephants. CBS
also has the story." National Geographic and the BBC have good stories.
I find it interesting that they could have possibly intereacted with modern humans and their "species" could have overlapped with ours, but I agree with the scientist arguing over naming a new species. Let's rule out any major speculation before we go naming new evolutionary tree branches.
-- johntracy.com, because everybody else is wrong.
However, if they were smart enough to find a way to this island, couldn't they just do another island-hoping to a bigger island like Sumantra, or even Australia?
Well, maybe they did...but that doesn't debunk the theory. Europeans found their way to the Americas, but there are still Europeans in Europe.
Maybe these tiny people have some kind of sickness (or just look tiny), and were therefore exiled from the main(is)land?
And this sickness also made their arms proportionately longer, created more prominent bone ridges above their eyes, gave them a sharply sloping forehead, and no chin? And it affected at least seven known individuals in the same way over a span of 30,000 of years, with no known fossil evidence of any "normal" hominids co-existing on the same island in that time?
Riiiight...
Canines were deliberately bred like that. No dog is the direct product of nature evolution but rather is the direct product of human breeding programs.
The cake is a pie
That's why I believe the universe was created in the 70's.
In africa, you have some of the tallest tribes in the world in close proximity to some of the shortest. The difference in their environments is not the heat -- the heat is constant -- but rather the humidity. In areas where the humidity is high, being larger does you no good. Sweat won't evaporate so the extra surface area isn't useful.
In areas where the humidity is lower, being taller is a great way to help get rid of excess heat.
However that may not be what's going on on this island at all.
The other lifeforms are textbook examples of foster's rule in action. Foster's rule is the maxim that states that creatures isolated on a small island will experiece dramatic changes in size (or die, adapt or die).
So, for instance, the pygmy elephants got smaller than the elephants they started as because there simply wouldn't have been enough vegatation on the island to support them otherwise. There was EXTREME selective pressure to get smaller, so it happened fast.
Meanwhile, because nothing was around to eat these pygmy elephants, those komodo dragons that were born larger than the others were significantly more fit becuase they might be able to exploit the elephants as a food source (which they did -- they sustained themselves on the elephants until they went extinct, at which time humans brought deer to the islands thus providing them with a new food source).
One creature had selective pressure to get bigger, another to get smaller. In *general*, Foster's rule is that things will get smaller. But occasionally (such as in the example above), the rule can work in reverse.
No dog is the direct product of nature evolution but rather is the direct product of human breeding programs.
Er, sorry, no. Dogs are the product of natural evolution, which includes human breeding programs. In other words, dogs as a species changed in various ways affected by their living in proximity to, and interacting with, humans. This is no less "natural" than, say, predators and prey developing different ways to catch/evade each other, or symbiotic species developing a dependence on each other. The idea that "nature" somehow stops once you get to humans, and everything we do is its own separate domain, is misleading.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.