Hobbit Is A New Species

Migraineman writes "Over the last year or so, archaeologists in Indonesia unearthed skulls and bones from eight proto-humanoids. Critics have claimed the meter-tall specimens were either pygmies or "aberrant individuals with a pathological condition" like microcephaly. A recent article in Science[subscription] rebuffs the critics, and claims that the specimens are actually a new species - Homo floresiensis. There's a summary article over at Nature."

Comments

The whole idea of a missing link

[Cadallin]

The whole idea of a missing link is a sham. It's a straw man put up by creationists. Because of the way evolution works you won't ever find a completely smooth transition from one form to another, you observe a puntuated equilibrium in the fossil record.

For those interested

[Masq666]

for those interested there's also an article about homo florensis at Bits of News

thank you!

[Goldsmith]

Thank you for actually referencing primary sources, and not some university or coporate PR generated press release!

Re:This is not a new species

[ornil]

While apparently the movie is bad, I thought the book this is based on is very interesting. The author's name is Vercors (French) and the book (in English translation) is called You Shall Know Them. I read it in Russian, in a collection of best French SciFi.

Anthropologists discover "a missing link" (still living, unlike our hobbits), and that forces them to try to look into the question of whether they are human or not (do they have human rights?). It forces them to try defining what makes a human being. This involves a court case (which is what most of the book is about). Overall, it has little to do with SciFi, and a lot
with philosophy. Which is probably why the movie sucked.

Re:stop calling them hobbits!

[jd]

Yes, but the term comes from the Pythagorean belief that ALL numbers could be defined as a ratio of two integers.

Rational and Irrational are not some play on words of "ratio", they are literally how the ancient Greek mathematicians saw such numbers, with respect to their mathematical religion. (The Cult of Pythagoras actually had the square root of two banned, because it was provably not a ratio.)