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Scientists Hope To Settle "Hobbit" Debate
Several readers wrote in with news of the debate around the identity of an ancient woman whose diminutive skeleton was found on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004. Fox News reports that Australian scientists have discovered a subterranean chamber that may contain DNA proof that will settle the question of whether "the Hobbit," as the specimen is called, actually is a representative of a new branch of the human family, or not. The find's discoverers named the putative new race Homo floresiensis. Others in the anthropological field question this identification, arguing that the meter-tall Hobbit was a modern human who had something wrong with her. In a paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with one of the original discovery team as co-author, researchers say they have compared the Hobbit's skull to those of modern humans with various ailments such as microcephaly, and that the Hobbit is different.
Another one of Tolkien's races has been discovered: Trolls, it seems, are native to the slashdot community.
Now they will have to find what came between Homo Sapian and Homo Floresiensis. /ducks for cover.
Others in the anthropological field question this identification, arguing that the meter-tall Hobbit was a modern human who had something wrong with her.
Maybe she just hobbitually ate a poor diet.
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Others in the anthropological field question this identification, arguing that the meter-tall Hobbit was a modern human who had something wrong with her.
Right -- they're the ones that don't get the publicity or funding. Come on, how boring is that -- that the meter-tall body was just an abnormal human? Wouldn't it be so much *cooler* if there were a whole race of these!
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
For whatever reason, the summary links to page two of the article. Page one is here
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
If this represents a new species of human, and given how recently this species is shown to have lived, then whole textbooks on the subject will likely need rewriting. I find it quite exciting, and I'm not even an anthropologist.
As an aside, I'm also quite interested to see what the bible-thumpers eventually come to make of all of this.
1. Was she found with lots of food, ale and smokes around her? 2. Was she wearing a ring? 3. Was she found near some place no one can pronounce, but that was surrounded by avalanching mountains and moving forests? 4. Was she found looking longingly into another female hobbit's eyes for uncomfortably long periods of time?
Paul Verhoeven
Kevin Smith
George Lucas
Allan Parker
Steven Spielberg
Ridley Scott
Beorn(who?)
or CowboyNeal?
What?
When I first read this I thought it was about the next Hobbit film, and how Jackson was acquitted of all charges.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
or does anyone else find it striking that Foxnews.com has an "Evolution and Paleontology Center" (http://www.foxnews.com/science/evolution/). Certainly, W doesn't approve of this.
it's labeled as science if you can't tell from the title on the frontpage. i think the icons can be independently selected. thats how articles about MS/Linux/etc. can have their respective icons. and besides... HOBBITS!!!!
Well, unfortunately we have enough scientific evidence; some of us still ARE monkeys.
There is line in the bible that says something like "There were midgets in the earth in those days" I am sure of it.
Wouldn't it be interesting if we hadn't likely killed off all these competitors in prehistory and some were left around. What kind of rights would neanderthals get? Surely they wouldn't be treated like animals. And if they were still around, I think religion would be a very different thing.
My question is why the hell is their an Einstein icon. He was a physicist for *@!$'s sake.
Can't we get an icon of Dawkins? Or are we to assume that physics and biology are one in the same?
National Geographic had a whole hour long special on this subject that I watched about 4 or 5 months ago. As the article below states, there was MORE than one set of bones found, while the girl mentioned in today's articles was the only COMPLETE skeleton, there was several other partial bone sets recovered that were equally comparable in size. Also in the documentary they rebuilt the skull and sent it to several specialists, who confirmed that it was in fact not a case of microcephallis. So todays articles seem like old news, AND they're confusing everyone by not mentioning the other bone sets recovered on site. What I haven't seen anyone address is whether they could have been premordial dwarfs... but considering how few of those there are in the world, the likelyhood of several being found in the save small island seems rare, but not unpossible. ~Mentions multiple skeletons... http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/10 27_041027_homo_floresiensis.html
and the video description
http://www3.nationalgeographic.com/channel/blog/20 05/03/explorer_hobbit.html
Did it have a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny brass knob in the exact middle?
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
It's Einstein with a ring for a halo. It's very punny.
The condition of having a "microphallus" would be "microphallusy," no?
With different spelling, it would also indicate the sort of "little deception" that sufferers of this disorder might use when discussing matters of size.
--jrd
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Physics and biology are the same. Well, there's some chemistry stuck in between the two, but you can't have chemistry without physics!
Although technically you can't explain physics without math...
Quick, someone snap a photo of Pythagoras and slap it up there!
Or maybe we should just stick with the "Scientist Personified" iconic representation that's being used now.
Or Richard Feynman.
Corollary to Hanlon's razor: Any significantly advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
Didn't God create humans from monkeys?
According to this news article from the BBC, it does appear to be a new species. This was posted yesterday and the study compares modern microencephalics skulls with the skulls found on Flores.
dude . . . UNDERLORDS!
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
The real cause of the extinction of the hobbit is New Line Cinema.
tell me about it.
Can't they just go by the results of the Slashdot poll on who should direct the Hobbit? It's not like we need scientists to decide on that?
Oh wait, what was the article about again? Is there anyone, who's new here who could tell us?Ok, they knew as soon as they saw this subterranean chamber that it was a hobbit hole, because it wasn't a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat.
QED.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
Physics and biology are the same. Well, there's some chemistry stuck in between the two, but you can't have chemistry without physics!
Hardly. It is possible to understand things at a macroscopic level without reducing them to interactiosn of smaller parts. Ultimate understanding of course, does boil down to reductionism, but to say that you cannot understand something at all without reductionism is a gross overstatement.
Hobbit 1 "Oh.. um.. err... are you.. deformed?" Hobbit 2 "Hey, it's small but it's fierce!"
Perversely, the list of things that'll stunt your growth is always growing.
Either way, I don't think we've heard the Ent of this discussion.
What would worry me would be the possibility of other denizens of Tolkiens world, especially "immortal" creatures like dragons and balrogs. All it would take is one mining expedition gone wrong and....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
>"The idea is that basically, instead of species evolving slowly over time into new species, speciation can occur rapidly (on a geological time scale) and then the new species will remain relatively stable until the next quick burst of change."
That is a good summary. Your other comments are rather off the mark, particularly the idea that there is no advantage to a "half-fin half-leg" and so on. Given that you don't have a background in biology, that's understandable. A good explaination of the theory is here at the talk.origins newsgroup site. A less techinical one is here at the Wikipedia site.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
"[...] settle the question of whether the "the Hobbit," as the specimen is called, actually is a representative of a new branch of the human family, or not."
Don't you mean old branch?
Tom Cruise's evil twin? Or is it the other way around?
Well, think about it. On one hand you have 6 ft tall humans, then you have 3 ft halflings. Now picture something half-way in between as height goes, and about as broad as a human. Right. It's a dwarf. Don't tell me that a species could have just jumped between extremes without hitting the points in the middle. That's not how evolution works. There has to be some grand hall under a mountain with skeletons that size and a door inscribed with "speak friend and enter"
Now finding the elves, that's gonna be more of a problem. If those buggers only differred by having pointy ears and fair skin/hair, there's no way in heck we'll be able to tell that from a dug up skeleton.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Well, I kind of wonder, though. Was it really a hobbit, or was it more like a halfling? What if it was a tall gnome, for that matter? Especially with all those tools around, it sure sounds like a (stone age) gnome engineer to me.
Or, *shudder*, what if it was an ewok?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Those that do know [Dawkins] [is] a total asshole
Your "source" being an article on a South Park episode? WTF?
We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from the machinations of the wicked.
"Fox News reports that Australian scientists have discovered a subterranean chamber"
Let me guess, they sent Geraldo to go open it.
Just to play the devil's advocate, how about taking your own advice? Get some clue to what the actual objections are, before you paint it all as closemindedness and religion?
The question is _not_ whether dwarfism could possibly exist. So let's move on from that ridiculous straw-man. Yes, we know that evolution can produce larger or smaller versions. You only need to look at a jaguar and at your house cat to know the same species can evolve in both directions.
The question is whether such a small-brained species, if one existed, would still be smart enough to use make tools or fire. _That's_ what goes contrary to all the other data we have.
No, religion has nothing to do with that objection. Especially if you _aren't_ religious, you have no reason to assume some "mind" or "soul" that's entirely independent from brain size or structure. The "mind" is entirely a product of having enough brain power to learn and process that data in real time. Scale that brain down, and the "mind" scales down to. Scale it down enough and it just stops having all that extra capacity needed to function as a human.
How's that for a very secular argument?
Can you just rewire a fraction of the neurons and get the same processing power? Then why didn't it happen someplace else too?
Because, believe it or not, that would be a _huge_ evolutionary advantage, if it were possible. The brain is a _major_ consumer of proteins and energy in your body, and each increase in brain size needed a source of more protein and energy. You can even follow the increases that were possible by inventing stuff like fire (and thus cooking), which in turn made people able to do smarter stuff, which in turn gave them enough food for the next brain size increase.
Plus having a huge brain creates a host of other disadvantages. It's really there just because evolution hasn't found any way around it. Being smarter was advantage enough to outweigh the disadvantage of needing a big brain.
If it were possible to just rewire the same neurons instead of growing a bigger brain, that race would have had an _incredible_ advantage. Between mutation A who just grew a 1% bigger brain, and mutation B who got 1% smarter by just rewiring the same neurons, mutation B has some major advantages. Between variant X who just stayed as it was, and variant Y who kept the same IQ on a 1% smaller brain, the natural selection would favour Y all the way. You wouldn't need an island for it. Put them in the same paleolythic cave, and variant B will tend to outlive variant A, and ditto for variant Y vs variant X.
And note that you don't need it happening only once, because such huge jumps tend not to happen. Evolution doesn't work that way. So that kind of mutation would have to happen again and again and again, over a helluva lot of time, producing progressively smaller brains that still are smart enough to function as a (primitive) human.
So why didn't it happen anywhere else, then? What's so special about that island? A mutation that happened millions of times there, why didn't it happen anywhere else? Because, again, it would have been a major survival advantage everywhere else too. We'd know if it happened lots. We'd all be like that.
So again, the question isn't whether a small human could have evolved, but whether it would still be a human and still able to make and use tools. _That_ is what doesn't add up there. We'd all have no problem accepting that Homo Erectus devolved into, basically, a monkey of that size. Maybe Homo Erectus shaped, but still monkey-brained. But when asked to believe that it somehow also kept the Homo Erectus mental abilities in a fraction of the brain size, that becomes much harder to swallow.
Micro-encephaly and that being a cemetery for retarded children is actually not dogma, it's really the easier to swallow hypothesis there. We already know that micro-encephaly exists. The hypothesis that a species could just rewire its brains to do the same in a fraction of the size, however, is something that's a lot less believable.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
We also know now that the one ring also exists, too. Unfortunately, it was never destroyed, as the story goes,... the current ringbearer occupies the Oval Office.
Next time I'll be sure and close caption my post for the sarcasm impared.
Corollary to Hanlon's razor: Any significantly advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
Dawkins? Since when did perpetual whining make one a biologist? Try someone who's actually made a real scientific contribution, like Alexander Flemming/Louis Pasteur/any real scientist. When was the last time Dawkins did anything besides try to extend the right to vote to (Insert Bush joke here) chimpanzees?
One can only hope that Dawkins is only a side note posted on the east wing of some futuristic asshole museum, right beside a picture of Jack Thompson. Am I the only one who notices that the two are practically the same in the 'Lets crusade against something good to get attention and money!' aspect?
Everyone knows midgits are made by the Flying Spaghetti Monster! This particular midgit may be the first one, the progenitor of all midgitkind!
I demand that this theory receive equal time in a Kansas biology class.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.