Slashdot Mirror
Ancient Bones of Small Humans Discovered In Palau
seattle-pk writes to let us know about the discovery in the Pacific island nation of Palau of thousands of human bones, some quite diminutive. The find is likely to rekindle the debate about how to classify the remains found on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. "Some of the bones are ancient and indicate inhabitants of particularly small size, scientists announced today. The remains are between 900 and 2,900 years old and align with Homo sapiens, according to a paper on the discovery. However, the older bones are tiny and exhibit several traits considered primitive, or archaic, for the human lineage."
From the third age...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
... midgets (or little people if you prefer) existed many years ago?
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
Look up the Bog people. There is an exhibit on them at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. They were all tiny people. Plus the Bog actually preserved their bodies as well.
Found in a thousand-year-old text in a museum in New New York:
Puny Humans, One day my race will destroy you all!
- Morbo, 1000 A. D., modern-day Palau
Of course, by modern-day, it means ancient.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Where's the tricksyhobbitses tag when you need it?
Glory be, Leprechans found in the South Pacific just before Saint Patrick's Day! I wonder if they found any whiskey bottles or Guiness there as well? And pots of gold?
I'd link me latest wee journal (Sane Patty's Day) if the bloomin' mods wouldn't mod me offtopic. Oi'll drink to yer health tonight! Cheers!
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Silly everyone.
These are just the pre-alpha build humans that god made while he was in the preliminary human creation development cycle. Height wasn't increased until Homo-Sapiens RC-1.
I mean really, if you're going to go poring over dev code, you've got to expect some pretty weird stuff.
Yes, the work costs money and research grants tend to be minimal, but if the researchers in either camp really wanted answers, they'd find the money. Complicating things further, research funding tends to be proportional on papers published and/or cited. Arguing over the facts gets multiple papers published. Getting hard data gets one paper published. Ergo, it not only costs money now to get hard data, there are costs in the form of reduced funding later. The "best" outcome, from the perspective of the various departments and groups, is therefore to never resolve anything but to continually discover just enough to be able to keep publishing. Vroomfondle would be proud.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Follow the yellowbrick road...
Some settling may occur during posting.
And the money shot (missing for the summary):
Wow, I guess Sam found out.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Further proof that Homo sapiens won! w00t!
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Someone modded you troll while I was writing this response. For what it's worth I don't think your comment was at all troll-like.
I thought the article leaned a little too far towards the "hobbit" conclusions and didn't even ask if they were children or even how old they might have been. It's a fascinating discovery and maybe they are some kind of branch species, but it seems more likely, like your comment and TFA suggested, that their diet and inbreeding may have led to them being "midgets."
With this discovery instead of filling the gap in our evolutionary record we instead now have two gaps in the place of one! If these discoveries continue then it is obvious that the number of gaps is going to drastically increase.
Because the next thing you know they'll strip naked and trick you into kissing them on the lips. Soon after you'll be escorted away by two police officers who will charge you with sexual assault on a minor while everyone else in the high school points and laughs at you.
Trust me.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
there's no reason then to be surprised that this effect works on human beings as well. as it is, modern malay and austronesian peoples living on southeast asian islands are generally a little smaller than people from the mainland (generally... the dayak people of borneo are quite tall). and their migrational wave is very recent in human history. so this size change tirck is very easy and quick to pull off
many people who find news of these hobbit sized archeological fossils in flores and now in palau (just a quick jump from mindanao in the philippines) will be even more suprised to find out that tiny ancient remnant people are very much alive in the philippines: the aeta
in the big islands of the philippines and other big southeast asian islands there are remnants of melanesian peoples like you see on papua new guinea, deep in the mountains, in tiny, nearly extinct groups that fiercely resist contact and integration into modern society. these people were there long before the austronesian people overwhelmed the coast and eventually everywhere else except the isolated mountains where they cling to existence
the aeta on luzon. these people are quite tiny
and yes, you can find still living remnants and historical recollections of these ancient tiny dwarf peoples even on japan, taiwan, thailand, and mainland china
so if one were to extrapolate to even smaller islands, to even further back in time, it is not surprising at all to imagine entire islands of hobbit sized people on islands all over southeast asia. really not surprising at all. all since wiped out though, a long time ago. if one studies the history of the haast eagle or the moa on new zealand (island giants) after the maori arrived, one gains an appreciation for how fragile island ecosystems are that most every zoologist possesses. and, by extension, how fragile island peoples are, culturally and genetically (disease and such) when contact with the wider world is established
however, this whole notion of separate species is rather doubtful. they probably were entirely homo sapiens. if one understands that smallness in size is not a very hard trick to pull off genetically for any creature to evolve quite quickly and comprise very little genetic change, then one can see tiny island people in man's recent past is not very strange at all
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
To find out that such interesting creatures walked the earth in historical times and died out before there was a chance to study them. They were only a whisper away from us.
...although I also hear that they found an ancient road apparently made from unusual yellow bricks as well as a strangely built ruins of a wooden tomb which only seems to contain the upper half of a female skeleton.
"The remains are between 900 and 2,900 years old and align with Homo sapiens..."
That has to be a typo. Did they miss the word "thousand" before the word "years" perhaps?
In other news, "Lucky Charms originated in Palau about 1,000BC."
The early Palauans' limited diet, combined with a tropical climate, absence of predators, a small founding population, and genetic isolation, may have produced "these very odd features and very small body size," Berger said.
TFA also notes that there were no big animals to exploit on the island, and apparently no fishing until much later. So it really seems like just a regular human population that was small and isolated and changed in odd ways, rather than a distinct species or anything like that.
ewoks
...now!
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
and i'm sick of this sort of comment posted. not everything has to be a rip on religion. seeing how this is a science blog and i'm sure the overwhelming majority share similar views as you and I - can slashdot stick to discussing the merits of the science-type-stuff unless the article actually has something to do with religion? If it's about the creationism museum in Kansas, that's a different story of course. Or if you have a comment thats truly funny, then sure. otherwise I wish there was a (-1, Boring Cliche) tag. offtopic would work well I suppose.
... 10 Inch Pianist!
...is that the reasons for the different species claim are that the brain cavity shows differences from those found in diminutive humans and that the tools found are more advanced than might be expected from human brains scaled down to the same degree. Neither of these are convincing or definitive, but they are suggestive that this isn't simply the Island Rule or one of the genetic conditions identified as causing dwarfism. One of the problems with the research limiting itself to structure and form is that large genetic changes can produce very little change in form, but also very small genetic changes can produce gigantic changes in form. When studying fossils, you're kinda limited, but these are a paltry few hundred years old. Human bones and Neanderthal teeth in conditions just as hostile to complex organic molecules have yielded usable mtDNA and nucleic DNA when nearly a hundred times that age.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The school would be required to reward the student with a good grade, or be considered in violation of the law. Even simple, factual information such as the age of the earth (4.65 billion years) would be subject to the student's belief, and if the student answered 6,000 years based on his or her religious belief, the school would have to credit it as correct. Science education becomes absurd under such a situation.
If a student chose to take his opportunity to speak to a group of students in a school-sanctioned assembly to tell them they must accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior or go to hell, then that student would have a right to do so, according to this bill. Especially, but not only if the student held a position of honor and authority (class officer, team captain), and was speaking in his or her official capacity, the school has clearly established religion in violation of both the U.S. and Oklahoma constitutions. ...
It looks like the creationists are really getting their way.
you can talk about modern malays showing somewhat smaller size due to the island rule, and the earlier remant negrito populations throughout southeast asia representing an earlier wave of migration, showing an even greater island rule effect
then there is no reason to postulate an even earlier wave, or waves, of homo sapiens or earlier human relatives, showing an extreme island rule effect in terms of their body size, now all since extinct. perhaps one can say that southeast asian islands represent the last toehold of pre-homo sapien relatives. perhaps about the same time we were slaughtering the last mammoth in siberia, an early melanesian homo sapien was arriving on an island and slaughtering the last of the our non homo sapien relatives somewhere in a southeast asia. or maybe he just sneezed on him and killed off our last non homo sapien relative thataways
but, as you admit, changing overall body size is such an easy and quick genetic trick, it's really hard to tell who was what and when. i really do hope they find some remnant dna
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Maybe they were Blog people.
Writings in the sand are almost as durable as websites that people don't fund.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
They are JAWAS!
Utinni!Beware!
It worked! The Debigulator worked!
Dewey, you fool! Your decimal system has played right into my hands!
I was just visiting some friends who are living in Palau and we went right by this cave on a snorkeling trip. One of the friends is a PA (physician's assistant) and recently served as the medical support for a crew shooting an episode of the Discovery show "Bone Detective." One of their sites was this cave.
The archaeology and anthropology of Palau is poorly researched and there is little known about the ancient cultures that lived there. My wife is an anthropologist who works at the Smithsonian and had trouble finding much material on Palau to read before travelled there.
The archaeology may also be endangered. On a sea kayaking trip in Nikko Bay, off the island of Babeldaob, we visited another cave that was known to have bones in it. But the bones were gone, and there was evidence of a hasty digging project in the floor of the cave. It was definitely not a research dig--no gridlines, no brushes or sifts, just a big hole that had clearly been dug with a shovel. We speculated that the recent attention had inspired some people to collect antiquities to sell. Hopefully that does not accelerate.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
'sig' deleted due to the stupidity of it's 'nature'
... on the General Organization of Development (GOD) and the human creation development cycle here.
I think they left out the pre-alpha stage description to avoid criticizing GOD's ability to create a stable release.
Dude, Hornswaggle's a leprechaun not a human! Your post is totally off topic to the article which is about pygmy humans! Not leprechauns (everyone knows they exist) ;P
I don't believe they exist.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Now we know where the Roaming Gnomes origins are.
"Teach a man to build a fire, and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life."
Reminds me of the dwarf mammoth bones (dated to 1700BC) found on Wrangel Island in the Arctic. The also mentions fossils found on Sardinia and the Channel Islands of the coast of California.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
The point is not bone size but skull shape. The Flores skull is exactly the same as a Homo Erectus with the exception of brain size. The brain size doesn't match proportions of either humans or Erectus. It's possible that Flores broke off from the family tree before Erectus. The disease theories don't take into account all the skull differences. I've seen lots of Erectus skulls and that was my gut reaction the first time I saw it. It looks like an Erectus child except it's an adult skull. No one has explained the differences in the teeth and that can't be caused by brain disease let alone brow and face differences. Pygmies look like regular humans. Flores didn't.
Nonono, these people were not hobbits, or elves, or leprechauns. They were on an island (and not Ireland), which makes them...
Lilliputians!
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Having a BMI of at least 36, the 3-feet guy (or gal, who cares) should go diet
The article is nice and National Geographic is a fine publication but it is not a scientific journal. Please, when you discuss science, link to the scientific paper itself, so people can comment on the information unfiltered and undistorted by the popular media. The paper is here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0001780
Actually, these are such preliminary findings that they could be children or even dwarfed people. Nature, which is often held a bit above National Geographic among seems to be skeptical: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080310/full/452133a.html As an anthropologist, I would be thrilled if this turns out to be the same as homo floresiensis, but I'm not jumping to any conclusions until there is some more testing completed. Especially interesting is that it doesn't appear that the brain was unusually small in these specimens as it was in the Flores find, which indicates that this is a different situation entirely.
Get a web developer
I'm an anthropologist too, by education, though I work in IT so i'm watching from the sidelines. Didn't realize they hadn't even aged the bones... sounds like they shouldn't have published yet. Checking for unerupted adult teeth in the skulls should be easy enough, though (TFA says they found skulls).
Jeremy
Good4u ... by the way, I know you were not kidding ... for some old 50+ war mongers a (patriotic) trace, trap, crack, and phreak-out OTA ... could be some weekend fun; but I guess, it would need to be done from a non-extradition country ... or the hops need to prove it was not possibly from US@home.
... always fast, no chat, end-it and be gone!
Legal Hacking... (Score:5, Funny)
ANSWER:
YGTBKM! LOL! I like your enthusiasm, but you know the Air Force neither encourages nor condones criminal activity.
!HAVEFUN! and remember your enemy will always try to do unto you what was done to them
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?