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Hobbits' Brains Shrank Due To Remote Home
Hugh Pickens writes "The 'hobbits,' dubbed homo floresiensis, caused a worldwide sensation when they were discovered five years ago, when some scientists claimed that the 18,000-year-old human-like fossils found on the Indonesian island of Flores represented an entirely new species. Now researchers at the Natural History Museum in London believe that the creatures' small brains could have developed to reduce the creatures' energy needs, crucial for surviving in an isolated area with limited resources. 'It could be that H. floresiensis' skull is that of a Homo erectus that has become dwarfed from living on an island, rather than being an abnormal individual or separately-evolved species, as has been suggested,' says palaeontologist Eleanor Weston. 'Looking at pygmy hippos in Madagascar, which possess exceptionally small brains for their size, suggests that the same could be true for H. floresiensis, and the result of being isolated on the island.' Although the phenomenon of dwarfism on islands is well recognized in large mammals, an accompanying reduction in brain size has never been clearly demonstrated before."
An 18,000 year old specimen of Homo Erectus would indeed be an amazing find if true. They were thought to have died out a little less than a million years ago. Thus, 18k is a huge leap. Also, being 18k old may mean that we can extract DNA from it or another like find, and learn more about Erectus, and maybe someday even recreate one ("Erectus Park"). Homo Erectus was a very successful species of proto-human (relatively speaking) and probably the first proto-human to spread deep into Europe and Asia.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm not illiterate. I swear...
"Both of these papers show things that could not have evolved or been a plastic response within our own species," George Washington University paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood told The Scientist. Wood, who was not involved with either study, added that the papers raise important questions regarding the evolutionary origins of H. floresiensis that only further research can answer.
While they certainly agree with the diminuative size being related to reduced energy needs they suggest that it is not just a reduced example of homo erectus.
In the other Nature paper, William Jungers, a paleoanthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York, and his coauthors compared the Hobbit foot to the few existing feet in the fossil record. "You just don't see complete feet until you get into Neanderthal," Jungers told The Scientist. "The fossil record of feet is surprisingly meager." If H. floresiensis was in fact a dwarfed H. erectus, the species would have had to amass primitive features after its ancestor had already evolved more modern skeletal characteristics. "It's asking a lot for evolution to backtrack like that," Jungers said. "Is it possible? I guess, but there's no precedent.".
Of course all of this analysis is very subjective. Morphological studies have created a number of strange controversies over the years in evolution. One really hotly contested area was the differences between Bat speicies the larger "flying fox" type that eat fruit and the smaller insect eating bat were throught to have evolved separately at one point and thought to be an example of convergent evolution (this ended up to be wrong). The real answer to this question would need to be settled using DNA mutation rate and genetics. if you want a firm answer everything else is just conjecture, even if it is well informed conjecture.
>where is the "species" line drawn?
theoretically, when populations no longer interbreed. Note that the populations may still be fertile together, as long as they don't naturally and normally interbreed. They may be too far apart, or they may have very different mate attraction strategies that are not interesting to the other group.
This definition, like many in biology, is in practice rather blurry, especially in plants and extinct organisms.
In this case, I agree that saying an island dwarfed type of H. erectus *is* H. erectus seems silly, but then I am not a biologist.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
Palin stated that "You can see Russia from parts of Alaska" which is a true fact. She did not state "I can see Russia from my house" which was a quote from a comedian doing an impersonation of Gov. Palin.
For more info please see this documentary.
Have you watched episodes of Big Brother or Survivor?
No, I haven't, because brains shrink when watching inane "reality" shows.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I don't think you quite understand what genetic diversity means in this case. In this case it means that making claims about Africans as if they were a homogeneous group is ludicrous. We're talking about several distinct populations in sub-Saharan Africa that have more genetic distance between them than every other single human population in the world. Even if there were some populations in Africa that were genetically predisposed to be less intelligent (and there's no evidence whatsoever for that), that would hardly reflect on the other major genetic lineages in the area.
So yes, genetic diversity plays directly against "black people are dumber" sorts of racists. There is no "black" race to begin with, save as a ethno-cultural artifact.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Africa's past has vast, long-lived empires on the same if not larger scale than Europe and Asia. The only point where Africa has "failed" in the last few centuries is that Europeans developed gunpowder and were able to subjugate the entire continent. There were universities and libraries in Africa long before they existed in Europe.
The discovery and debate over the "hobbits" Homo floresiensis is fascinating.
It appears that the hobbits are a unique species and not a shrunken version of Homo erectus based not so much on brain size, but on different and more ape-like body parts including feet, wrists, hips, and shoulders. The NYTimes has a couple of stories on this.