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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."
If you think about it, most animals are intellectually inferior to human retards. But they seem to get by in the wild just fine.
So assuming that there was a whole society of retarded human-like creatures living on an island in Indonesia, it wouldn't be much different than a band of monkeys or gorillas living in Africa.
Their small brains developed due to reading Rupert Murdoch's "newspapers".
Does that explain Sarah Palin?
Have you watched episodes of Big Brother or Survivor? Brains shrink in close quarters. I think it's not bunk.
over consumption of ale and pipeweed?
*DrugCheese rants*
Rather like the British then?
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.
Incidentally, I agree with BadAnalogyGuy up there; with no competition and limited resources you would expect expensive brains to be evolved out. Cats, for instance, conserve resources in part compared to dogs because they have brains with some of the "higher level" functions reduced. However, I didn't mod him up because I strongly object to the term "retards". It's unpleasant, and insulting to people with lower IQs or learning difficulties. It would be far more accurate to point out that many children could survive in a predator-free hunter-gatherer environment from the age of about 8 on, so that possibly sets a bar.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
FTFS:
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.
Sorry, but evolution is not a goal-oriented process. Evolution is just the hindsight path that got us from "there" to "here."
Yes, the small brains may have provided a small competitive advantage due to their lower energy needs, but that doesn't really say anything about how that actually translated into the evolutionary path that was taken.
It's all just bullshit and mental masturbation if we make conjectures about why group A won out over group B. Maybe group A just liked having sex a lot. We'll never know, and it really doesn't matter.
The brain shrinkage must be what's causing everyone to run around in the jungle in the rain at midnight. And don't even get me *started* on Gilligan's island.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Let's hope being isolated in a basement doesn't have the same ef ^~ ;afgh' qw } puppy! bug! pizza old, pizza good. yum old. momma want some?
Table-ized A.I.
The cave lady probably spent too much time on Slashdot Stone Edition. Damage was irreversible.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
How does "some researchers believe" equate to "clearly demonstrated"? I think whoever wrote that blurb has experienced brain shrinkage!
I'm not seeing the sense in dwarfism caused by lack of resources. Erectus shows up and either there are resources to survive or not. If not they aren't going to survive how ever many evolutionary generations to 'match' their environment. That these fossils are being described as Homo erectus responding to isolation I don't buy either. In fact I remember seeing something that described to exact opposite using the komodo dragon as a example.
They don't mean that evolution was looking forward. They are talking to laymen and then getting it reported by a news report so by the end it will get simplified. What they mean is that selective pressure due to critical energy needs favored successively smaller brained individuals who were more able to effectively survive and have fertile offspring. Over the course of many generations, this led to small brains. Everyone understood what they meant when they said that. There's no good reason to nitpick about an attempt to give a short explanation to laypeople.
I'm not illiterate. I swear...
""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 Dr Eleanor Weston.
Could someone explain why this wouldn't be a new species, even if it is an adapted homo erectus? isn't that how new species are formed? where is the "species" line drawn?
Not only are you a racist, but you're clearly an uneducated one as well. Africa is the most genetically diverse area in the world. Making the sorts of sweeping statements you did, regardless of whether they're racist or not, indicates that you actually have no fucking clue about human evolution.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
while they aren't hobbits, they are similarly ancient, diminuitive peoples of southeast asia whose history may be instructive of how succeeding waves of human and proto-humans competed with and replaced each other. based on the experience of the aeta, i wouldn't be surprised if the last flores hobbit died at the sharp end of a homo sapien's stick
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito
essentially, ancient remnant isolated melanesian populations in largely malay and thai areas across indonesia, malaysia, the philippines, and thailand. the malays took over the coastal areas over time, and now the aeta live in tiny mountain tribes. they also existed in china until recently. han and malay peoples just either outright exterminated them, outcompeted them, or genetically intermarried and swamped them out of existence
http://www.africaresource.com/rasta/sesostris-the-great-the-egyptian-hercules/the-black-african-foundation-of-china-honouring-the-aboriginal-black-people-of-china/
in the philippines, the aeta famously came to light after the eruption of mount pinatubo, and this isolated group of peoples, probably living on the mountain isolated for hundreds if not thousands of years, were suddenly driven into the modern world
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2001/11/11/MN206799.DTL
the island of negros in the philippines gets its name from the spanish who found large numbers of aeta who lived there, at one time. now the island is almost completely malay
the dutch hurried along the process of the supplanting of the aeta with more cooperative malay slaves by genocidally emptying some strategic spice islands because the aetas proved uncooperative in the profitable nutmeg trade:
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Still seems silly to me, when you start renaming actual medical conditions just for fear of hurting the emotions of someone even worse off. Should we also stop calling autism autism, just because someone even more autistic out there could feel unhappy about it? Should we stop calling asthma asthma, just because some people are even more crippled by it?
The real insulting part in your example would be your using that term as an inherent insult, instead of a medical condition. _That_ is what ends up annoying those who genuinely have that condition.
But when you get to the point of actually using the euphemisms even for the actual disease, something tells me that you're missing the whole point.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I have similar problems in 2 different vendor's browsers. I just wish Slashdot had a "plain jane html" option. It's generally fast and reliable.
Table-ized A.I.
"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.
Sure, that explains the small brains... but what explains the pointed ears and large, hairy feet?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
...that the whole "different species" theory was completely debunked. Seems the editors did not notice this. Which is quite a feat, considering that they most likely posted it themselves here on Slashdot. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Homo floresiensis is different than Homo Erectus. Homo erectus died out a million years ago. Homo floresiensis died out 18000 years ago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_(genus)
This makes a lot of sense. A large part of what appears to have encouraged the increase in reasoning ability of human beings has been our complex social interaction. On an island with a small population the social interaction would be simpler and thus less reasoning would be required.
A monkey can make a spear and hunt for food, it takes a human being to figure out that when your girlfriend is telling you about her problems she just wants to complain about it and doesn't actually want you to help create a solution.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
"Now researchers at the Natural History Museum in London believe that the creatures' small brains could have developed to reduce the creatures' energy needs" So, if you're overweight due to excessive eating, you can just say you're got a big ol' brain to feed.
Well at least you'll be less attractive to zombies when you have smaller brain...
I took Human Evolution in college. I really liked it. But there is some phallic fascination with brain case size as being a important factor in approximating intelligence.
We have parrots that are as intelligent as 4-year olds. We have bears that are dumber. We have cephalopods that have a lot of intelligence in a few cm^3. Brain case volume to me, does not seem to have a determining factor in intelligence.
The density of brain matter would seem to be relevant as we look at brain function in terms of neural complexity. As density increases required volume decreases. And since to soft tissue survive, we have no idea of neural density. It seems that neural density would be a much better proxy for intelligence - particularly when looking in the same genus. (As opposed to cephalopods which have an entirely different brain morphology)
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Are you from Africa?
"The apologists claim that African poverty is to solely to White and Japanese oppression."
"Africa is a failure society due to the lower intelligence of the African people."
Well of course it's mutations, but I would suspect that, considering that hominid evolution shows a clear trend towards larger cranial capacity, there must have been some very severe selective pressures on this particular species which caused a very profound reversal of that trend. Evolution simply isn't a bunch of random alleles accidentally "working" for an environment.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Isn't he the lead designer for Duke Nukem Forever?
Do you have a reason for saying it's bunk? This is not my field so maybe you're right, but nothing sticks out from the articles.
And by "bunk", you mean that these fossils are NOT dwarfed humans, right? Because the other alternative that is being floated is that it's a distinct species.
Have you seen soccer moms driving SUVs? My theory is that, much like gold fish, these maternal females grow proportionally to the vehicles' cabin size.
Hmm, are you familiar with the concept of insular dwarfism? If these scientists say it's Homo erectus + insular dwarfism, what on Earth allows you to doubt it?
You just got troll'd!
Extreme cases can also cause aggrevated swelling of the brain as it's shrinkage puts more pressure on the neurons.
Hurry. It looks like you don't have a moment to lose.
No, but IT departments everywhere will be clamoring to hire the new race of dim-witted cavemen who will apparently, literally, work for less peanuts.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
But there is some phallic fascination with brain case size
Naw. Those researchers are just dickheads.
Insects are pretty diverse. None of them are very big. Not much variation in number of legs either.
Thus it would appear that diverse doesn't mean "covers the entire scale on every possible variable". Therefore it does not at all refute GPs post.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That goal is survival. OK, it's anthropomorphizing to call it a "goal", as if there were thought or desire involved, but that's of no importance. Survival (long term Nth generation) is effectively the goal.
The relevant error is to think that the survival goal of evolution must somehow coincide with the qualities that we humans desire or respect. No way! If passionate religion or inability to comprehend birth control make it more likely that you have surviving descendents in the Nth generation, then those traits get selected for. It's perfectly valid, and even likely, that evolution selects against people who accept evolution. :-)
Note that modern society could allow the island effect to apply worldwide. After all, the Earth itself is a sort of island in space.
Have you read Dawkin's "The Ancestor's Tale?" There's a tremendous amount of discussion on this issue, and it's one of the most fascinating books I've ever read.
You're right. The proper measurement is brain mass, not size. Unfortunately it's difficult to measure mass of soft tissue in fossils. Typically, there is a linear relationship between log(body mass) and log(brain mass). Humans and dolphins are the real outliers to the line, with primates outlying to a lesser extent. The animals we think of as being smart are always above average in log(brain mass)/log(body mass).
It doesn't work properly in IE or Firefox. At least it sucks in different ways, whch breaks up the tedium a little.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No, but it explains the "we've hit 57 states, and have one more to go" Obama.
Perfectly reasonable: 47 states and 10 provinces.
Bullshit. Either they'd be unable to stand up or their poor little necks would snap.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Should we also stop calling autism autism, just because someone even more autistic out there could feel unhappy about it? Should we stop calling asthma asthma, just because some people are even more crippled by it?
I think it's the part of speech. Contrast "a retard", "a retarded person", and "a person with retardation." Likewise, in the autism spectrum, contrast "an Aspie" with "a person with Asperger's", at least until such people reclaim "Aspie".
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
The "hobbits" represent a divergence from established models of Human evolutionary history. There are huge egos and invested in keeping things as they are. Conversely, there are careers to be made by getting people to believe something new.
Because of this, new people are going to overstate the likelihood that these little people represent a missing line, and established people will come up with all kinds of tenuous arguments saying that they are NOT.
You can't believe either side. Let them duke this out for a few years before coming to any conclusions.
You too. You missed "it's".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Um, the term "Hobbits" has been applied to this species almost from the beginning and by almost every news source. This is a valid scientific discussion and if you have a problem with the term "Hobbits", take it up with the scientists, don't blame Slashdot.
In conclusion, you are a filthy whiner and good riddance.
It would be useful if you could explain how the post is incorrect.
There is now extra evidence in the feet that these individuals are not Homo Erectus or Home Sapiens. The latest findings are the feet which appear to be more "chimplike" than the feet that you find in H. Erectus or H. Sapiens.
This includes extremely long foot, flat arch, long, more thumb like big toe. Whomever this creature is, it didn't do much in the way of running. However, the foot structure and the structure of the limbs does show that this creature was bipedal. The large toe, although longer and more thumb-like is not separated from the rest of the foot like in chimps. But, it certainly shows some older forms. The legs are also much shorter than you'd find in the other two species of Homo mentioned above.
Although the pigmy hippos show reduction in cranial capacity beyond the simple reduction in size, other aspects of these creatures are not different from normal hippo. The reduced brain could save a lot of energy, and there might not be much need on an isolated island for raw brain power.
But, how does this explain the structure of the foot for H. Floresiensis? These H. Floresiensis wouldn't have reverted back to a more primitive foot.
There has been some new evidence that pre-H Erectus humanoids did escape from Africa and populated what is now Asia minor. It could be possible that H Floresiensis could have evolved from a pre-H. Erectus humanoid.
Then again, in an island setting where there is little food, a very small inbred population, and little worry about predators, that genetic defects that may have hurt the survival chances of a normal H. Erectus or Sapien could have survived in this setting. Genetic drift could explain the reduced size, the reduced cranial capacity, the flat feet, and the enlarged toe.
Some of this might be settled if some genetic information could be pulled out one of the bones. However, with these slight bone sizes, there might not be a lot of genetic information.
Methinks you are confused. Are you perhaps a city dweller? Given that the suburbs are much more spacious than urban dwellings, it would follow from the article that suburbanites' brains have evolved to be larger than urbanites.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
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.
I did, and I will again. You have an incredibly diverse number of populations in Africa, in genetic terms. It's much more diverse than anywhere else on the planet (as the Out of Africa theory predicts). To say "Africans are genetically predetermined to be dumber than everyone else" is completely moronic, considering that there is no singular African lineage, but a number that go very very deep in time. Even if you could, say, make a claim that one group is somehow genetically more likely to produce less intelligent members, how would that possibly carry over into the other lineages? And to be clear here, I'm posing a hypothetical question, there is no evidence that Africans are less intelligent than other human populations. But the point here is that there is no singular African population, but rather several different distinct African populations, thus the very high diversity in Africa.
The genetic distance, for instance, between a San bushman and someone of Bantu stock is much greater than the genetic distance between a Inca Indian and an Irishman.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Shit. I'm trading in the Yukon for a Smart Car.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
Citation? Perhaps in specific tasks, but I doubt it would be so using the sum of a wide variety of tests.
Table-ized A.I.
But I live in a yellow submarine, with four mop-headed lads who never bathe.
Table-ized A.I.
I think that brain energy needs in relation to the rest of the body's energy needs should be considered, and this is related to brain case size.
Humans' gestation, childrearing, nuclear family, tribe-based society, etc. all essentially stem from our huge brains. Our entire society served to support helpless babies- and our babies had to be born so young as to be helpless so that their huge heads didn't kill their mother during childbirth. Even with the early birth, we still require a fontanelle so our head can squish through the pelvis.
When you look at it that way, our large brain case is pretty important in our general development over the last million years or so. As you go back in time and find proto-humans with smaller brain-cases, you can make educated judgments about their social structure, reasoning ability, etc.
None of this serves to place humans on a pedastal above other thinking creatures who have entirely different brain structures and evolutionary pressures.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
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.
Have a think about it in terms of vegetarianism
Look at Japan. It has a tiny fraction of the natural resources of Africa. Yet, the Japanese people created the 2nd-richest nation on the planet.
My history may be way off but:
Didn't the Japanese move there recently (evolutionary timescale) from the mainland? There wouldn't be enough time for evolution to make an equivalent difference. Modern (same timescale) cultures can offset a lack in resources easily. After overcoming that hurdle, a small land mass can be a blessing for a country's development. One example is how much better their connectivity is because they don't need to span a country the size of the US.
Are both ends of the spectrum the best for a country's development? US = huge = tons of resources, japan = small = needs less resources. (I realize that there might be a lower limit to this, making this not work for tiny countries. There are also other factors that have led to Japan's success)
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.
Well, Mr.AC
I am going to ignore your obvious racism. I am also not going to comment on things I don't know enough about to even speculate. I am simply going to put this question to you. I am going to ignore Africans vs. Rest of the world stuff too because its not related to the topic.
On what basis do conclude a smaller brain implies less intelligence, particularly in creatures within the same genius?
Perhaps a smaller brain is simply more compact, the article was talking about it being smaller for reasons of caloric efficiency, we can't really know if it is less powerful. My car engine displaces only 2.7 liters, and its much more powerful than some big seven and eight liter classic cars. Smaller does not always indicate less output. Elephants have larger brains than Humans, do you think they are smarter then we are? Last I checked I am not the one in the zoo doing tricks for peanuts.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Argh, that came from TFA (and there's no way to comment on TFA). It should be "The homo floresiensis, dubbed 'hobbits'.."
From the definition of dubbed:
b: to call by a distinctive title, epithet, or nickname
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/09/when_was_the_exact_day_slashdo.html
Yeah but uh, the Inca and the Irish both produced civilizations and the Bushman and the Bantu have not. It seems to me that there may be a missing component common over many of these diverse African populations that has an inhibiting effect on the creation of large well organized civilizations. I'm just say'in they don't seem to be able to get their shit together, maybe there is a problem present that if it weren't ignored, could be treated (with some future genetic therapy) or dealt with more effectively to both the African's and their entire worlds benefit if it were understood.
It's like a prehistoric reality show, then? And here I thought society had only perfected wasting time, money, resources and lives only in the last few centuries!
Way to go subverted ancients! I salute your tyrannical, well-entertained overlords.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Last I checked I am not the one in the zoo doing tricks for peanuts.
With a bit of philosophical reflection on modern human life, I think that's debatable.
Going across species as you are, you should consider the brain size to body mass ratio, as opposed to the brain size. You get a much stronger correlation that way.
Some squids have huge neurons for the sake of reaction speed. Huge neurons need huge space.
QED, size -> intelligence = huge bullshit.
All rites reversed 2010
Just last week NOVA had an episode on this topic. Prior to that I was under the impression that it had been settled that they were simply adapted regular humans. However the NOVA episode implied strongly that there is a consensus building that they are actually a different species. They presented brain shape, tooth shape, and wrist bone shape studies that didn't line up with modern humans.