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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."
Does that explain Sarah Palin?
I have found this phenomenon localized in my community. It's called Wal-Mart.
Those who can do... Those who can't get a certification from Cisco or Microsoft.
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.
How does "some researchers believe" equate to "clearly demonstrated"? I think whoever wrote that blurb has experienced brain shrinkage!
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.
but we are attempting to reproduce via mitosis. We'll call it "human forking". It simplifies things.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
"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.
No, the species living in wall mart tend to be much larger. It's the opposite phenomenon.
\u262D = \u5350
Why not? Island dwarfism and island gigantism are well know phenomena, even if we don't really understand why they happen.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
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
No, the species living in wall mart (sic)tend to be much larger. It's the opposite phenomenon.
The species that lives in Wal-Mart has an overly-large body with a severely undersized brain. Kinda like the Brontosaurus (or whatever they call that dinosaur these days).
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.
I strongly object to the term "retards".
By treating the term retard as offensive, you are only feeding into its offensiveness. Retard means slow. If retard has any negative connotation at all, it is because being mentally slow is something that is inherently undesirable, and no matter what window dressing you do to it, the window dressing will always become an insult.
If you had any depth to you, you would be more focused on trying to emphasize to as many people as possible that being a retard is not something worthy of being hated or abused. The word retard is not harmful at all, and it never will be. It is how people react to people who are retarded. When you focus on something as shallow as a word, you are hurting retards worldwide by misdirecting public attention from their cause.
The 'Hobbits' are retards. And so are you for getting butthurt over the word retard.
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.
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 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.
Shit. I'm trading in the Yukon for a Smart Car.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
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.