New Study Shows Mystery 'Hobbits' Not Humans Like Us (phys.org)

According to a study published on Monday, diminutive humans that died out on an Indonesian island some 15,000 years ago were not homo sapiens, but rather a different species. The Homo floresiensis, known as "hobbits" since they looked like small humans, were found to be a distinct species based on the layers in the specimens' skulls. This discovery could be the end of one of the most heated arguments in anthropology.

Comments

"most heated arguments in anthropology"

[Anonymous Coward]

How do we have to imagine this? More "english gentlemen drinking brandy in front of a stuffed Lion, disagreeing slightly", or more "Thunderdome!!! Two opinions enter, one opinion leaves!"...?

Re:"most heated arguments in anthropology"

[Feral Nerd]

I read it as 'emacs vs. vim' kind of an argument.

The argument has been a bit more heated than that. For many decades humans, unlike all other known species, were thought to have an evolutionary tree without any branches. Over the last couple of decades it turns out that:

1) The human evolutionary tree had many, many, many branches.
2) Dwarfism in humans existed, i.e. the hobbits.
3) Archaic forms of humans existed until fairly recently, again the hobbits.
4) It turns out you can recover large amounts of DNA from ridiculously old samples and discover extinct species of humans without ever touching a shovel and scraping at dirt with a bricklayer's trowel.
5) Some of the diverse branches of the human evolutionary tree merged again when modern humans mated with archaic forms of human. Well know examples of this are Neanderthals, Denisovans plus at least a couple of other archaic species unknown from anything except DNA. Upwards of 20% of the DNA of the Neanderthal for example still exist in our genome.
6) There are a lot of surprises still left to discover, like Albert Perry's Y-chromasome which pre-dates the oldest know modern human fossil by 140000 years.

I really love it when things like this happen. Scientific communities tend to settle into a routine. They are like a bunch of people in a conference room who have dominant theories to explain much of the way things work and most of the work that still need doing is to extend and improve these theories and the oddballs with weird theories have been pushed into a corner and are being ignored. Then, just as people were settling into a routine under the fatherly guidance of the big names in the field, somebody opens the door and brings in a discovery like this or Svante Pääbo's discovery of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in modern humans (Ian Tattersall has been eating crow on that score ever since) or my other recent favourite contribution to the human origins debate which is Eske Willerslev 's discovery of people that were genetically closely related to modern Europeans but who lived in Siberia. It turns out that these people contributed significantly to the groups that settled the Americas, meaning that Native Americans and Europeans are actually very closely connected by genetic bonds that stretch back way, way, way, way before Columbus (as in 24000 years ago)... so here we once again have the revenge of the scientific oddballs.