Interesting discovery.

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Sep 2, 2003
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Heard on the news this morning....

Australian scientists have found what appears to be the remains of a previously unknown species of humans. They found a skeleton of a woman in a cave on a remote island of Indonesia. They have nicknamed her the hobbit because she was only 1 metre tall. They think this species could have lived as recently as 12000 years ago which means there could have been two different species of humans living at the same time. Apparently they were relatively advanced stone tool users.

Wonder what else is out there ....
 
If it's for real, it will be in print soon.

To call it a species, we would need DNA evidence. Appearance is not good enough. Depending on the condition of the remains, we might not know if it were juvenile, or diseased, or just undernourished in life. There are also normally short populations, including some in SE Asia.

The human race is incredibly diverse. Come to any large, multicultural, urban concourse and stand quietly and watch what walks by.
 
True enough Esav, I just got the 30 second news report version, haven't seen the actual scientific publication yet. I believe they think it was a 30 year old woman.

I'm going to search for the real information.
 
I just finished reading about this at Nature.com. Came over here to post and found that you lads are on the case...:) Fascinating stuff. They haven't been able to extract DNA yet. And apparently the remains were not fossilized, so reconstruction has been even more challenging than usual.

Here is a another link to more stories.
 
Thanks for all those links. I just finished reading the New York Times version. As usual, they took a good, solid story and spoiled it for me with mistakes in details they should never have missed.

But the find itself looks good. It's not just one specimen, there is structural evidence for speciation. It is astounding that we have had an H. erectus form around so long.
 
Esav Benyamin said:
But the find itself looks good. It's not just one specimen, there is structural evidence for speciation. It is astounding that we have had an H. erectus form around so long.
It sort of reminds me of all those 19th century stories about lost worlds and nonsense like jurassic park involving some sort of hidden island or valley or whatever that's populated by mini people hunting mini elephants and so on.

Yeah, OK, maybe my imagination gets away with me at times ...

It will certainly be interesting to find out if these "hobbits" ever interracted with our species at any time.
 
Most people only know of Tarzan as a movie creation, but in the original Edgar Rice Burroughs books, the story was much more complex. And Philip Jose Farmer followed up on Burrough's stories to suppose that ancient humans surviving into our times, not "great apes", were Tarzan's foster tribe.

Definitely better stories. The ancient volcano that wiped out Flores Man, could that have been Sauron's Mount Doom? :)

I just finished copying all the links' stories into one Word document, 18 pages worth, to make it all easier to read through, even though there is a serious amount of repetition.

I'll copy here what really impressed me, was Chris Stringer's comments. He is as reputable an anthropologist as we've got, and not likely to overstate a case.

A stranger from Flores
Chris Stringer

When a new fossil is found it is often claimed that it will rewrite the anthropological textbooks. But in the case of an astonishing new discovery from Indonesia, this claim is fully justified.

The conventional view of early human evolution is that the species Homo erectus was our first relative to spread out of Africa, some 2 million years ago. The spread that our cousin achieved is indicated by a 1.8-million-year-old, primitive form of H. erectus found at Dmanisi in Georgia, and by finds at slightly younger sites in China and the Indonesian island of Java. It was not thought that H. erectus travelled any farther towards Australia than this, because although early humans could have walked to Java from Southeast Asia at times of low sea level, the islands east of Java, always separated from it by deep water, seemed beyond their reach.

However, six years ago a team of archaeologists, led by Australian Mike Morwood, published a paper claiming that a site on the island of Flores, 500 kilometres east of Java, contained stone tools dating from about 800,000 years ago1. Many researchers (myself included) doubted these claims, because if they were true they implied that H. erectus had moved beyond Java and might have used boats to do so. Such a development was thought to be unique to Homo sapiens.

When I then heard rumours about the discovery of an early human skeleton in a cave on Flores, I was ready to be surprised. However, nothing could have prepared me for how big (or small) that surprise would be.

Asian fusion

The skeleton found at Liang Bua, a cave on Flores, is of an adult who was only about one metre tall with a brain size of only 380 cubic centimetres. That is less than one-third of the average brain size for a modern human and much smaller even than those of the primitive H. erectus skulls from Dmanisi.

The Flores skull shows a unique mixture of primitive and advanced characteristics. The brain is the same size as a chimpanzee's, the brain-case is low with a prominent brow ridge at the front, and the lower jaw completely lacks a chin. However, as in modern humans, the face is small and delicate. It is tucked under the brain rather than thrust out in front and the teeth are similar in size to our own.

The skeleton shows a similarly strange mixture of features. The hip-bone resembles those of the pre-human African species known as australopithecines (meaning 'southern apes'). But the legs are slight, and enough detail has been preserved to show that this creature definitely walked on two legs, as we do.

Class act

So what was this strange creature, and what was it doing on Flores? The authors of the two Nature papers2,3 about the discovery and its context have had to make difficult choices in deciding how to classify the creature, although it is clear that this person was definitely not a modern human. The small brain size and the hip-bone shape might favour classification as an australopithecine, whereas the size and shape of the skull might suggest a primitive form of H. erectus.

Given the unique combination of features, the authors have decided to give the specimen a new name: Homo floresiensis. This means, literally, 'man of Flores', although the authors recognize that the Liang Bua skeleton is probably that of a woman.

The researchers argue that this species made the tools found in the Liang Bua cave, and may have preyed on one of the few other mammals that had also managed to reach Flores: a tiny form of the extinct, elephant-like Stegodon.

Of a certain age

It seems that Flores man (or woman) still has one more surprise up its sleeve: its age. Astonishingly, two methods of dating agree in placing the skeleton at only about 18,000 years old. Its ancestors, probably a form of H. erectus, could have reached the island in the hunt for stegodons a million years ago, either by building some kind of boat or by walking across a short-lived land-bridge.

Their resulting isolation and inbreeding may have led them to evolve a small body size, in a process known from other mammals as 'island dwarfing'. Because of climate change or the impact of modern humans, who began to spread from Africa around 100,000 years ago, the strange story of H. floresiensis eventually ended in extinction. But modern humans must surely have encountered this tiny relative of ours, and the discovery shows how much we still have to learn about the story of human evolution.

Chris Stringer is a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London.
 
"Most fascinating of all, local legends suggest that the "Hobbits" may have survived until modern times, at least until the 16th century, when Dutch traders arrived in the Spice Islands, and perhaps even more recently.
"Until they found this creature they would have dismissed them as tales of leprechauns, but no longer," said Dr Henry Gee, the senior editor of the journal Nature who handled the "Hobbit" paper.

"All over Indonesia are limestone cave systems that are barely explored," he told a press conference in London. "Who knows? In remaining patches of rainforest, one might find relic populations."

Legends of "wild men of the woods", the "Orang Pendek" in Sumatra, giants, and other fabled creatures could be a word-of-mouth record of an astonishing diversity of human forms that lived on until recently, said Dr Gee.

"It is possible, though not likely, that some of these creatures still survive."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mai...28.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/10/28/ixnewstop.html

"Richard Roberts, discoverer of the Hobbit, says local tales suggest the species could still exist:

When I was back in Flores earlier this month we heard the most amazing tales of little, hairy people, whom they called Ebu Gogo - Ebu meaning grandmother and Gogo meaning 'he who eats anything'. The tales contained the most fabulous details - so detailed that you'd imagine there had to be a grain of truth in them.

One of the village elders told us that the Ebu Gogo ate everything raw, including vegetables, fruits, meat and, if they got the chance, even human meat.

When food was served to them they also ate the plates, made of pumpkin - the original guests from hell (or heaven, if you don't like washing up and don't mind replacing your dinner set every week).

The villagers say that the Ebu Gogo raided their crops, which they tolerated, but decided to chase them away when the Ebu Gogo stole - and ate - one of their babies.

They ran away with the baby to their cave which was at the foot of the local volcano, some tens of metres up a cliff face. The villagers offered them bales of dry grass as fodder, which they gratefully accepted.

A few days later, the villagers went back with a burning bale of grass which they tossed into the cave. Out ran the Ebu Gogo, singed but not fried, and were last seen heading west, in the direction of Liang Bua, where we found the Hobbit, as it happens.

When my colleague Gert van den Bergh first heard these stories a decade ago, which several of the villages around the volcano recount with only very minor changes in detail, he thought them no better than leprechaun tales until we unearthed the Hobbit. (I much prefer Ebu as the name of our find but my colleague Mike Morwood was insistent on Hobbit.)

The anatomical details in the legends are equally fascinating. They are described as about a metre tall, with long hair, pot bellies, ears that slightly stick out, a slightly awkward gait, and longish arms and fingers - both confirmed by our further finds this year.

They [the Ebu Gogo] murmured at each other and could repeat words [spoken by villagers] verbatim. For example, to 'here's some food', they would reply 'here's some food'. They could climb slender-girthed trees but, here's the rub, were never seen holding stone tools or anything similar, whereas we have lots of sophisticated artefacts in the H. floresiensis levels at Liang Bua. That's the only inconsistency with the Liang Bua evidence.

The women Ebu Gogo had extremely pendulous breasts, so long that they would throw them over their shoulders, which must have been quite a sight in full flight.

We did ask the villagers if they ever interbred with the Ebu Gogo. They vigorously denied this, but said that the women of Labuan Baju (a village at the far western end of Flores, better known as LBJ) had rather long breasts, so they must have done.

Poor LBJ must be the butt of jokes in Flores, rather like the Irish and Tasmanians.

A local eruption at Liang Bua (in western Flores) may have wiped out local hobbits around 12,000 years ago, but they could well have persisted much later in other parts of the island. The villagers said that the last hobbit was seen just before the village moved location, farther from the volcano, not long before the Dutch colonists settled in that part of central Flores, in the 19th century.

Do the Ebu Gogo still exist? It would be a hoot to search the last pockets of rainforest on the island. Not many such pockets exist, but who knows. At the very least, searching again for that lava cave, or others like it, should be done, because remains of hair only a few hundred years old, would surely survive, snagged on the cave walls or incorporated in deposits, and would be ideal for ancient DNA analyses.

Interestingly, we did find lumps of dirt with black hair in them this year in the Hobbit levels, but don't know yet if they're human or something else. We're getting DNA testing done, which we hope will be instructive."

Richard "Bert" Roberts is a University of Wollongong professor and one of the team investigating the Hobbits.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mai...28.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/10/28/ixnewstop.html

maximus otter
 
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