New Hominid Species Unearthed in Indonesia 588
Radical Rad writes "ABC News is reporting that anthropologists have found the skeletal remains of seven hobbit sized hominids. The population may have been wiped out by a volcanic activity 12000 years ago or according to local legend may have lived up until the 1500's living on in caves and eating food the villagers would leave out for them. Also found were bones of giant lizards and miniature elephants. CBS
also has the story." National Geographic and the BBC have good stories.
New species explaination (Score:4, Interesting)
However, if they were smart enough to find a way to this island, couldn't they just do another island-hoping to a bigger island like Sumantra, or even Australia?
The article also mentioned "many anthropologists have argued that in recent years, scientists have been adding too many new species to the human evolutionary tree. They say scientists have become too quick to call what may simply be an unusual individual a member of a whole new species."
Maybe these tiny people have some kind of sickness (or just look tiny), and were therefore exiled from the main(is)land?
Hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
small brains (Score:3, Interesting)
Myths and Legends (Score:2, Interesting)
Super Volcano? (Score:4, Interesting)
Menehune (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:New species explaination (Score:2, Interesting)
You are correct. It does seem that anything not exactly like any current known species is called a new species. I would like to see anthropologists be a bit more careful with this classification system we've got, but in the end, does it really matter? I mean, whoopety-do.. Some type of hominid that probably didn't lead directly to modern humans is misclassified. Eh.. For some reason I'm a little apathetic to the whole thing.
Anyway.. Perhaps they didn't so much get onto the island as the land broke away from the main island isolating them. Then its plausible they weren't intelligent enough to make it back to the main island. Perhaps that is what will happen to all those folks over in California.
Re:Not too surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Interaction with Modern Humans (Score:4, Interesting)
These newly-discovered "hobbitt-sized people" may well be no more than a sort of local pygmy tribe, now extinct.
OTOH, it's perfectly possible that remnants of genetic side-branches of Homo Whatever persisted into historical times, if sufficiently isolated and protected by their local environment.
Size is no indication of being a different species; hell, look at dogs, which even among wild species range from 25 to 100 lbs. A closed environment can select for even larger extremes; also, note the radically different brain size among different breeds of domestic dogs, even tho they are all the same species.
little walls, little bridges (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:typical western culture whitewashing..... (Score:1, Interesting)
It's older than that... this is what "Mediterranean" means, after all.
But this is pretty typical of cultures all over. The Chinese word for China means "Middle Kingdom", i.e. the central country.
Hobbits in Indonesia (Score:4, Interesting)
So if we follow the map [uni-bremen.de] (assuming sea level has risen since Middle Earth days), mountain chain, south to Rohan, East, that would put Mordor right ... about ... Here [backpack-newzealand.com].
I thought Rohan/Gondor west of Ithilien river looked a lot like Australia. Now we know.
Re:New species explaination (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the argument used for living in extreme cold. We were told that ethnic cultures such as the Zulu's were tall because that was the best way to radiate heat (taller == more elongated == more surface area/volume), and that the Innuit were short and round due to the extreme cold (shorter == more spherical == less surface area/volume).
For reptiles, warmer temperatures usually leads to larger body sizes, while colder temperatures leads to smaller sizes.
So, maybe the climate went the other way, and everything became colder?
one specimen (Score:4, Interesting)
i'm no paleontologist (and i don't play one on tv, either) so i don't know exactly how well you can really extrapolate a whole species' traits from one specimen. do you know, for instance, that it's genetically "normal" for its species? was it typical of the nutritional, physical, and in the case of hominids, social environment?
for instance, what would be the inference if a future archaeologist found the skeletal remains of the following: someone born with Down Syndrome, someone with Marfan Syndrome, and someone with one of the 522 different types of dwarfism [dwarfism.org] - skeletons or models of which can typically be found in better natural history and science museums around the world.
where, for instance, are Lucy's kin? and she's the basis for whole shelves of books on human evolution.
Re:New species explaination (Score:3, Interesting)
There have been cases when a special kind of individuals have been exiled, or killed, even because of their sex. You talk about the improbability for a malformation of the same kind in many individuals. Down's syndrome, for example, is a malformation that looks similar in every individual that has it, and it has morphological particularities, too.
Bayan Kara-Ula - Dropa and the Han (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Interaction with Modern Humans (Score:4, Interesting)
Point being, you can't judge by appearance at that level. Now, if they had DNA evidence to back up their speculation about these people being a different species... that would mean something.
## Selection for proportions can be done in just a couple generations in dogs**. Humans aren't that much more complex, and human mating behaviour tends toward selecting the familiar (ie. someone who looks at least sortof like your own tribe). Types do develop and breed true in humans, if sufficiently isolated by geography and/or tribal behaviour. -- I've heard how some Orientals can peg another Oriental by physical type right down to their native village and even family, because the local types are so consistent. [I can do the same with some bloodlines in dogs.]
(**Something I'm intimately aware of, as a professional dog breeder/trainer with 11 generations of my own bloodline, and 35 years experience.)
Great, now you've made me do nested footnotes
They Featured in Legends (Score:4, Interesting)
First, this would be the first case of modern humans having even psuedo-recorded contact with another intelligent species.
Second, this rips back open the possibility of our faerie tales being more true than most of us would have expected.
Re:New species explaination (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:New species explaination (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:New species explaination (Score:3, Interesting)
From that chapter:
"This article includes observations informed by personal experiences of both practicing sociology in exile and studying an exilic community. Since 1991, I have been involved in fieldwork research in North America and Europe among Iranian exiles. "
You're trying to apply contemporary human sociology to a society that is at least 18000 years old... and possibly not human?
Riiight...
Re:non-human? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:New species explaination (Score:2, Interesting)
Probably not (Score:2, Interesting)
Most folklorists believe that myths about wee folk are remnants of animist beliefs. When a new religion came people merged it with it's earlier religion, and the animist spirits became the wee folk. A good example is how Pan has many features in common with the Christian devil.
As the wee folk of different cultures usually has much more in common with how spirits are viewed in animist cultures than with any small humans I believe we can disregard the homo foresiensis as any explanation of the wee folk.
But this on the other is probably a myth based on fact (from the BBC article):
"Even more intriguing is the fact that Flores' inhabitants have incredibly detailed legends about the existence of little people on the island they call Ebu Gogo.
The islanders describe Ebu Gogo as being about one metre tall, hairy and prone to "murmuring" to each other in some form of language. They were also able to repeat what islanders said to them in a parrot-like fashion.
Yet there are hints H. floresiensis could have lived on much later than this. The myths say Ebu Gogo were alive when Dutch explorers arrived a few hundred years ago and the very last legend featuring the mythical creatures dates to 100 years ago.
But Henry Gee, senior editor at Nature magazine, goes further. He speculates that species like H.floresiensis might still exist, somewhere in the unexplored tropical forest of Indonesia. "
Really something for the cryptzoologists!
It reminds me.. (Score:3, Interesting)
The fascinating history of H.P. Blavatsky 'The People of Blue Mountains [katinkahesselink.net]'.
Probably those small people of Indonesia had also his own myths about why and how the were there.
Cryptozoology (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:little walls, little bridges (Score:1, Interesting)
30 000 years ago during the last ice age when ice sheets covered north america and most of europe and CONNECTED the continets so a boat could follow the coast and circle the world, there were neanderthals and these elve types (and the bible "giants" mentioned in genesis for all we know) and giant animals like sabbertooth cats and whooly mamoths and giant salt water crocadiles (the inspiration for dragons?) (whose methane laden breath could catch fire???) all buried on the world's continental sea shelves in a few hundred feet of water.
Truely, what riches await future underwater archiologists !!! Especially one's that can spell !!
Re:Not too surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
I know what he meant. And I'm saying that the distinction between natural and artificial selection is specious.
This situation is fundimentally different from the evolution of dogs because there was no 3rd party species to artificially select for traits in humans.
Humans didn't evolve in a vacuum. We are what we are today because of the ways in which our ancestors were affected by their environment, which includes all the other species with which they had to live.
I suppose the distinction you're trying to make is that humans intentionally bred animals for certain traits, whereas, unless Lamarck was right about the giraffes, there's no intentional change in so-called natural evolution. I'm not sure you can really draw this line. For example, humans aren't the only animals who cultivate other organisms; there are ants who raise aphids and farm fungus for food, and I'm sure both the aphids and the fungus have been changed somewhat by that process in ways that were mutually benificial. Was this intentional or not, natural or artificial?
Now consider the way the wheat plant has changed due to humans. It used to be the case that most grains of wheat were loose and would fall off at the slightest breeze-- this is how the plant would reproduce. When humans developed agriculture, they would cut stalks of wheat in the fields and carry them back to their granaries. Those wheat grains which were not firmly attached fell off, leaving only the more secure grains in the hands of humans. It didn't take long before most of the wheat grown by humans had grains which were hard to detach, requiring people to do a lot more work to separate them. This was selection due to human activity (hence "artificial"), yet was almost certainly unintended.