Next Assignment...
Posted: Tue Feb 01, 2005 2:13 pm
John C. and I leave in another day or 2 (Whenever my bags arrive with my equipment. Bloody airline!) to investigate a Wall Street Journal article by David P. Hamilton about Dr. Richard Roberts' find on Flores. We chose it because we are both archaeologist, and want to some have fun once in awhile. Luckily, for us, the Lazlo Society does have an interest.
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Archaeologists sifting through the remains of pygmy elephants and Komodo dragons may have also turned up evidence of humanity's newest cousin -- skeletal remains of a previously unknown species of short-statured people who lived on the Indonesian island of Flores as recently as 18,000 years ago.
Last year, an Indonesian-Australian team of archaeologists on Flores unexpectedly unearthed a partial skeleton of a person who appeared to be about three feet tall, with a skull roughly the same size as that of a chimpanzee.
Initially, the team assumed it to be a child's remains, but further analysis of the skeletal teeth and bones indicated that they most likely belonged to an adult woman. The excavation team quickly nicknamed the skeleton "Hobbit," after the pint-size race featured in "The Lord of the Rings," and later decided it represented an entirely new human species.
The find, described yesterday in two papers in the journal Nature, holds the potential to upend scientific understanding of humanity's evolutionary history. The new species -- dubbed Homo floresiensis, or "Man of Flores" -- appears to have lived much more recently than any other close human relative. Neanderthals, the next most-contemporaneous relative to modern humans, became extinct roughly 30,000 years ago.
Some members of the team speculate that the Flores people might even have coexisted with modern humans, citing folk tales of "little people" on the island. "The stories suggest there may be more than a grain of truth to the idea that they were still living on Flores up until the Dutch arrived in the 1500s," says Richard "Bert" Roberts, an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia.
Equally intriguing is what the Flores fossils might reveal about the surprisingly elastic capabilities of human evolution. Over time, close relatives to modern humans have generally grown larger bodies and brains, and exhibited more complex behavior, anthropologists say.
The Flores people, by contrast, appear to have shrunk in both stature and brain size over time, perhaps as an adaptation to the scarcity of food and other resources on their isolated island. That, at least, is the working hypothesis of the discovery team, which noted structural similarities between the "hobbit" skeleton and those of other -- but much larger -- early humans known to have lived throughout Asia.
As a result, anthropologists believe Homo floresiensis shows just how drastically humans can evolve, given the right environmental conditions. "If you didn't know any better and looked at a wolf, who'd know you could breed from its genome everything from a Chihuahua to a Great Dane?" asks Milford Wolpoff, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Michigan. "What this shows is that [the same sort of variation] is all there in our genetics."
The Flores find may also spark some fresh controversies over the cognitive abilities of humans with such small brains. For instance, the discovery team argues in Nature that despite its small brain, Homo floresiensis appeared to use tools, make fire and hunt a primitive pygmy elephant called Stegodon.
"The association of these small-brained people with fairly advanced stone tools is completely unexpected," Peter Brown, a leader of the team from the University of New England in Australia, wrote in an e-mail interview. "This will, I think, result in a major reconsideration of what it is to be human."
Prior to the Flores discovery, the only known human relative with a comparable height and brain size was a species known as Australopithecus, an African plains-dweller thought to have died out two million years ago. The skull and other bones of the Flores skeleton differed from those of Australopithecus in significant ways, but turned out to be similar in other respects to those of Homo erectus, the first large-brained human cousin, common in Asia until about 50,000 years ago.
Eventually the researchers concluded that the "hobbit" skeleton was evidence of an entirely new species, possibly one that had diverged from Homo erectus sometime in the previous 100,000 years or so. The idea fit with previous evidence that early humans had lived on Flores roughly 840,000 years ago.
Furthermore, scientists knew that large mammals such as elephants and rhinoceroses often "dwarfed" over time when isolated on tropical islands, presumably because smaller, less energetic individuals were more likely to survive in environments with limited food. Such dwarfing hadn't previously been seen in humans, although some anthropologists think a similar factor may explain African pygmies and other short-statured indigenous tribes.
Some anthropologists, while acknowledging the importance of the discovery, still worry that the findings might collapse if the Flores woman turned out to have suffered from an aberrant form of dwarfism. Dr. Brown, one of the team's leaders, dismisses such concerns, noting that the researchers have since found remains of between five and seven individuals, primarily consisting of a complete lower jaw and several limb bones.
"All are from individuals of the same body size," Dr. Brown wrote in an e-mail. He said the Nature papers only described the team's findings from its September 2003 "field season," and doesn't include data from its recently completed September 2004 work.
---------------
Archaeologists sifting through the remains of pygmy elephants and Komodo dragons may have also turned up evidence of humanity's newest cousin -- skeletal remains of a previously unknown species of short-statured people who lived on the Indonesian island of Flores as recently as 18,000 years ago.
Last year, an Indonesian-Australian team of archaeologists on Flores unexpectedly unearthed a partial skeleton of a person who appeared to be about three feet tall, with a skull roughly the same size as that of a chimpanzee.
Initially, the team assumed it to be a child's remains, but further analysis of the skeletal teeth and bones indicated that they most likely belonged to an adult woman. The excavation team quickly nicknamed the skeleton "Hobbit," after the pint-size race featured in "The Lord of the Rings," and later decided it represented an entirely new human species.
The find, described yesterday in two papers in the journal Nature, holds the potential to upend scientific understanding of humanity's evolutionary history. The new species -- dubbed Homo floresiensis, or "Man of Flores" -- appears to have lived much more recently than any other close human relative. Neanderthals, the next most-contemporaneous relative to modern humans, became extinct roughly 30,000 years ago.
Some members of the team speculate that the Flores people might even have coexisted with modern humans, citing folk tales of "little people" on the island. "The stories suggest there may be more than a grain of truth to the idea that they were still living on Flores up until the Dutch arrived in the 1500s," says Richard "Bert" Roberts, an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia.
Equally intriguing is what the Flores fossils might reveal about the surprisingly elastic capabilities of human evolution. Over time, close relatives to modern humans have generally grown larger bodies and brains, and exhibited more complex behavior, anthropologists say.
The Flores people, by contrast, appear to have shrunk in both stature and brain size over time, perhaps as an adaptation to the scarcity of food and other resources on their isolated island. That, at least, is the working hypothesis of the discovery team, which noted structural similarities between the "hobbit" skeleton and those of other -- but much larger -- early humans known to have lived throughout Asia.
As a result, anthropologists believe Homo floresiensis shows just how drastically humans can evolve, given the right environmental conditions. "If you didn't know any better and looked at a wolf, who'd know you could breed from its genome everything from a Chihuahua to a Great Dane?" asks Milford Wolpoff, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Michigan. "What this shows is that [the same sort of variation] is all there in our genetics."
The Flores find may also spark some fresh controversies over the cognitive abilities of humans with such small brains. For instance, the discovery team argues in Nature that despite its small brain, Homo floresiensis appeared to use tools, make fire and hunt a primitive pygmy elephant called Stegodon.
"The association of these small-brained people with fairly advanced stone tools is completely unexpected," Peter Brown, a leader of the team from the University of New England in Australia, wrote in an e-mail interview. "This will, I think, result in a major reconsideration of what it is to be human."
Prior to the Flores discovery, the only known human relative with a comparable height and brain size was a species known as Australopithecus, an African plains-dweller thought to have died out two million years ago. The skull and other bones of the Flores skeleton differed from those of Australopithecus in significant ways, but turned out to be similar in other respects to those of Homo erectus, the first large-brained human cousin, common in Asia until about 50,000 years ago.
Eventually the researchers concluded that the "hobbit" skeleton was evidence of an entirely new species, possibly one that had diverged from Homo erectus sometime in the previous 100,000 years or so. The idea fit with previous evidence that early humans had lived on Flores roughly 840,000 years ago.
Furthermore, scientists knew that large mammals such as elephants and rhinoceroses often "dwarfed" over time when isolated on tropical islands, presumably because smaller, less energetic individuals were more likely to survive in environments with limited food. Such dwarfing hadn't previously been seen in humans, although some anthropologists think a similar factor may explain African pygmies and other short-statured indigenous tribes.
Some anthropologists, while acknowledging the importance of the discovery, still worry that the findings might collapse if the Flores woman turned out to have suffered from an aberrant form of dwarfism. Dr. Brown, one of the team's leaders, dismisses such concerns, noting that the researchers have since found remains of between five and seven individuals, primarily consisting of a complete lower jaw and several limb bones.
"All are from individuals of the same body size," Dr. Brown wrote in an e-mail. He said the Nature papers only described the team's findings from its September 2003 "field season," and doesn't include data from its recently completed September 2004 work.
