Post by L Roebuck on Oct 11, 2005 11:28:11 GMT -5
New “hobbit” bones bolster separate species claim
13:51 11 October 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Andy Coghlan
Newly discovered bones have strengthened claims that small human-like “hobbits” roamed Indonesia as recently as 12,000 years ago.
The bones come from Liang Bu, the same site on the island of Flores where the first found was made. The skull of a small female hominin, labelled LB1, was found in 2003 and announced a year ago.
The new finds include the right arm bones of LB1, plus a jawbone and several limb bones from others of the same species. “We now have evidence for at least nine individuals,” says Michael Morwood of the University of New England in New South Wales, Australia, who is head of the excavation team.
Other unearthed items reveal aspects of the hobbits’ lifestyle, including sophisticated cutting tools and remains of stegodons, dwarf forerunners of modern elephants. The stegodon bones have cut marks on them, suggesting they had been butchered. Other animal bones and stones at the site were charred, suggesting the hobbits knew how to light fires.
“This type of complex behaviour probably required the ability to talk,” says Morwood. "But there is no evidence for burial of the dead, art, ornaments or other types of symbolic behaviour.”
Island isolation
Some sceptics have claimed that LB1 was simply a modern human with a condition called microencephaly – an abnormally small brain. But the new finds all came from individuals with the same size bodies as LB1, only about a metre tall. This supports the idea that Homo floresiensis is indeed a species in its own right.
Morwood and his colleagues proposed previously that the hobbits are dwarf forms of Homo erectus, a forerunner of modern humans, that evolved after being isolated on the island.
Sceptics such as Bob Martin, provost of the Field Museum in Chicago, US, hotly dispute this, claiming that the brain is only half the size it should be for a dwarfed version of Homo erectus.
And in the light of the new finds, Morwood's team is itself moving away from the dwarfing theory. The hobbits have disproportionately long arms relative to their legs, and so cannot be scaled-down versions either of modern humans or Homo erectus, who have had the same body proportions for 1.6 million years.
Ancestral line
They say that a more likely ancestral line goes back to australopithecine species such as 3-million-year-old “Lucy”, found in Ethiopia (Australopithecus afarensis).
“The combination of skeletal attributes that [the hobbits] share is not found in any modern human,” says team member Peter Brown. “The bones of the hands and feet don’t look like those of arboreal apes, but like everything else to do with Homo floresiensis, they are not like humans either.”
Martin remains unconvinced by the new finds. The “smoking gun”, he says, would be the discovery of another skull identical in size to LB1’s, but significantly older or younger, so it could not be a contemporaneous sibling.
The researchers counter that an additional jawbone found at the site is virtually identical in size to LB1’s, but is 3000 years younger.
The Australians and their Indonesian colleagues believe the issue will be settled by the discovery of more bones. “Only a few per cent of the site has been excavated, so the chance the site contains many others is very high,” says Morwood.
Source: NewScientist.com
www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8128
13:51 11 October 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Andy Coghlan
Newly discovered bones have strengthened claims that small human-like “hobbits” roamed Indonesia as recently as 12,000 years ago.
The bones come from Liang Bu, the same site on the island of Flores where the first found was made. The skull of a small female hominin, labelled LB1, was found in 2003 and announced a year ago.
The new finds include the right arm bones of LB1, plus a jawbone and several limb bones from others of the same species. “We now have evidence for at least nine individuals,” says Michael Morwood of the University of New England in New South Wales, Australia, who is head of the excavation team.
Other unearthed items reveal aspects of the hobbits’ lifestyle, including sophisticated cutting tools and remains of stegodons, dwarf forerunners of modern elephants. The stegodon bones have cut marks on them, suggesting they had been butchered. Other animal bones and stones at the site were charred, suggesting the hobbits knew how to light fires.
“This type of complex behaviour probably required the ability to talk,” says Morwood. "But there is no evidence for burial of the dead, art, ornaments or other types of symbolic behaviour.”
Island isolation
Some sceptics have claimed that LB1 was simply a modern human with a condition called microencephaly – an abnormally small brain. But the new finds all came from individuals with the same size bodies as LB1, only about a metre tall. This supports the idea that Homo floresiensis is indeed a species in its own right.
Morwood and his colleagues proposed previously that the hobbits are dwarf forms of Homo erectus, a forerunner of modern humans, that evolved after being isolated on the island.
Sceptics such as Bob Martin, provost of the Field Museum in Chicago, US, hotly dispute this, claiming that the brain is only half the size it should be for a dwarfed version of Homo erectus.
And in the light of the new finds, Morwood's team is itself moving away from the dwarfing theory. The hobbits have disproportionately long arms relative to their legs, and so cannot be scaled-down versions either of modern humans or Homo erectus, who have had the same body proportions for 1.6 million years.
Ancestral line
They say that a more likely ancestral line goes back to australopithecine species such as 3-million-year-old “Lucy”, found in Ethiopia (Australopithecus afarensis).
“The combination of skeletal attributes that [the hobbits] share is not found in any modern human,” says team member Peter Brown. “The bones of the hands and feet don’t look like those of arboreal apes, but like everything else to do with Homo floresiensis, they are not like humans either.”
Martin remains unconvinced by the new finds. The “smoking gun”, he says, would be the discovery of another skull identical in size to LB1’s, but significantly older or younger, so it could not be a contemporaneous sibling.
The researchers counter that an additional jawbone found at the site is virtually identical in size to LB1’s, but is 3000 years younger.
The Australians and their Indonesian colleagues believe the issue will be settled by the discovery of more bones. “Only a few per cent of the site has been excavated, so the chance the site contains many others is very high,” says Morwood.
Source: NewScientist.com
www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8128