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Tuesday, October 11, 2005
"Hobbits" back in the news
Carl Zimmer, writer of one of my new favorite blogs The Loom, has a good post revisiting the H. floresiensis discovery last year on the Indonesian island of Flores (as well as a link to an archive of past posts). Peter Brown and company have published another article in Nature further supporting the classification of floesiensis as a human species.
In this week's issue of Nature, the scientists describe bones from nine individuals from the Liang Bua cave. Some of the bones--parts of the right arm and jaw--belong to an individual. Other leg bones, shoulder bones, and various bits of fingers and toes come from other levels in the cave. They were laid down in the cave over thousands of years, the youngest being just 12,000 years old--around the time when our ancestors were inventing agriculture.
The key conclusion of the paper is that these fossils look a lot like the original Hobbit bones reported last year. The new jaw, for example, has the same peculiar roots on its teeth as the old one, and both also lack a chin. If the original Hobbit was just a pathological human, the authors argue, then all of these new individuals would have to be pathological too. And the fact that these fossils span 80,000 years makes it even harder to hold the pathology argument. According to Harvard's Daniel Lieberman this pattern refutes the aberrant dwarf argument, which now "strains credulity," as he writes in an accompany commentary.
More: AP reports on the discovery of another H. floresiensis jawbone.
Posted by Will at October 11, 2005 09:50 AM in Anthropology | In the News