A new study bolsters the claim that an ancient fossil discovered several years ago belongs to an entirely different species of tiny humanlike creatures. An analysis of an 18,000-year-old Homo floresiensis skull has proven that they were not the same species as modern humans, according to a study led by Dr. Karen Baab, Ph.D., a researcher in the Department of Anatomical Sciences at New York’s Stony Brook University, and Kieran McNulty, professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, published in the Journal of Human Evolution.
Some believe that the “hobbit” skeleton belonged to humans that had dwarfism or the disease microcephaly, which causes the brain to be smaller than normal. But Baab and McNulty say their analysis of the skull’s shape, which they then compared to samples from other extinct hominins and modern humans and apes, proves the microcephaly theory wrong.
“The overall shape of the LB1 skull, particularly the part that surrounds the brain (neurocranium) looks similar to fossils more than 1.5 million years older from Africa and Eurasia, rather than modern humans, even though Homo floresiensis is documented from 17,000 to 95,000 years ago,” said Baab in a Stony Brook University news release.
I knew it! One look at those feet and you just know that ain’t human.
Wonder what the women looked like ?
From the Science Direct abstract, “Taken together, these findings suggest that H. floresiensis was most likely the diminutive descendant of a species of archaic Homo, although the details of this evolutionary history remain obscure.”
I’m surprised there is so much debate about this. The answer should be easy to determine. Here’s the abstract for the article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
http://pnas.org/content/105/12/4650.abstract
The surprising bit to me is that (from a 2 day class at the American Museum of Natural History) there are two unique features of the skulls of homo sapiens. One is a small ridge in the middle of the chin, just below the teeth, that you can feel with your finger through your skin. This is more pronounced in males. The other is a small indent in each of our eyebrow ridges that can also be felt with your finger if you firmly rub your finger over your eyebrows.
It seems to me that it should be fairly simple with a complete skull to check for these two features.
#1 Lou said: “Wonder what the women looked like ?”
Lou – are you sure your name isn’t James Kirk?
Anthropologists are constantly having to go back and redo.
#1 – Lou,
The most complete skeleton is of an adult female. So, this is what the women looked like, at least a bit beneath the skin.
http://tinyurl.com/b3q439
Lou, this wasn’t what your were thinking about, was it?
#7 I never thought of Frodo and Sam in that way. Merry and Pippin on the other hand…
Hugh Ripper, there are reasons why Sam is so interested in elves and redecorating.
Actually when the big toe doesn’t stick out anywhere near as far as the second toe that’s not normal and that is what a hobbit foot looks like. The had big feet for their size too but I can’t vouch for the hair. We haven’t found any the last I heard.
#6, Tap that!
#8 – As correctly pointed out in Clerks 2, all hobbits are gay. And a movie about them skipping through the woods all day didn’t help.
How nice that science must keep correcting its mistakes (but not the school text books), while the Biblical scholars don’t have to. And yet, this is suppose to make science’s theories of where mankind comes from, more “believable”? Oh yeah! Constantly reguessing and reshuffling the Tree of Life, is a solid basis for toppling the 2,000 year old religious view. I say that the natural sciences are as derivative as the subprime mortgage market. And you see what faith in the latter, got us. Until they actually crack the DNA code, they’re only guessing at what became what.
Classifying where plants and animals fall in a neat little catalog, doesn’t mean they evolved from each other, that way. It’s all just a taxonomical arrangement, that got super-sized into a career science.