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Hobbit remains found in Australia

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sonicfan

Venerable Member
Hobbit remains found in Australia

1 hour, 5 minutes ago

By Patricia Reaney

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists in Australia have found a new species of hobbit-sized humans who lived about 18,000 years ago on an Indonesian island in a discovery that adds another piece to the complex puzzle of human evolution.



The partial skeleton of Homo floresiensis, found in a cave on the island of Flores, is of an adult female that was a metre (3 feet) tall, had a chimpanzee-sized brain and was substantially different from modern humans.

It shared the isolated island to the east of Java with miniature elephants and Komodo dragons. The creature walked upright, probably evolved into its dwarf size because of environmental conditions and coexisted with modern humans in the region for thousands of years.

"It is an extraordinarily important find," Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London, told a news conference on Wednesday. "It challenges the whole idea of what it is that makes us human."

Peter Brown of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, and his colleagues made the discovery of the skull and other bones, and miniature tools in September 2003 while looking for records of modern human migration to Asia. They reported the finding in the science journal Nature.

"Finding these hominins on an isolated island in Asia, and with elements of modern human behaviour in tool making and hunting, is truly remarkable and could not have been predicted by previous discoveries," Brown said in a statement.

Local legends tell of hobbit-like creatures existing on islands long ago but there has been no evidence of them.

DESCENDENT OF HOMO ERECTUS

The hominin family tree, which includes humans and pre-humans, diverged from the chimpanzee line about 7 million years ago. Early African hominins walked upright, were small and had tiny brains.

The new species, dubbed "Flores man", is thought to be a descendent of Homo erectus, which had a large brain, was full-sized and spread out from Africa to Asia about 2 million years ago.

The new species became isolated on Flores and evolved into its dwarf form to conform with conditions, such as food shortages. Flores, which was probably never connected to the mainland, was home to a variety of exotic creatures including a dwarf form of the primitive elephant Stegodon.

Modern humans had reached Australia about 45,000 years ago but they may not have passed through Flores. The scientists suspect the new species became extinct after a massive volcanic eruption on the island about 12,000 years ago.

Brown and his colleagues have found the remains of seven other dwarf individuals at the same site since the first find.

"The other individuals all show similar characteristics, and over a time range that now extends from as long ago as 95,000 years to as recently as 13,000 years ago -- a population of hobbits that seemed to disappear at about the same time as the pygmy elephants that they hunted," said Bert Roberts, one of the authors of the Nature study.

Story link
 

sonicfan

Venerable Member
Also here

Tiny new species of human unearthed

18:00 27 October 04

NewScientist.com news service


99996588F1.JPG

Ebu's skull (left) is much smaller than that of a modern human (Image: Peter Brown)

The remains of a tiny and hitherto unknown species of human that lived as recently as 13,000 years ago have been discovered on an Indonesian island.

The discovery has been heralded as the most important palaeoanthropological find for 50 years, and has radically altered the accepted picture of human evolution.

The skull and bones of one adult female, and fragments from up to six other specimens, were found in the Liang Bua limestone caves on Flores Island, which lies at the eastern tip of Java.

The female skeleton, known as LB1 - or by the nickname "Ebu" - has been assigned to a new species within the genus Homo - Homo floresiensis. Examination of the remains shows members of the species stood just 1 metre tall and had a brain no bigger than a grapefruit.

A handful of stone tools from the same period were also found in the caves, along with the bones and teeth of several dwarf stegodons, an ancestor of the modern elephant. Other animal remains, including rats, bats and fish, show signs that they were cooked around the time H. floresiensis inhabited in the caves.


Jaw-dropping


Instead of following a simple evolutionary path culminating in modern humans - Homo sapiens - the discovery of LB1 suggests early humans branched into many more forms than previously thought - some of which survived until very recently. The find also shows that small-brained humans could evolve without losing much of their intelligence.

"It is literally jaw-dropping," says Bernard Wood, an anthropologist at George Washington University in Washington DC, US. "The implications for the evolution of the [human] brain are among the most interesting."

99996588F2.JPG

The Liang Bua site has been excavated for the last 20 years (Image: Michael Morewood)

Worn molars


Indonesian archaeologists have dug at the Liang Bua cave site for the past 20 years, so at first the small skull misled the excavation team.

"We thought the skull and the mandible was from a child," says excavation site director Thomas Sutikna of the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology, who was there when the discovery was made in September 2003. "But after a week, we checked the teeth and saw that they were already worn, and that the molars had erupted, so she was more than 20 years old."

The authenticity of the remains has been confirmed by three-dimensional X-ray images which revealed the internal structure of the skull of LB1, something that would be virtually impossible to fake.

Accelerator mass spectrometry dating suggests that LB1's remains are 18,000 years old. But New Scientist has learned that some bone fragments could be as young as 13,000 years old. The oldest remains from the site are 78,000 and 94,000 years old, respectively.

This means H. floresiensis survived well beyond the last Neanderthals, which are thought to have disappeared from Europe and western Asian about 28,000 years ago.


Splendid isolation


"The most remarkable thing is that there was a time, not so long ago, when two very different human species walked the planet," says Peter Brown of the University of New England, Australia, who lead the team that made the discovery.

H. floresiensis is thought to have descended from a population that became marooned on Flores during the last few hundred thousand years. Its tiny size was probably an adaptation to isolated island conditions, where a low calorie diet and the lack of large predators made smaller physical characteristics advantageous.

There is no evidence the Flores was ever linked by land to other parts of south-east Asia, so the ancestors of this species might have used boats or rafts to reach it. But the fact this population evidently became isolated suggests that they may have relied on temporary land links to first reach the island.

What caused the demise of H. floresiensis is unknown. It is possible that they were out-competed for food and other resources by H. sapiens or that they were wiped out by a volcanic eruption about 12,000 years ago.

Journal reference: Nature (vol 431, p 1055, p 1087)
 

MrCheez

President/Creative Director of Grumpyface Studios
Very interesting.

I like how the first article actually refers to them as "Hobbit" remains. :lol
 
If there is one thing watching Dr. Who taught me, is that these extinctions are clearly the result of the Daleks and Cybermen dropping by every 10,000 years.

Seriously though, interesting article.
 

Ripclawe

Banned
http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/10/28/whuman228.xml

Richard Roberts, discoverer of the Hobbit, says local tales suggest the species could still exist



When I was back in Flores earlier this month we heard the most amazing tales of little, hairy people, whom they called Ebu Gogo - Ebu meaning grandmother and Gogo meaning 'he who eats anything'. The tales contained the most fabulous details - so detailed that you'd imagine there had to be a grain of truth in them.

One of the village elders told us that the Ebu Gogo ate everything raw, including vegetables, fruits, meat and, if they got the chance, even human meat.

When food was served to them they also ate the plates, made of pumpkin - the original guests from hell (or heaven, if you don't like washing up and don't mind replacing your dinner set every week).

The villagers say that the Ebu Gogo raided their crops, which they tolerated, but decided to chase them away when the Ebu Gogo stole - and ate - one of their babies.


The anatomical details in the legends are equally fascinating. They are described as about a metre tall, with long hair, pot bellies, ears that slightly stick out, a slightly awkward gait, and longish arms and fingers - both confirmed by our further finds this year.

They [the Ebu Gogo] murmured at each other and could repeat words [spoken by villagers] verbatim. For example, to 'here's some food', they would reply 'here's some food'. They could climb slender-girthed trees but, here's the rub, were never seen holding stone tools or anything similar, whereas we have lots of sophisticated artefacts in the H. floresiensis levels at Liang Bua. That's the only inconsistency with the Liang Bua evidence.

The women Ebu Gogo had extremely pendulous breasts, so long that they would throw them over their shoulders, which must have been quite a sight in full flight.
 
D

Deleted member 1235

Unconfirmed Member
I wonder if big people doing it with little people is how we got dwarves.
 

Mengy

wishes it were bannable to say mean things about Marvel
Very cool discovery. I always knew hobbits were real. I want one as a pet.
 

levious

That throwing stick stunt of yours has boomeranged on us.
Zilch said:
Ever hear of theistic evolution? Oh wait, you probably don't know shit about Christianity.

Interesting discovery.

Bringing up something like theistic evolution will not win you many intellectual points. Don't get me wrong though, you can believe whatever you want.
 

J2 Cool

Member
Cimarron said:
Clone the lil son of a bitch I say.

hey hey hey hey, you don't know his mother, and she doesn't know you! How bout we just leave it at that? Now let's clone the little bastard!
 
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