FLORES MAN

FLORES MAN FLORES MAN

Human evolution is like a bush, not a ladder.

Flores Man: The original skeleton, a female, stood at just 1 meter tall, weighed about 25 kilograms (55 pounds), and was around 30 years old at the time of her death 18,000 years ago. Modern pygmies are considerably taller, at about 1.4 to 1.5 meters. The skeleton was found in the same sediment deposits on Flores that have also been found to contain stone tools and the bones of dwarf elephants, giant rodents, and Komodo dragons --lizards that can grow to 3 meters and that still live today. The accompanying paper on the archaeology also shows the tools found with these little hominids; these weren't simple apes. They were making some wicked weapons and carving tools. Since then, at least seven individuals have been found, including males. "They had slightly longer arms than us. More conspicuously, they had hard, thicker eyebrow ridges than us, a sharply sloping forehead, and no chin."
. . The researchers found hobbit and pygmy stegodon remains only *below a 12,000-year-old volcanic ash layer. Modern human remains were found only *above the layer. Still, rumors, myths, and legends of tiny creatures have swirled around the isolated island for centuries. It's certainly possible that they interacted with modern humans. [& perhaps were killed off by them?] What was the nature of their interaction? We have absolutely no idea.
. . The find was covered in a documentary in early '05 on the National Geographic Channel.

Mar 13, 08: Large volumes of water ice have probably been detected below Mars' surface, far from the planet's polar ice caps, scientists have said. The radar data suggest that some of these features consist mostly of ice.
. . The Sharad radar experiment, on Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft made the discovery in Mars' mid-northern latitudes. The ice is found in distinctive geological structures on Mars' surface that are hundreds of meters thick.
. . Sharad (SHAllow RADar) is able to probe up to 1km beneath the Martian surface. Analysis of those waves that penetrate the soil and bounce back can give information on transitions between materials with different properties, such as rock and liquid water.
. . Mission scientists used Sharad to probe Martian surface features known as lobate debris aprons (LDAs). These distinctive, dome-shaped structures are concentrated around mid-latitudes in the planet's northern and southern hemispheres.
. . The researchers looked at LDAs in the Deuteronilus Mensae region of Mars' northern hemisphere, where the features can be found at the bases of valley walls, craters and scarps of mesas. Scientists have long suspected that LDAs were flows consisting of mixed up rock and ice. The radar penetrated these geological features with very little attenuation (reduction in signal strength), suggesting they were predominantly made of ice. "We would say, robustly, more than 50% ice by volume - but it could be much more", said Jeff Plaut.

Mar 10, 08: Tiny skeletons found in the caves of the Pacific islands of Palau undercut the theory that similar remains found in Indonesia might be a unique new species of humans, researchers reported. The Palau skeletons, which date to between 900 and 2,800 years ago, appear to have belonged to so-called insular dwarfs --humans who grew smaller as a result of living on an island, the researchers said.
. . Lee Berger of the U of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and colleagues say they cannot explain the Flores skeletons, but said they found some similar remains in Palau, one of the islands of Micronesia. "These rock islands contain numerous caves and rock shelters, and many of these sites contain abundant fossilized or subfossilized human remains. At least ten burial caves have been discovered in the rock islands, and excavations at one of them (Chelechol ra Orrak) has produced the skeletal remains of at least 25 individuals",they added.
. . Like the skeletons found on Flores, these are very small, with small heads and some features that are considered primitive for modern Homo sapiens. One adult male would have weighed around 43 kg and one female would have weighed around 29 kg, they estimated. Such "insular dwarfism" has been seen in several species of animals including extinct mammoths and elephants from islands off Siberia, California and the Mediterranean.
. . The Palau skeletons are clearly modern humans, however, the researchers note. They cannot closely examine the skulls yet as they are embedded in rock. The Flores skeleton had very small skulls with tiny brain cases.

Mar 5, 08: Small human-like skeletons found in a cave on a remote Indonesian island were actually human and their miniature features probably due to nutritional deficiency --iodine and other dietary deficiencies-- some researchers in Australia say.
. . Cretinism is a condition of severely stunted physical and mental growth due to a congenital deficiency of thyroid hormones. "We believe they were homo sapiens but with this disorder ... cretins born without the thyroid gland."

Sept 20, 07: Scientists, wringing their hands over the identity of the famed "hobbit" fossil, have found a new clue in the wrist. Since the discovery of the bones in Indonesia in 2003, researchers have wrangled over whether the find was an ancient human ancestor or simply a modern human suffering from a genetic disorder.
. . Now, a study of the bones in the creature's left wrist lends weight to the human ancestor theory. The wrist bones of the 3-foot-tall creature, technically known as Homo floresiensis, are basically indistinguishable from an African ape or early hominin-like wrist and nothing at all like that seen in modern humans and Neandertals, according to the research team led by Matthew W. Tocheri of the Smithsonian.
. . "Basically, the wrist evidence tells us that modern humans and Neandertals share an evolutionary grandparent that the hobbits do not, but all three share an evolutionary great-grandparent. If you think of modern humans and Neandertals as being first cousins, then the hobbit is more like a second cousin to both", Tocheri said.

Jan 29, 07: The tiny woman dubbed the Hobbit who lived 18,000 years ago on a remote Indonesian island deserves to be deemed a new human species and not a deformed modern human as skeptics assert, researchers said.
. . In the latest salvo in a heated scientific shootout, an international team led by Florida State U anthropologist Dean Falk compared the Hobbit's skull to those of nine people with microcephaly, a rare condition in which the head is abnormally small due to improper brain development.
. . They concluded the 1-meter-tall adult woman had a highly evolved brain, unlike that of a microcephalic person, confirming she belongs to the proposed extinct species Homo floresiensis, closely related to modern Homo sapiens. "Lo and behold, it doesn't look anything like a microcephalic. In fact, it's antithetical," Falk said.

Jan 24, 07: Archaeologists who found the remains of human "Hobbits" have permission to restart excavations at the cave where the specimens were found. "We'll probably be in there towards the middle of the year." Indonesian officials had blocked access to the cave since 2005, following a dispute over the bones --reportedly due to political sensitivities. "You've got to get there in the dry season."
. . The researchers claim that the remains belong to a novel species of human. But some researchers reject this assertion, claiming instead that the remains could belong to a modern human with a combination of small stature and a brain disorder.
. . Finding other specimens in the cave, particularly one with an intact skull, is crucial to resolving the debate over whether the Hobbit's classification as a separate species --Homo floresiensis-- is valid.
. . Skeletal remains were discovered by an Australian-Indonesian research team in Liang Bua, a limestone cave deep in the Flores jungle, in 2003. Researchers found one near-complete skeleton, which they named LB1, along with the remains of at least eight other individuals.
. . LB1 was an adult female who lived 18,000 years ago who stood just 1m tall and possessed a brain size of around 400 cc --about the same as that of a chimp. Long arms, a sloping chin and other primitive features suggested affinities to ancient human species such as Homo erectus and even earlier ones such as Homo habilis and Australopithecus.
. . Professor Teuku Jacob, based at Gadjah Mada U, in Indonesia, contended that the bones of LB1 could have been those of a pygmy person with the condition microcephaly, which is characterized by a small brain.
. . In 2004, Professor Jacob --known as Indonesia's "king of palaeoanthropology"-- took the bones away from their repository in Jakarta to his lab, 443km away, against the wishes of the researchers who found them. They were eventually returned. But the discoverers claimed the bones were extensively damaged in Jacob's lab during attempts to make casts.

Oct 17, 05: The team behind the "Hobbit" finds have been widening their search for remains of the strange little humans on Flores island --with tantalizing results. Since last year, the remains of at least nine individuals have been found in a cave on the Indonesian island.
. . The discovery team has now excavated more than 500 stone tools from another, much older, site about 40km away. They believe a population ancestral to the Hobbits may have lived at this site, which is 850,000 years old.
. . The skeletal remains of Homo floresiensis, as they are more properly called, were all unearthed from cave deposits at Liang Bua on Flores. There is evidence these people inhabited the site from perhaps 100,000 to 12,000 years ago. The sites at Liang Bua and Mata Menge are separated by some 700,000 years. Yet stone tools found at both sites are small and well-crafted, Professor Morwood said.
. . DNA is often preserved within teeth, and can be recovered by drilling inside one. But Professor Morwood said the H. floresiensis teeth recovered from Liang Bua were too scientifically valuable to allow them to be drilled.
. . Australian scientists Michael Morwood and Peter Brown's new idea is even more audacious: the hobbits, they suggest, may come directly from the Australopithecus family, which went extinct something like 2 million years ago. Their detailed argument for this notion has yet to be published.

Oct 12, 05: Scientists say they have found more bones in an Indonesian cave that offer additional evidence of a second human species —-short and hobbit-like-— that roamed the Earth the same time as modern man.
. . The discovery of a jaw bone represents the ninth individual belonging to a group believed to have lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. The bones are in a wet cave on the island of Flores in the eastern limb of the Indonesian archipelago, near Australia.
. . These diminutive skeletons belonged to a remnant population of prehistoric humans that were marooned on Flores with dwarf elephants and other miniaturized animals, giving the discovery a kind of fairy tale quality. If true, the discovery grafts a strange and tangled evolutionary branch near the very top of the human family tree.
. . The same team of Australian and Indonesian scientists working in Liang Bua cave on Flores report finding a variety of additional bones buried at various depths. Among them, bones from the right arm of the previously discovered 18,000-year old female. They labeled her LB1. And, they report finding the lower jaw bone that does not belong to any of the previously discovered individuals.
. . An analysis of firepit charcoal found nearby in the excavation layer suggests the jawbone is 15,000 years old. It suggests a weaker chin with smaller tooth dimensions than LB1, but otherwise shares the same characteristics. "They almost certainly belong to the same species", Lieberman concluded.

Sept 21, 05: Scientists are to present new evidence that the tiny human species dubbed "The Hobbit" may not be what it seems. The researchers say their findings strongly support an idea that the 1meter tall female skeleton from Indonesia is a diseased modern human.
. . The Hobbit's discoverers are adamant that it is an entirely separate human species, which evolved a small size in isolation on its remote island home of Flores. Analysis of the 18,000-year-old remains showed the Hobbit had reached adulthood, despite her diminutive size. Long arms, a sloping chin, and other primitive features suggested affinities to ancient human species such as Homo erectus.
. . And Homo floresiensis, as science properly calls the creature, seems to exhibit other oddities, such as lower premolar teeth with twin roots. In most modern humans, the lower premolars have a single root.
. . But there's a problem with the sceptics' version of the story. The Hobbit team has found *more human remains. These include a lower jaw with the same unusual features as the original find (including twin roots to the molars).
. . "Let's buy into [the sceptics'] argument just for a bit of fun", said Professor Bert Roberts of the University of Wollongong, Australia, a member of the discovery team. "We've got a complete lower jaw that's identical to the first so there we have a situation where we've now got to have two really badly diseased individuals. We've got a diseased population like some sort of leper colony, living in Liang Bua 18,000 years ago. The probabilities have got to be vanishingly small."

Mar 3, 05: Despite having very small brains -—roughly the size of a chimpanzee's-— Flores man appears to have hunted animals twice their size, made stone tools for hunting and butchering, and used fire for cooking.
. . Falk and her team created a virtual, three-dimensional cast of the interior of the fossilized H. floresiensis skull. Called an endocast, the model shows a variety of features, including the brain's size, shape, vessels, and convolutions.
. . This hobbit endocast was then compared with virtual endocasts and latex endocasts of modern humans, gorillas, chimpanzees, an adult female Pygmy, and three early human ancestors: Australopithecus africanus, a species that lived around 2.5 million years ago; Paranthropus aethiopicus, a species that appears in the fossil record about 2.7 million years ago, and Homo erectus, a species that lived from about 1,600,000 to 250,000 years ago. "It does, with some differences, most resemble endocasts of H. erectus."

. . Some suggest that H. floresiensis existed as a species before arriving on Flores --that it was already tiny on arrival. It's possible, they say, that there was a small-bodied, small-brained, as yet unknown species of human ancestor (possibly H. floresiensis) that may have left Africa at around the same time as Homo erectus, about 1.8 million years ago. "We're not dismissing the island-dwarfing hypothesis. It's just that we think the other seems maybe a little stronger", Hildebolt said.
. . Some scientists have speculated that the hobbit fossil was not of a new species but rather of a modern human with microcephaly, a birth defect in which a person has an abnormally small brain. To address this concern, Falk's team also compared the hobbit braincase to that of a known modern human microcephalic. "We think it least resembles a microcephalic", Hildebolt said. "It has a lateral profile that is somewhat similar to a Homo erectus, but it has other features that are similar to modern humans. The combination is unique."
. . Although much smaller than in modern humans, the hobbit's frontal lobe contains a region known as Brodmann's area 10, which is very convoluted and has large swellings. In the modern human brain, area 10 is associated with higher cognitive processes such as planning ahead and taking initiative.
. . When scaled for size, the hobbit also has larger temporal lobes than Homo erectus does. In modern humans, the temporal lobes are associated with hearing and understanding speech.

Mar 3, 05: Scientists working with powerful imaging computers say the spectacular "Hobbit" fossil recently discovered in Indonesia had distinctive brain features that could justify its classification as a separate —-and tiny-— human ancestor. The new report, in the online journal Science Express, seems to support the idea of a human dwarf species marooned for eons while modern man spread across the planet. Detractors of the theory, however, said the computer models were unconvincing.
. . The new research produced a computer-generated model that compared surface impressions on the inside of the fossil skull with brain casts of modern and ancient humans, as well as chimps and other primates. The scientists said the model shows that the 3-foot specimen, nicknamed Hobbit, had a brain unlike anything they had seen before in recent human lineage. The brain is chimplike in size, between 380 and 420 cc's.
. . Despite being up to two-thirds smaller than a modern human brain, the Hobbit fossil's brain shared wrinkled surface features with the brains of both modern humans and Homo erectus, tool-making human ancestors that lived more than 1 million years ago, the researchers said. Some of those features are consistent with higher cognitive traits, they report. At the same time, they said the Hobbit brain was different from the brain of a modern human pygmy or a human with abnormal brain growth.
. . Katerina Semendeferi of the University of California-San Diego described it as a "cutting edge study." While the Hobbit brain does not fit neatly into an evolutionary pattern, she said it is too much to expect that all ancient humans would have brains that would neatly transition from ape to modern human. "There is increasing evidence that white matter and interconnectivity may be a critical component of human cognitive abilities", she said.

Oct 27, 04: Scientists in Australia have found a new species of tiny humans who lived about 13,000 years ago on an Indonesian island in a discovery that adds another piece to the complex puzzle of human evolution. This is the first time that the evolution of dwarfism has been recorded in a human relative.
. . Scientists have pieced together an image of a hairless, dark-skinned dwarf specie with a head the size of a grapefruit, sunken eyes, a flat nose and large teeth and mouth projecting forward with virtually no chin.
. . The partial skeleton of Homo floresiensis, found in a cave on the island of Flores, is of an adult female that was a meter 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.
. . They 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.
. . The discovery of hominids on Flores was unexpected, as no Asian land animal at the time had crossed the sea to the islands in eastern Indonesia, and hominids were not believed to be developed enough to build and sail a craft. Despite the shrinking of the brain, "Flores man" still performed complex tasks like making miniature stone tools, hunting miniature Stegodon elephants and giant Komodo dragons and using fire to cook.
. . They expect to discover more new species of hominids on neighboring islands. "So, you're likely to have a distinctive little hominid population on Lombok, on Sumbawa, on Timor, and on Sulawesi, and each of those will be distinct species, because they will have evolved in isolation."
. . Local legends tell of little creatures existing on islands long ago but there has been no evidence of them. [this tells us how very long a legend can be passed down thru the generations!! Or...]
. . Flores man's time overlaps modern humans by about 40,000 years, but it is not clear whether there was any interaction between the two on Flores. Scientists suspect "Flores man" became extinct after a massive volcanic eruption on the island around 12,000 years ago, but local folk tales suggest the hominids may have still been living on Flores up until the Dutch arrived in the 1500s!
. . 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. They became isolated on Flores and evolved into the 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.
. . They've 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."
. . The discovery has astonished anthropologists unlike any in recent memory. Flores Man is a totally new creature that was fundamentally different from modern humans. Yet it lived until the threshold of recorded human history, probably crossing paths with the ancestors of today's islanders.
. . To others, the specimen's baffling combination of slight dimensions and coarse features bears almost no meaningful resemblance either to modern humans or to our large, archaic cousins. They suggest that Flores Man doesn't belong in the genus Homo at all, even if it was a recent contemporary. But they are unsure how to classify the species.
. . In 1998, stone tools and other evidence found on Flores suggested the presence 900,000 years ago of another early human, Homo erectus.

The hominin bones were not fossilized, but in a condition the team described as being like "mashed potatoes", a result of their age and the damp conditions. "The skeleton had the consistency of wet blotting paper, so a less experienced excavator might have trashed the find."
. . Researchers are hoping to find DNA in the bones, which would help to clarify the relationships between species. Probably descended from full-sized Homo erectus that made landfall on Flores as much as 900,000 years ago.
. . In the light of the Flores skeleton, a recent initiative to scour central Sumatra for 'orang pendek' can be viewed in a more serious light. This supposed small, hairy, manlike creature has hitherto been known only from Malay folklore, a debatable strand of hair and a footprint. Now, cryptozoology, the study of such fabulous creatures, can come in from the cold.It had a brain size of only 380 cubic centimeters. That is less than one-third of the average brain size for a modern human and much smaller even than those of the primitive H. erectus skulls. The brain is the same size as a chimpanzee's, the brain-case is low with a prominent brow ridge at the front, and the lower jaw completely lacks a chin. However, as in modern humans, the face is small and delicate. It is tucked under the brain rather than thrust out in front, and the teeth are similar in size to our own.
. . The skeleton shows a similarly strange mixture of features. The hip-bone resembles those of the pre-human African species known as australopithecines (meaning 'southern apes'). But the legs are slight, and enough detail has been preserved to show that this creature definitely walked on two legs, as we do.

The Miocene ape fossil record is patchy; so finding such a complete fossil from this time period is unprecedented.
. . During the Miocene, Earth really was the planet of the apes. As many as 100 different ape species roamed the Old World, from France to China in Eurasia and from Kenya to Namibia in Africa.

If you got here from the GAIA HOME PAGE, click on
"minimize" or "eXit". (upper right browser buttons)
If you didn't: the site.)