Re: Importance of Flores Overstated?

From: Daryl Habel (Dar_83001_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 11/07/04 

Date: 6 Nov 2004 17:01:25 -0800

richardparker01@yahoo.com (richard01) wrote in message news:<6e30eb22.0411060046.42b7d0c3@posting.google.com>...
> Dar_83001@yahoo.com (Daryl Habel) wrote in message news:<d24f0b9f.0411051123.1249ea2@posting.google.com>...
> > "firstjois" <firstjoisyike@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<WY6dncXswoD1ThfcRVn-ow@comcast.com>...
> >
> > > Thanks, Dar, I think this is fascinating stuff but it's not going to change
> > > all the text books on evolution. Wonder if some old Dutch sailing logs
> > > might have some info hidden away!
> > >
> > > Jois
> >
> > Well, it will, at the very least,in some small way, certainly change
> > some text in paleoanthropology books. Evolutionary theory can
> > accomodate LB1, so that's not going to be re-written. Do we just
> > accept that LB1 is an insular dwarf erectine derived Homo? Even if
> > LB1 is not a dwarfed H. erectus, it is something that has to be
> > explained. Is the 380 cc brain pathological? Is it some kind of
> > cryptozoic extant Asian ape, maybe now extinct? Certainly there were
> > normal-sized H. sapiens seafarers in the Flores vicinity by 18,000
> > years ago, who could have been responsible for the sophisticated tools
> > (and, possibly, the death of LB1). If the 380 cc brain is not
> > pathological, and LB1 is some kind of Homo, it has by far the smallest
> > cranial capacity known for our genus. Someone will have to rewrite the
> > books on how LB1 came into existence. I'm not satified with the
> > Myotragus brain-size reduction explanation, and I've seen Ralph
> > Holloway's initial reaction on Anne G.'s Yahoo palanthsci group, so I
> > know I'm not alone with this uneasy feeling.
> >
> > Is the importance of Flores overstated? I don't think we really can
> > answer that yet. There's been an incredible amount of hype that has
> > accompanied this find, but very little in the way of comparative
> > anatomical analysis included in the few pages of the Nature (Brown et
> > al. 2004) journal article. I view this all as preliminary, so far.
> > Best,
> > Dar
 
> 1) Is it not possible that H Florensiensis moved from 'primitive' HE
> type 'Mousterian' tools to another type 'Gravettian' just like
> Neanderthal did?

The 840,000 year old "primitive He" tools on Flores are not
'Mousterian', but are Lower Paleolithic core-flake tools. Nor are the
Upper Pleistocene tools 'associated' with H. floresiensis assigned to
'Gravettian', although they do have Upper Paleolithic resemblances.
So, more correctly, it is possible that whoever made the
840,000-year-old tools (there are no associated fossil hominids with
the Lower Paleolithic tools) could have (provided there was continual
occupation on Flores until after 100,000 years ago) developed the
advanced industry over time.

But between 800,000 and 100,000 years ago neither tools or fossil
humans have been recovered on Flores, so there is no evidence for the
gap of 700,000 years.

> It seems we are still not at all sure how Neanderthal did this,
> whether he could communicate with, or procreate with HS or not, but
> still, when the Aurignacians came along, Neanderthal moved along and
> did his very best to copy.

??????????? That's your scenario, and others would disagree on some
aspects of the latter part of this sentence.
 
> 2)'Myotragus' is only one example of island dwarfism - there has been
> plenty of it. And there is also evidence from artificial breeding
> (Great Danes/Chihuahuas) that brain sizes can be reduced, along with
> body sizes, without huge effects on intelligence (my aunty's chihuahua
> is stupid, but so is my uncle's Great Dane - this may be due more to
> being coddled in a warm house and not being let out to hunt for a
> living, than to any difference in brain size).

Yes. What is your point?
 
> 3) All the information on H Floresiensis is still very limited - the
> diggers may well know (more or less) than they are prepared to
> publish. There may be readable DNA to be found - that might upset a
> lot of apple carts.

Yes. As I said above, I view all so far published as preliminary.
There could be more surprises.

>
> 4)You are discussing over on Yahoo-Paleanthro if H floresiensis could
> be a 'parallel evolution' descendant of hylobates (gibbon) - (a
> discussion from which I am unfortunately banned after making a
> silly-ass comment about elections). This is quite a reasonable
> proposition, and would open up a whole other pandora's box.
>
> However, it seems to partly depend on a hylobate radiation paper
> (Brandon Jones) which totally ignores the Mt Toba explosion (around
> 72000ya) which left so much volcanic ash in India that it can be
> matched and measured. The effect on the Mentawai Islands (Brandon
> Jones' presumed radiation centre for gibbons) - very near by - of a
> disaster which has been reckoned to have wiped out all life on Sumatra
> was not even noted. Not to mention that the Mentawais are 150 miles
> offshore from 'mainland' Indonesia and they have an endemic gibbon of
> their own.

Did Toba cause the extinction of all life in Southeast Asia? Obviously
not!!! The principal direction of the Toba ash cloud fallout was
northwest toward India. Not all gibbon ancestors in SE Asia were
brought to extinction by Toba. The Brandon-Jones paper raises the
point that volcanic islands are recolonized in a rather short time
(geologically speaking). The Paleoanthro group discussion is not
about gibbons colonizing Flores, it questions the possibility of
whether a Pleistocene hylobatid (siamang-like) ancestor could evolve
into 'H.' floresiensis. Apparently a lot of folks seem to think that
a Pleistocene hylobatid ancestor and a modern-day gibbon are one and
the same. They are not. At Paleoanthro, the discussion is only
examining the possibility of hylobatid ancestry, not pressing this
hypothesis forward as a theory.

Dar

>
> 5)I have no trouble at all in accepting 'island dwarfism' in humans
> (any more than I do with the evidence of dwarfism of elephants, goats,
> deer (in Jersey within a demonstrable period of only 6000 years), etc,
> and maybe even the Komodo 'dragon' itself - it once had an Australian
> cousin 2.5 times as long and 4 times as heavy. That's just a bit more
> than the difference between HF & HE.
>
> 6)If we accept that H Floresiensis is only a (fairly unimportant)
> branch-line in our family, I (IMHO) think that the long persistence of
> H erectus (if all those tools found all over the place belong to him)
> for at least 1 million years needs some real explanation (or some more
> digging).
>
> 7) These things go in cycles - I would refer you to
> http://www.uiowa.edu/~bioanth/giganto.html
> and the quote from it:
>
> "Meanwhile, however, Weidenreich, who had retreated from Beijing to
> the American Museum of Natural History in New York, set about studying
> plaster casts of the four teeth. Because of the unusually large size
> of a few of the Homo erectus specimens from Java, Weidenreich came up
> with the notion that there had been a period of gigantism in human
> evolution, and that modern humans were the diminutive descendants of
> these giants. In Apes, Giants, and Man, published in 1946, he argued
> that the Gigantopithecus teeth were humanlike, and that von
> Koenigswald had been mistaken in considering the animal an ape rather
> than a member of the human family tree"
>
>
> regards
> Richard
> My Seashore Foraging & Fishing weblog is up and running at
> coconutstudio.blogspot.com