Re: More Hobbit Bones - Pygmies?
- From: rmacfarl <rmacfarl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2008 01:11:16 -0700 (PDT)
On Mar 13, 7:06 am, Rich Travsky <traRvE...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13441-new-bones-suggest-hobbits.......
Amidst accusations of grave-robbing, researchers have uncovered bones that could
drive another nail into the Homo floresiensis coffin.
...
Now researchers have discovered that a nearby island was overrun by diminutive
humans as recently as 1400 years ago - but despite their size these people
clearly belonged to our species.
Lee Berger at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and
his team found the fragmentary remains of at least 26 individuals in two caves on
the Palauan archipelago in Micronesia, east of the Philippines.
Palau is much harder to reach than Flores, but Eckhardt points out that even here,
any isolation was short-lived - the small bones were found beneath the remains of
normal-sized humans from four centuries later. "The paper confirms that small body
size on a tiny island provides no proof of isolation and endemic speciation," he
says.
...
Ridiculous journalistic hype. Palau is a world away from Flores
geographically and temporally. The distance from Flores to the nearest
landfall in the Indonesian archipelago at 14KYA, vs. the sea journey
from the Phillipines to Palau 1.4KYA, consigns this comparison to the
category of "drawing a *very* long bow".
All it demonstrates is that humans can be dwarfed on islands. Wow -
who knew? - Well, everybody really. And if it could happen within the
human taxon within the last 2 milliennia, who is to say it could not
have progressed to full speciation in a few 10s of millenia?
I am still dubious about the validity of the floresiensis taxon, but
frankly I don't see how this ludicorus juxtaposition does anything to
shed light on the subject...
Ross Macfarlane
.
- References:
- More Hobbit Bones - Pygmies?
- From: Rich Travsky
- More Hobbit Bones - Pygmies?
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