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Anthropologist Confirms ‘Hobbit’ Indeed a Separate Species

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Europa
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« on: January 30, 2007, 07:57:09 pm »

Anthropologist Confirms ‘Hobbit’ Indeed a Separate Species

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ANTHROPOLOGY, HOBBIT, HOMO FLORESIENSIS, EVOLUTION, INDONESIA, FLORES, BRAIN, PNAS, DEAN FALK, HOMO SAPIENS, HUMANS, HUMAN ORIGIN 
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After the skeletal remains of an 18,000-year-old, Hobbit-sized human were discovered on island of Flores in 2003, some scientists thought that the specimen must have been a human with an abnormally small skull. Not so, said Dean Falk, a world-renowned paleoneurologist and chair of Florida State University’s anthropology department, in Tallahassee, Fla.. 

 
 
 

Newswise — After the skeletal remains of an 18,000-year-old, Hobbit-sized human were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, some scientists thought that the specimen must have been a pygmy or a microcephalic — a human with an abnormally small skull.

Not so, said Dean Falk, a world-renowned paleoneurologist and chair of Florida State University’s anthropology department, who along with an international team of experts created detailed maps of imprints left on the ancient hominid’s braincase and concluded that the so-called Hobbit was actually a new species closely related to Homo sapiens.

Now after further study, Falk is absolutely convinced that her team was right and that the species cataloged as LB1, Homo floresiensis, is definitely not a human born with microcephalia — a somewhat rare pathological condition that still occurs today. Usually the result of a double-recessive gene, the condition is characterized by a small head and accompanied by some mental retardation.

“We have answered the people who contend that the Hobbit is a microcephalic,” Falk said of her team’s study of both normal and microcephalic human brains published in the Jan. 29 issue of the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States).

The debate stemmed from the fact that archaeologists had found sophisticated tools and evidence of a fire near the remains of the 3-foot-tall adult female with a brain roughly one-third the size of a contemporary human.

“People refused to believe that someone with that small of a brain could make the tools. How could it be a sophisticated new species?”

But that’s exactly what it is, according to Falk, whose team had previously created a “virtual endocast” from a three-dimensional computer model of the Hobbit’s braincase, which reproduces the surface of the brain including its shape, grooves, vessels and sinuses. The endocasts revealed large parts of the frontal lobe and other anatomical features consistent with higher cognitive processes.

“LB1 has a highly evolved brain,” she said. “It didn’t get bigger, it got rewired and reorganized, and that’s very interesting.”

In this latest study, the researchers compared 3-D, computer-generated reconstructions of nine microcephalic modern human brains and 10 normal modern human brains. They found that certain shape features completely separate the two groups and that Hobbit classifies with normal humans rather than microcephalic humans in these features. In other ways, however, Hobbit’s brain is unique, which is consistent with its attribution to a new species.

Comparison of two areas in the frontal lobe, the temporal lobe and the back of the brain show the Hobbit brain is nothing like a microcephalic’s and is advanced in a way that is different from living humans. In fact, the LB1 brain was the “antithesis” of the microcephalic brain, according to Falk, a finding the researchers hope puts this part of the Hobbit controversy to rest.

It’s time to move on to other important questions, Falk said, namely the origin of this species that co-existed at the same time that Homo sapiens was presumed to be the Earth’s sole human inhabitant.

“It’s the $64,000 question: Where did it come from?” she said. “Who did it descend from, who are its relatives, and what does it say about human evolution? That’s the real excitement about this discovery.”

Falk’s co-authors on the PNAS paper, “Brain shape in human microcephalics and Homo floresiensis,” are Charles Hildebolt, Kirk Smith and Fred Prior of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis; M.J. Morwood of the University of New England in Australia; Thomas Sutikna, E. Wayhu Saptomo and Jatmiko of the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology in Indonesia; Herwig Imhof of the Medical University of Vienna, Austria; and Horst Seidler of the University of Vienna, Austria.



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http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/526845/
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« Reply #1 on: January 30, 2007, 07:59:42 pm »

Cavern may hold answers to hobbits riddleBy Leigh Dayton
January 30, 2007 06:30am


THE chance discovery of an enormous chamber beneath the Indonesian cave where hobbit-like creatures were discovered promises to settle the debate about who - or what - the tiny creatures were.

Scientists are confident the mystery will be solved if they can extract DNA from hobbit remains they expect to find among the rubble of 32,000- to 80,000-year-old bones and stone tools littering the cavern floor.

"Well, well, well, well, well; this will settle the matter," said Colin Groves, a physical anthropologist at the Australian National University in Canberra.

He said obtaining a CSI-style DNA-profile of the 1m-tall creatures - named Homo floresiensis - would prove conclusively if they were members of a new human species, as their discoverers claimed, or deformed modern people, as alleged by sceptics.

The original hobbit remains, found four years ago, have so far failed to yield any DNA.

The Australian learned of the new chamber and its DNA potential yesterday, just as international scientists reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science that they had compared a series of normal and abnormal human skulls with that of the hobbit and found that the hobbit was not an abnormal modern human.

The unexpected discovery of a chamber in the Flores island cave was made last year by an Australian-Indonesian team - led by ANU paleoclimatologist Mike Gagan - while they were investigating ancient climates.

An expert caver assisting in sample retrieval abseiled down a 23m-long sinkhole, inaccessible to the original team, at the back of Liang Bua Cave and found the chamber.

"I'd be very surprised if hobbits didn't fall down there," said archeologist Mike Morwood, co-leader of the team that discovered the hobbits.

"If they get (uncontaminated) bone and DNA out of there, it would be mind-boggling," said Professor Morwood, of Wollongong University.

According to Dr Gagan, they found bones of numerous species, from stegodons and giant rats to pigs and primates. Many showed evidence of butchery.

"The bones are also in pristine condition," he said.

Dr Gagan said he and his Indonesian colleagues surveyed just the top 5cm of a 5m-deep layer of mud in the 430sq m cavern. "Imagine what's below," he said. "It might have been a split-level home for hobbits."

Dr Gagan's team will return to the cave in June, with additional members, including Alan Cooper, an expert in ancient DNA with Adelaide University, and CSIRO mammalogist Ken Aplin. Professor Morwood's group will also return to Liang Bua this year, after previously being denied access by Indonesian officials.

Both groups will continue to collaborate with the Indonesian National Research Centre for Archaeology. Dr Gagan's group is also working with the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.


http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,21140698-401,00.html

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« Reply #2 on: January 30, 2007, 08:05:02 pm »

Hobbit cave digs set to restart 


 
Researchers had not been able to excavate at the cave
Archaeologists who found the remains of human "Hobbits" have gained permission to restart excavations at the cave where the specimens were found.
Indonesian officials have blocked access to the cave since 2005, following a dispute over the bones.

But Professor Richard "Bert" Roberts, a member of the team that found the specimens, told BBC News the political hurdles had now been overcome.

The researchers claim that the remains belong to a novel species of human.

  South-East Asia and East Asia is going to yield an awful lot of surprises

Mike Morwood, UNE
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.

Political hurdle

"This year we will back in Liang Bua again, back in the cave where we found the Hobbits," said Professor Roberts, from the University of Wollongong in Australia.

 


The "Hobbit" has forced a re-think of human evolution
"This is good; we've now managed to get over the political hurdles that had been put up. We'll probably be in there towards the middle of the year."

The Hobbit's discoverers are adamant it is an entirely separate human species that evolved a small size in isolation on its remote Indonesian island home of Flores.

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.

Vertically challenged

LB1 was an adult female who lived 18,000 years ago, stood just 1m (3ft) tall and possessed a brain size of around 400 cubic cm (24 cu inches) - 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.

 
These observations could imply that humanlike creatures - hominids, or hominins - reached island South-East Asia much earlier than had been thought.




The find caused a sensation when it was unveiled in 2004, because it suggested human evolution had been much more complicated in South-East Asia than previously imagined. It also showed that another species of human had survived into "modern" times.

Mike Morwood, director of the excavation, told BBC News the remains at Liang Bua could be the tip of the iceberg: "South-East Asia and East Asia are going to yield an awful lot of surprises and it's going to make a major contribution to our understanding of hominin evolution."

But not all researchers were happy about this hand grenade being tossed into one of palaeoanthropology's hallowed vestibules.

Professor Teuku Jacob, based at Gadjah Mada University, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, contended that the bones of LB1 could have been those of a pygmy person with the condition microcephaly, which is characterised by a small brain.

Bone damage

In 2004, Professor Jacob - known as Indonesia's "king of palaeoanthropology" - took the bones away from their repository in Jakarta to his lab in Yogyakarta, 443km (275 miles) 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.

The damage included long, deep cuts marking the lower edge of the Hobbit's jaw on both sides, said to be caused by a knife used to cut away the rubber mould.

In addition, the chin of a second Hobbit jaw was snapped off and glued back together. Whoever was responsible misaligned the pieces and put them at an incorrect angle.

The pelvis was smashed, destroying details that reveal body shape, gait and evolutionary history.

After the accusations surfaced, Professor Jacob denied damaging the remains, telling USA Today that breakages could have occurred when the bones were being transported from Yogyakarta back to Jakarta.

Excavations at Liang Bua were reportedly blocked because Indonesian government officials would not issue exploration permits for projects that might prove Professor Jacob wrong.

Momentous discovery

But the remaining issues now appear to have been smoothed over.

"It's now a matter of getting everything organised so we can start digging again," said Professor Roberts.

"You've got to get there in the dry season; in the wet season you can hardly drive to the site and when you are there, there are puddles of water all over the floor - so it's got to be dry to sensibly dig holes."

Speaking to BBC News before permission was given to restart excavation, Mike Morwood, from the University of New England, Australia, was optimistic about future research into H. floresiensis and the record of human occupation in island South-East Asia.

"This particular discovery seems to have prompted people to rethink what it is to be human, the relationship between brain size and behaviour, and whether hominin populations have been insulated from environmental factors. This indicates that they haven't.

"It also raises questions about the colonisation capabilities of early hominids. What are they doing on Flores and what are they almost certainly doing on other islands in South-East Asia."

It is still not known how hominids travelled by sea between these islands. Building watercraft may have been a skill too advanced for them.

So natural catastrophes such as tsunamis have been invoked by some researchers to explain their distribution. Hominids could have clung to trees as they were washed out to sea, eventually arriving on the shores of other islands.



 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6294101.stm
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« Reply #3 on: February 18, 2007, 04:11:11 am »

Craniotomy in ancient China

2007-01-26 11:11

The modern technology of craniotomy, a surgical operation which is performed on the brain through an incision in the skull, may have been in use in China nearly 3,000 years ago. Scientists made the conclusion after a detailed study of 13 perforated skulls that had been unearthed in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.

The skulls were found in a cluster of more than 2,000 ancient tombs in the desert outside Turpan, 200 kilometers east of the regional capital Urumqi, said Lu Enguo, a researcher with the Xinjiang Institute of Archeology.

He said the skulls had between one to five holes each, although one had seven. "The holes were either round or square and the healing tissues near the holes suggested they must have been made while the people were still alive - probably for medical purposes," he explained. Through laboratory tests, Lu found that nearly all the perforated skulls had signs of brain injuries.

"They might have fallen off their horses, for example, so the shaman priests, who also worked as doctors in those times, probably performed a primitive version of life-saving craniotomy," he said.
Shamans enjoyed a lofty status in ancient society because people believed they could communicate with the gods and conjure up the dead. Shamanism used to be common in many parts of north China.

Lu and his colleagues also found 600 mummies in the tombs, a dozen of which are believed to have been shamans because sacks of marijuana leaves were found next to the corpses. "The marijuana must have been buried with the dead shamans who dreamed of continuing the profession in another world."

The best preserved mummy is a Caucasian male and about 1.2 meters long. Experts said the man must have been between 40 and 50 years old when he died.

The mummy was dressed in a leather coat, a knitted cloak, hat and boots. He wore earrings and a necklace, and held a copper laced staff in one hand and a bronze axe in the other. Three ancient harp-like string instruments were also discovered, which archaeologists believe were used by the shamans to communicate with the gods.

"We assume the shamans played them during religious rituals to inform the gods of human deaths," said Lu. Archaeologists assume the tombs, which date from the Bronze Ageto the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907), belonged to several large nomadictribes.

"Most of them moved to Turpan from Altay in the far north about 3,500 years ago and settled down there because of its mild climate," said Han Kangxin, an anthropologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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« Reply #4 on: February 21, 2007, 07:13:27 pm »

Very Interesting Europa

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« Reply #5 on: February 26, 2007, 01:36:16 pm »

Thanks, Unknown, I have developed a special fondness for these poor little people from the time of their discovery!

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« Reply #6 on: March 05, 2007, 06:07:59 am »

This isn't a current article, however, I thought it had some more good pictures on the Hobbits:

More bones of hobbit-sized humans discovered
New find adds to controversy over remains on Indonesian island



Scientists digging in a remote Indonesian cave have uncovered a jawbone that they say adds more evidence that a tiny prehistoric Hobbit-like species once existed.

The jaw is from the ninth individual 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.

The research team which reported the original sensational finding nearly a year ago strongly believes that the skeletons belong to a separate species of early human that shared Earth with modern humans far more recently than anyone thought.

The bones have enchanted many anthropologists who have come to accept the interpretation of these diminutive skeletons marooned on Flores with dwarf elephants and other miniaturized animals, giving the discovery a kind of fairy tale quality.

But a vocal scientific minority insists the specimens are nothing more than the bones of modern humans that suffered from microencephaly, a broadly defined genetic disorder that results in small brain size. The latest discovery on Flores, to be published in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature, does not change their minds, they said, with one critic describing the latest artifacts as “pretty scrappy.”

At least two groups of opponents have submitted their own studies to other leading scientific journals refuting the Flores work.

Evolutionary controversy
The result is a controversy unlike any other in the often-contentious study of human origins. Those caught in the middle say the debate is a real test for what we know about human evolution.

Daniel E. Lieberman of the Peabody Museum at Harvard said the specimens are so unusual that they deserve a more detailed analysis in order to adequately answer the critics.

“Many syndromes can cause microencephaly and dwarfism and they all need to be considered,” said Lieberman, who wrote a commentary in Nature. “The findings are not only astonishing, but also exciting because of the questions they raise.”

Bones from several generations
In the latest Nature study, the same team of Australian and Indonesian scientists working in trenches dug in Liang Bua cave found a variety of additional bones at various depths, suggesting the cave had been occupied for tens of thousands of years by several generations.

The most prominent specimen discovered in the latest batch is the lower jawbone from a separate individual. Dating of charcoal nearby in the excavation layer suggests that it is 15,000 years old.

They also found the right arm of the 18,000-year-old female announced last year, as well as fragments of other skeletons.

The jaw reported now has a weaker chin with smaller tooth dimensions than last year’s primary specimen, but otherwise shares the same characteristics.

Other artifacts in the cave include cut and charred bones of stegodon, a prehistoric pygmy elephant, and other animals, as well as a variety of sophisticated stone tools. The researchers said the artifacts offer further proof that the cave’s tiny inhabitants were capable of advanced thinking and behavior, like cooperative hunting.

Lingering questions
Critics say they have many lingering questions about the Flores discoveries.

“This paper doesn’t clinch it. I feel strongly that people are glossing over the problems with this interpretation,” said Robert Martin, a biological anthropologist and provost of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

In Martin’s view, the more likely scenario is that the specimens belonged to an extended family of modern humans, some of whom suffered from microencephaly, which often runs in families.

The critics challenge the reliability of the dating of bones and artifacts because only a few pieces of charcoal — presumably from fire pits — were analyzed. Also, water drainage may have helped jumble the older specimens with the more recent.

And, they argue, the stone tools found are of the type known to be made only by modern humans. The brain size of the specimens found suggest it’s unlikely such a people could have used the tools.

© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9661094/





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« Reply #7 on: March 17, 2007, 06:01:01 pm »

Yeah  ,  the joint Australian-Indonesian team are digging away on Flores now.  I read an interview with the Aussie leader,  that he is confident they will provide overwhelming evidence this season that the hobbit is indeed a separate species .

It's interesting how those that deny it being a new species claim that it is merely a diseased individual or several diseased individuals . 

When Neanderthal was first discovered they said something similar ....uncanny .   But if you've read Forbidden Archaeology it is clear what is happening.. It seems to be a natural tendency of academics to resist change ,even in light of clear evidence.

Why can't they say ,,"oh yes ,it appears very different, it could be a new species ,,can't be 100% sure yet,,keep digging next season ,we will soon see"   .Noooo  they have to hurl insults and the like . It's really petty.    Ironically, They must feel so insecure in their own beliefs .
« Last Edit: March 17, 2007, 06:04:35 pm by Mark Ponta » Report Spam   Logged
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