I know it's almost blasphemy to cover anything nonpolitical right now, but here's something from Nature:

27 October 2004; Rex Dalton ; http://www.nature.com/news/2004/0410.../4311029a.html

A new human-like species - a dwarfed relative who lived just 18,000 years ago in the company of pygmy elephants and giant lizards - has been discovered in Indonesia.

Skeletal remains show that the hominins, nicknamed 'hobbits' by some of their discoverers, were only one metre tall, had a brain one-third the size of that of modern humans, and lived on an isolated island long after Homo sapiens had migrated through the South Pacific region.

"My jaw dropped to my knees," says Peter Brown, one of the lead authors and a palaeoanthropologist at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia.

The find has excited researchers with its implications - if unexpected branches of humanity are still being found today, and lived so recently, then who knows what else might be out there? The species' diminutive stature indicates that humans are subject to the same evolutionary forces that made other mammals shrink to dwarf size when in genetic isolation and under ecological pressure, such as on an island with limited resources.

The find has been classed as a new species - Homo floresiensis.

The new species, reported this week in Nature1,2, was found by Australian and Indonesian scientists in a rock shelter called Liang Bua on the island of Flores. The team unearthed a near-complete skeleton, thought to be a female, including the skull, jaw and most teeth, along with bones and teeth from at least seven other individuals. In the same site they also found bones from Komodo dragons and an extinct pygmy elephant called Stegodon.

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," says Richard Roberts of the University of Wollongong, Australia.

"Only the Indonesians were present at the actual moment of discovery - the Australian contingent had departed back to Oz," says Roberts. He credits Thomas Sutikna of the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta for the excellent handling of the samples. The success has inspired national pride at the centre, the researchers say. "This is very important for Indonesian society," says co-author R. P. Soejono.

It's the most extreme example ever found of human adaptation.

The discovery is prompting increased scrutiny of sites on other Southeast Asian islands, both to look for more of the same species and to place it in context with Homo sapiens and Homo erectus, our closest relative. Homo erectus was found to have lived on the nearby island of Java as long as 1.6 million years ago; the team suggests that the Flores hominins may be their descendants.

Dating more bones could help determine whether the species was a short-lived branch of human evolution or survived for longer. Preliminary dating places it at about 70,000 years ago, but it may extend back 800,000 years. "We were hoping we might find a little hominin from that early," says author Michael Morwood, an archaeologist at the University of New England.

In the meantime, researchers are hoping to find DNA in the bones, which would help to clarify the relationships between species. DNA has previously been extracted from European Neanderthals living in the same time period. But they have so far failed to find DNA in the teeth of the Stegodon found in the same cave, says Brown.

This was on the front page of my (non-American) paper this morning. It's pretty cool, eh? This find could rewrite significant portions of the theory of human evolution.

And don't apologize for posting a non-political article. Please do it again; I guarantee I'll post in it and be happy to do so. :D

Ah...I was actually about to find and post this.

I wonder if the species classification will stick, after all there is great variation among groups that we'd still call H. sapiens. I think the finding of other 'pygmy' species will compel anthropologists to link it to a broader species, but s/he who finds it, names it after all.

I'd also like to see where (evolutionarily) it came from, though H. erectus has my bet. 13,000 (also heard 18,000) years ago isn't that long, so that might narrow it down.

Edited number.

[ 10-29-2004, 04:50 AM: Message edited by: Lucern ]

Here is a partisan article from the BBC magazine (taking an anti-creation theory stance - not the news so merely the opinion of the writer) which is related:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3964579.stm

EDIT: Follow the link to get an artists impression from the National Geographic, a picture of a cast of the skull and comments by other readers of the article.

[ 10-29-2004, 11:29 AM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]

Hah, this topic is also in the General Discussion area, and they're talking more about hobbits than humanoids.

That's a wacky article seemingly attempting to bait creationists on a number of levels, but it's right in line with questions like 'what did H. sapiens do to H. neaderthalensis?'. I just wanted to point out that creationism is a cultural belief structure, and evolutionary biology is a science. The primary difference is how each comes to know what it knows. One is a skeptical research-oriented methodology based on empiricism. The other relies on authority. The very fact that empirical knowledge is subject to falsification is a good indication that evolutionary biology is the appropriate venue for finds like this.

I've heard creationists say that science is a religion, or alter the definition of 'science', but the above is the key difference between creation-theory and evolutionary biology. I'm happy to PM with anyone who either doesn't want to discuss publicly, would do so in a way that violates the religious discussion ban, or just wants to call me names lol.

Neanderthals did, and they were on the out-and-out 30,000 years ago.

[ 10-29-2004, 04:52 PM: Message edited by: Lucern ]

Creationists tends to view Evolution theory as a religion, not science as a whole. If they did, they would be shooting themselves in the foot as they regard Creationism itself a scientific discipline.

But let us move on to another discussion before the thread get's locked for breaking the Holy Ban. ;)

Haha, well if these little 'mini men' ever were found alive then I assume they ultimately wouldn't garner any greater social rights than the throngs of working-class drones of modern homo sapiens 'civilisation' [img]smile.gif[/img]

lol Hierophant - I think it'd be worse than that. Humans have shown repeatedly how well we've done dealing with differences overall. Neanderthals are quite possibly a very old "cold case file" with H sapiens as prime suspect.

Definitely a weird article there. Chances are pretty darn good that H. florensiensis is an extinct species, so why is he going on about experimental cages and pet cemeteries? I appreciate he's trying to make a point against creationists, but he's barking up the wrong tree. ;)

And really, does he think that supposedly solid scientific evidence is going to convince someone who holds a diametrically opposite view?

I suspect he recently lost an argument with a creationist and thought of these points before he fell asleep that night. [img]graemlins/hehe.gif[/img]

I went to the original link and saw a hypothetical wording in the subtitle (How Would We Treat Our Hobbit Ancestors?). I would be REALLY surprised if those organisms still exist, but it seems that some (at the bottom) missed that 'what if?'.

At the bottom are a host of comments that may give you an idea of where he's coming from. I was actually about to post them before I realized the thin ice that would leave this thread on...

Ranging from downright silly, using old-school arguments that no longer float, to open-minded and/or offended - I think these cover the range pretty well. I've read much better articles about the way humans may have acted against other 'humanoid' groups (relating to Neanderthals, since the same hypothetical questions are involved).

Somewhere in there I think, as an anthropologist, he should have focused on the point about what humans would have done to these 'hobbits' as a corollary to what some contemporary human groups are doing to others. Instead he focuses on a very unnecessary and ineffective attack on people's belief structures/cultural values. This is particularly off-base for an anthropologist - one who has likely studied a healthy dose of the world's cultures - to do. As an aspiring anthropologist, I'm disappointed with the article given the background I'm assuming this fellow has had. He would not tell the Mundurucu of the Amazon that their religion is wrong, or dismiss the thousands of other creation stories that survive in cultures (even permutations on Christianity) because they do not conform to science.

I think the only valid place for such an argument is where creationism is interjected as an alternate scientific hypothesis to evolution such as into public education. There at least, proponents are marketing it as science, and it can be judged as such.