Tiny Cousins of Humans

[7/4]

October 28, 2004

New Species Revealed: Tiny Cousins of Humans

By NICHOLAS WADE/NYTimes

Once upon a time, but not so long ago, on a tropical island midway between Asia and Australia, there lived a race of little people, whose adults stood just three and a half feet high. Despite their stature, they were mighty hunters. They made stone tools with which they speared giant rats, clubbed sleeping dragons and hunted the packs of pygmy elephants that roamed their lost world.

Strangest of all, this is no fable. Skeletons of these miniature people have been excavated from a limestone cave on Flores, an island 370 miles east of Bali, by a team of Australian and Indonesian archaeologists. Reporting their find in today's issue of Nature, they assign the people to a new human species, Homo floresiensis.

The new finding is "among the most outstanding discoveries in paleoanthropology for half a century," say two anthropologists not associated with the study, Dr. Marta Mirazon Lahr and Dr. Robert Foley of the University of Cambridge, in a written commentary in the same issue.

The little Floresians lived on the island until at least 13,000 years ago, and possibly to historic times. But they were not a pygmy form of modern humans. They were a downsized version of Homo erectus, the eastern cousin of the Neanderthals of Europe, who disappeared 33,000 years ago. Their discovery means that archaic humans, who left Africa 1.5 million years earlier than modern people, survived far longer into recent times than was previously supposed.

The Indonesian island of Flores is very isolated and, before modern times, was inhabited only by a select group of animals that managed to reach it. These then became subject to unusual evolutionary forces that propelled some toward giantism and reduced the size of others.

The carnivorous lizards that reached Flores, perhaps on natural rafts, became giant-size and still survive, though now they are confined mostly to the nearby island of Komodo; they are called Komodo dragons. Elephants, because of their buoyancy, are surprisingly good swimmers; those that reached Flores evolved to a dwarf form the size of an ox.

Previous excavations by Dr. Michael J. Morwood, a member of the team that found the little Floresians, showed that Homo erectus had arrived on Flores by 840,000 years ago, to judge from the evidence of crude stone tools. Presumably the descendants of these Homo erectus became subject to the same evolutionary forces that reduced the size of the elephants. The first little Floresian, an adult female, was found in September last year, buried under 20 feet of silt that coats of the floor of the Liang Bua cave in Flores. A team of paleoanthropologists headed by Dr. Peter Brown, of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, identified the skeleton, which is not fossilized, as a very small but otherwise normal individual, similar to Homo erectus. Because the downsizing is so extreme, smaller than that in modern human pygmies, they assign it to a new species.

In a companion report Dr. Morwood, an archaeologist who is also at the University of New England, estimates that the skeleton is 18,000 years old. He has since found the remains of six more individuals in the cave, with dates ranging from 95,000 to 13,000 years ago, he said in an interview.

Also buried in the cave are a number of objects that illustrate how the little Floresians lived. There are bones of Komodo dragons, beasts 10 feet in length, and of an even larger lizard. The dragons can eat animals the size of deer, but being cold-blooded, they are sluggish at low temperatures and not so hard to kill. There are bones of the pygmy elephant, giant rat, fish and birds.

There is evidence that the Floresians knew the use of fire. And there is a suite of stone tools, considerably more sophisticated than any yet known to have been made by Homo erectus. The tools include small blades that might have been mounted on wooden shafts.

If the stone tools were made by the little Floresians, as Dr. Morwood believes, that is striking evidence of their cognitive abilities. Dr. Morwood says they must have hunted cooperatively to bring down the pygmy elephants. To conduct such hunts, and to fabricate such complex stone tools, they almost certainly had some form of language, he said.

This will be a surprising finding, if true, because the little people have brains slightly smaller than a chimpanzee and similar in size to Australopithecenes, the ape-like ancestors of the human line. Dr. Foley said he would not rule out Dr. Morwood's suggestion but noted that chimpanzees hunt cooperatively without using language. Modern humans are known to have reached Australia by at least 40,000 years ago and were probably in the general neighborhood of Flores at the same time, so it is a plausible alternative that they could have been the makers of the stone tools. "I think it's a big jump" to assume the Floresians had language, Dr. Foley said. He also noted the danger of assuming the Floresians behaved like diminutive people when their nature might in fact have been quite different.

Dr. Morwood said he had found no sign of modern humans in Flores until 11,000 years ago, so he had no basis for associating them with the tools in the Liang Bua cave. Dr. G. Philip Rightmire, a paleoanthropologist at Binghamton University in New York, said he was persuaded that the tools were made by the little Floresians.

"It's a wonderful demonstration of apparently 'archaic' humans adapting to the special conditions on Flores," Dr. Rightmire said. "I wouldn't have supposed that such small-brained people descended directly from Homo erectus would be capable of producing these artifacts, but the evidence is pretty compelling."

The new findings add to the rapidly emerging picture of Homo erectus, which has long been overshadowed by the better known Neanderthals of Europe. Like the Neanderthals, Homo erectus generally disappeared from the scene just before modern humans arrived in their territory.

The little Floresians not only survived long into the modern period but unlike most of the other archaic human populations managed to coexist with modern humans. They also demonstrate the adaptability of the human form and how readily humans conformed to the same pressures toward dwarfism that affected other island species.

Most of the extraordinary finds in paleontology have been surprising because they were so old. "What's exciting about this one is that it's so late, telling us about the processes and patterns of evolution in a way that's deeply informative," Dr. Foley said.

The Floresians of the Liang Bua region seem to have perished after an eruption from one of the island's many volcanoes about 12,000 years ago. But they may have survived until much later elsewhere on Flores, Dr. Morwood believes. Among today's Ngadha people of central Flores and the Manggarai of West Flores there are local stories of little people who lived in caves until the arrival of the Dutch traders in the 16th century.

[7/4]

October 29, 2004

EDITORIAL/NYTimes

Homo TomThumbus

The discovery of the skeletal remains of hobbit-size humans on a remote island in Indonesia has set anthropologists atwitter. The bones appear to belong to a new and unexpected species of humans, little more than three feet high, who lived among giant rats and pygmy elephants on the island of Flores until at least 13,000 years ago. That would make these miniature people contemporaries of our own human ancestors for tens of thousands of years, though no one knows if they ever met.

If the findings hold up, the partial skeleton of a 30-year-old woman and bone fragments from six other individuals suggest that Homo floresiensis, or Flores man, is a descendant of the Homo erectus line that left Africa some 1.8 million years ago. Scientists speculate that full-size members of the line reached Flores more than 800,000 years ago, were marooned and evolved in isolation. With scant food and few predators, large size became a disadvantage. That favored the evolution of smaller humans and smaller elephants, which needed far fewer calories to live. A surprising byproduct of this downsizing was that the brain of Flores man shrank to become smaller than a chimpanzee's. Even so, these humans were no dummies, given the evidence that they used fire, made stone tools and hunted cooperatively.

The Floresians may have been wiped out, along with the pygmy elephants, by volcanic eruptions some 12,000 years ago, although local lore speaks of "little people" living in remote caves on the island right up to the 1500's, when Dutch traders arrived. Speculative minds raise the possibility that even today, in some remote corner of Earth, a primitive line of humans remains to be discovered.

That's probably pushing it. But the new discovery chips away at our smug notion that human evolution is a steady march toward bigger and brainier. In a tough environment, smaller may fare better. Meanwhile, our long reign as the sole human species on Earth appears to be shorter than we thought.

[7/4]

Human evolution

Meet cousin Florence

Oct 28th 2004

From The Economist print edition

A new and diminutive species of human being has been discovered

IN THE 1890s, Eugene Dubois, an anatomist working as a doctor in the Dutch army, stunned the scientific world when he found the first fossil human remains outside Europe. Java Man—Homo erectus, as it is now known—threw ideas about human evolution into chaos by suggesting that Europe was not, as most anthropologists had hitherto assumed, the cradle of human evolution.

As it turned out, neither was Asia. The evidence now shows that all the important developments in human evolutionary history, from the appearance of Australopithecus (the first species generally regarded as human) to the emergence of Homo sapiens (you and me), happened in Africa. But Asia can still spring the odd surprise in the field. And few finds have been as surprising as that made last year on Java's Indonesian neighbour, Flores, and announced this week in Nature. For Homo floresiensis, as the new species has been dubbed, suggests that the ascent of man is not an evolutionary inevitability. Descent is also possible. That is because Homo floresiensis (whose skull is pictured above, alongside that of a modern human) was but a metre tall, and had a brain not much bigger than an ape's.

In a truly ancient fossil human from, say, 3m-4m years ago, those dimensions would not be surprising. But the skeleton found by Peter Brown, of the University of New England, in Armidale, Australia, and his colleagues from the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta, is a mere 18,000 years old. That means it was alive at a time when Homo sapiens had not only come into existence, but had already reached Australia.

A little puzzle

The species is not, however, a descendant of Homo sapiens. A tooth from a lower soil layer in the cave where the main skeleton was found shows it evolved before modern humans arrived in the area. It was thus one of several species of humanity, such as Neanderthal Man, that were pushed aside by the rise of Homo sapiens.

That, in turn, suggests it was descended from Dubois's Homo erectus. But Homo erectus was as big as Homo sapiens—in some cases bigger. And if erectus was not in quite the same intellectual league as modern man, it was certainly no dunce. Its brain could be as big as 1,250cm3 (compared with 1,400cm3 for a modern human). That of Homo floresiensis, by contrast, was a mere 380cm3. Dr Brown knows this because he measured the volume by the delightfully low-tech technique of pouring mustard seeds into the fossil's cranium after he had cleaned the interior.

Nor is there any doubt that the skeleton is that of an adult (probably, from the pelvic anatomy, a woman). Her teeth are worn, and some telltale bones in the skull are knitted together in an adult way. On top of that, although they are not described in the paper, Dr Brown's team has now found five more specimens which confirm that she was not an abnormally small member of her species.

Of course, a small animal will have a small brain. But what is noticeable about Homo floresiensis is how small the brain is, even in comparison to the diminutive body. The species had regressed, more or less, to the brain/body ratio found in Australopithecus. The question is why. And the answer to that question may shed light on the wider question of how human intelligence arose in the first place.

Islands are famous for generating indigenous species from whatever biological material pitches up on them. One frequent trend observed in such island species, at least when they are large mammals, is dwarfism. Elephants seem particularly susceptible. The last mammoths, which lived on an island off the coast of Siberia, were, paradoxically, dwarfs. Similar elephantine examples are known from Malta, Sicily and, indeed, Flores itself. And the same thing has been observed in cattle, too. There seems no reason why it should not happen to hominids.

Two evolutionary pressures are thought to drive this process of diminution. One is that islands are often free of large predators (on Flores, the largest were Komodo dragons, a species of large lizard). The other is that they sometimes have a restricted food supply. The result is that you do not need to be big to defend yourself; and if you are big, you may starve.

Both of those facts might drive the evolution of smaller brains, too. Brains are expensive in terms of energy consumed, and thus food needed. And an absence of predators would remove at least one reason to have a large brain. In other words, use it or lose it.

Why human intelligence evolved in the first place, though, is controversial. Many researchers feel that it was not so much to deal with the non-human world (eg, predators and food-gathering) as to deal with other people. One theory, known as the “Machiavellian mind”, is that intelligence is there to analyse, and thus manipulate, the motives of others. Another, known as the “mating mind”, is that much of human intelligence is about showing off to the opposite sex, in a behavioural equivalent of the peacock's tail. Both could be true. Whether either of these purposes would disappear on an island is moot.

All this is speculation, of course. And human fossils are so rare that there is a risk of over-interpreting each new find. What would help is evidence of Homo floresiensis's culture, if any.

One possible remnant of that culture is the numerous stone tools in the cave where the skeleton was found. These are small and delicate, which suggests they might have been made and wielded by tiny hands. Nor do they bear much resemblance to the tools of Homo erectus. But they do date from a period when the island could have been inhabited by Homo sapiens. So who made them is unclear. In any case, tool-making is not an exclusive badge of intellectual advancement. Australopithecus used stone tools, and modern chimpanzees make and use tools, too (though admittedly not stone ones). If tools were useful to Homo floresiensis on its island home, natural selection would have retained the ability to make and use them even if other mental faculties dwindled.

Regardless of how these questions are settled, what is clear is that Dr Brown's find has changed thinking about the way humanity has evolved. If Homo floresiensis was flourishing 18,000 years ago, the chances are it did not die out until much more recently. Indeed, it is conceivable that it lasted into historical times. Much of Homo sapiens's vision of itself is built around the idea of human uniqueness. That it was not unique until so recently should give pause for thought—and will no doubt spur others to follow Dubois's lead and look for further species of fossil human in previously unexplored places.

[Shrdlu]

You might also want to read the liner notes for "Empyrean Isles" and "Maiden Voyage". Those have much more panache.

[Alexander]

You might also want to read the liner notes for "Empyrean Isles" and "Maiden Voyage". Those have much more panache.

So what's the creationist view of this? Fairies? Gnomes? Or is this evidence of God's attitude that "size doesn't matter?"

[DTMX]

So what's the creationist view of this?  Fairies?  Gnomes?  Or is this evidence of God's attitude that "size doesn't matter?"

These people were probably one of God's earlier creations, possibly a student work done in college. Once he got a handle on working with larger forms he went on to produce more mature works, like Neanderthals and Magellon and stuff.

[BruceH]

A pretty amazing finding though. Cool.

[connoisseur series500]

You might also want to read the liner notes for "Empyrean Isles" and "Maiden Voyage". Those have much more panache. 

So what's the creationist view of this? Fairies? Gnomes?

Homomunculus? (sp?)

I think it's homunculus. No dictionary on hand...

Edited October 29, 2004 by connoisseur series500

[BruceH]

Homo Piper (for all you sf fans out there.)

[RDK]

These people were probably one of God's earlier creations, possibly a student work done in college. Once he got a handle on working with larger forms he went on to produce more mature works, like Neanderthals and Magellon and stuff.

You mean he didn't start out making bongs like every other kid in high school ceramics class?

[ejp626]

(RDK,Oct 29 2004, 12:52 PM)

You mean he didn't start out making bongs like every other kid in high school ceramics class?   

Fraid not, it was just snakes, snakes, snakes for the first three days. Then an ashtray. Then Adam.

[Big Wheel]

But were any of them allowed to hang out in the Red Sox clubhouse?

[Jazzmoose]

Follow the yellow brick road...

[Son-of-a-Weizen]

One is that islands are often free of large predators (on Flores, the largest were Komodo dragons, a species of large lizard). The other is that they sometimes have a restricted food supply. The result is that you do not need to be big to defend yourself; and if you are big, you may starve.

The 3-foot-tall guy vs. an aggressive Komodo Dragon --- he'd certainly put up a far better fight than the St. Louis Cardinals.

[Noj]

These little folk must have had it rough with Komodos around. One bite from the bacteria-infested mouth of a Komodo results in an infected wound which will not heal and will slowly kill the victim.

[7/4]

November 9, 2004

Miniature People Add Extra Pieces to Evolutionary Puzzle

By NICHOLAS WADE/NY Times

The miniature people found to have lived on the Indonesian island of Flores until 13,000 years ago may well appeal to the imagination. Even their Australian discoverers refer to them with fanciful names. But the little Floresians have created something of a headache for paleoanthropologists.

The Floresians, whose existence was reported late last month, have shaken up existing views of the human past for three reasons: they are so recent, so small and apparently so smart. None of these findings fits easily into current accounts of human evolution.

The textbooks describe an increase in human brain size that parallels an increasing sophistication in stone tools. Our close cousins the chimpanzees have brains one third the size of ours, as do the Australopithecines, the apelike human ancestors who evolved after the split from the joint human-chimp ancestor six or seven million years ago. But the Australopithecines left no stone tools, and chimps, though they use natural stones to smash things, have no comprehension of fashioning a stone for a specific task.

The little Floresians seem to have made sophisticated stone tools yet did so with brains of 380 cubic centimeters, about the same size as the chimp and Australopithecine brains. This is a thumb in the eye for the tidy textbook explanations that link sophisticated technology with increasing human brain size.

The Australian and Indonesian researchers who found the Floresian bones have an explanation that raises almost as many questions as it resolves. They say the Floresians, who stood three and a half feet high, are downsized versions of Homo erectus, the archaic humans who left Africa 1.5 million years before modern humans. But some critics think the small people may have descended from modern humans - Homo sapiens.

Homo erectus had arrived on the remote island of Flores by 840,000 years ago, according to earlier findings by Dr. Mike Morwood, the Australian archaeologist on the team. The species then became subject to the strange evolutionary pressures that affect island species. If there are no predators and little food, large animals are better off being small. Homo erectus was sharply downsized, as was the pygmy elephant the little Floresians hunted.

But the Morwood theory is not universally accepted. Homo erectus is known to have made crude stone tools but is not generally thought to have spoken or been able to build boats.

Maybe Dr. Morwood's alleged stone tools were just natural pieces of rock. "Many researchers (myself included) doubted these claims," writes Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, adding that "nothing could have prepared me" for the surprise of the little Floresians.

It is surprising enough that Homo erectus managed to reach Flores. But not only have the Floresians evolved to be much more advanced than their ancestors ever were, as judged by the stone tools, but they did so at the same time that their brain was being reduced to one-third human size. Getting smaller brained and smarter at the same time is the exact reverse of the textbook progression.

The Floresians' other surprise lies in the time of their flourishing. The skeleton described in Nature lived as recently as 18,000 years ago, but Dr. Morwood said that in the most recent digging season he found six other individuals whose dates range from 95,000 to 13,000 years ago. Modern humans from Africa arrived in the Far East some time after 50,000 years ago and had reached Australia by at least 40,000 years ago.

There has been little evidence until now that Homo erectus long survived its younger cousins' arrival in the region. Modern humans probably exterminated the world's other archaic humans, the Neanderthals in Europe. Yet the little Floresians survived some 30,000 years into modern times, the only archaic human species known to have done so.

All these surprises raise an alternative explanation. What if the Floresians are descended from modern humans, not from Homo erectus?

"I think the issue of whether it derives from H. erectus or H. sapiens is difficult or impossible to answer on the morphology," says Dr. Richard Klein, an archaeologist at Stanford. And if the individual described in the Nature articles indeed made the sophisticated tools found in the same cave, "then it is more likely to be H. sapiens," he says.

The same possibility has been raised by two anthropologists at the University of Cambridge, Dr. Marta Mirazón Lahr and Dr. Robert Foley. Commenting on the sophisticated stone implements found in the cave with the Floresians, they write that "their contrast with tools found anywhere with H. erectus is very striking."

There is the basis here for a fierce dispute. Given what is on the record so far, the argument that the Floresians are descended from Homo sapiens, not erectus, has a certain parsimony. Moderns are known to have been around in the general area, and no Homo erectus is known to have made such sophisticated tools.

Dr. Morwood counters this thesis with data that he has not yet published, and which therefore does not strictly count in scientific arguments. The 95,000-year-old Floresians far antedate the arrival of modern humans in the area. There are modern human remains on Flores, Dr. Morwood says, but the earliest is 11,000 years old, suggesting there was not necessarily any overlap between the two human species.

His view is supported by Dr. G. Philip Rightmire, a paleoanthropologist at Binghamton University in New York and an expert on Homo erectus. "There is no ambiguity about the morphological pattern, and it is erectus-like," Dr. Rightmire says of the Floresian skeleton. "I'm not sure why it should be difficult to accept the reasoning that the little Floresians made progress with stone working and honed their hunting-butchering skills" during their long co-existence on Flores with the pygmy elephants, he said.

Dr. Morwood believes the little Floresians must have had language to cooperate in elephant hunts. Others are not willing to follow him so far, especially given Homo erectus's apparent lack of achievement. Even chimps can hunt cooperatively, Dr. Foley says.

Whether the Floresians' line of descent runs through Homo erectus or through Homo sapiens, a whole new line of human evolution has opened up, even though one that is now all but certainly extinct. The Floresians are not like human pygmies, which have almost normal-size brains but smaller bodies because their growth is retarded during puberty. Nor are they dwarves. The skeleton described last month could be a called a midget, in the sense of a tiny person with the head and body proportions of a full-size person, Dr. Klein said.

"I always tell my students that I've taught for 30 years and I've never given the same lecture twice. Hardly a year goes by when something new isn't found," says Dr. Leslie Aiello, a paleoanthropologist at University College London. Of the Floresian discovery she says, "It's a total knockout."

[Ed S]

Pretty cool stuff. I love reading about finds like this. Fascinating.

[JSngry]

How do we know that they weren't just lawn ornaments?

[BruceH]

But on WHOSE LAWN?????

[JSngry]

Why, visitors from beyond, of course!

[7/4]

October 12, 2005

A Big Debate on Little People: Ancient Species or Modern Dwarfs?

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

New discoveries in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, notably another jawbone, appear to give additional support to the idea that a separate species of little people new to science and now extinct lived there as recently as 12,000 years ago.

But a vigorous minority of skeptical scientists were unmoved by the new findings. They contend that the skeletal remains are more likely to be deformed modern human beings, not a distinct species.

The group of Australian and Indonesian researchers who announced the first findings a year ago and proclaimed the new species Homo floresiensis describe the additional bones in a report to be published tomorrow in the journal Nature.

They said the bones were fragments of nine individuals of unusually small stature, little more than three feet tall, and, judging by one skull, with brains the size of a chimpanzee's. The newly discovered lower jaw was almost identical to one previously found, except that it appeared to be 3,000 years younger.

"We can now reconstruct the body proportions of H. floresiensis with some certainty," the scientists, led by Michael J. Morwood and Peter Brown, both of the University of New England in Australia, said in the report.

"The finds further demonstrate," they continued, that the original skull and partial skeleton was not from "an aberrant or pathological individual, but is representative of a long-term population" that was present during the period from 95,000 to 12,000 years ago.

The implication that made the original discovery a year ago such a sensation was that these "little people of Flores," as they are commonly called, represent a distinct species that shared the earth with modern humans far more recently than anyone had supposed.

In a commentary in the journal, Daniel E. Lieberman, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University, said, "All in all, it seems reasonable for Morwood and colleagues to stick to their original hypothesis that H. floresiensis is a new species."

But Dr. Lieberman noted that the authors were less certain of the new species' lineage than they had been a year ago. Then the discovery team speculated that the little people had evolved from Homo erectus, the immediate predecessor of Homo sapiens. Now they suggest in the report that the species may descend more directly from earlier members of the human family, like the australopithecines, the group the famous 3.2-million-year-old Lucy belonged to.

In an exchange of e-mail messages from Australia, Dr. Brown said, "The limb proportions, stature, brain size and skeletal robusticity of H. floresiensis replicated those in Australopithecus afarensis, not in any member of our genus Homo."

Dr. Brown said he was preparing to publish results of research that could explain what, if any, connection the little people had to Lucy.

But some paleontologists and biologists express strong doubts that the little people represent a new species. Two separate groups, including Indonesians, Australians, Americans and Britons, said this week that they were about to submit reports to a journal that they say refute the new-species hypothesis.

"I don't think anything is changed with this paper," Robert D. Martin, a biological anthropologist and provost at the Field Museum in Chicago, said in a telephone interview, referring to the latest Nature report. "I feel very strongly that these people are glossing over the problems with this interpretation."

In Dr. Martin's view, in which he is joined by several prominent scientists, the more likely explanation for the small stature is, in part, a phenomenon known as island dwarfing. People and animals living in isolation for many generations tend to evolve smaller bodies, their growth constrained by limited resources.

Dr. Lieberman, who wrote the commentary in Nature, said the dwarfing issue could be resolved if fossils of much earlier specimens of the Flores people were discovered.

"If the island-dwarfing hypothesis is correct," he wrote, "then the island's earliest inhabitants should be larger than the Liang Bua fossils."

Liang Bua is the cave at a remote Flores village where archaeologists found the first bones of the little people two years ago. Besides the skull and jaw, the bones included limbs and other fragments in deposits dating from 18,000 years ago; they were accompanied by remarkably advanced stone tools. The latest finds were from trenches at various depths and thus ages, some as recent as 12,000 years ago, indicating that the cave was occupied for tens of thousands of years.

Another possibility raised by the skeptics is that the discoverers happened to come on a people suffering from microcephaly, a disorder that causes abnormally small brain growth and other deformities.

Recently, British researchers examined the skull of a microcephalic individual at the Royal College of Surgeons of England and found that its braincase appeared to match that of the Flores specimen.

Robert B. Eckhardt, a professor of developmental genetics at Penn State, complained that the new report on the additional jaw failed to support the thesis that these people were a separate species.

"All the paper tells us is that they have identified an early population of small people," Dr. Eckhardt said. "What we are disputing is that people with the brain size of a chimp made these stone tools in the cave. The easiest explanation is that the specimen with the small brain has a small brain because it is abnormal, not a new species."

[Johnny E]

BLASPHEMY!!!

Edited October 13, 2005 by Johnny E

[7/4]

That's a twisted little blue halo you have there.

[jazzypaul]

October 12, 2005

A Big Debate on Little People: Ancient Species or Modern Dwarfs?

Robert B. Eckhardt, a professor of developmental genetics at Penn State, complained that the new report on the additional jaw failed to support the thesis that these people were a separate species.

"All the paper tells us is that they have identified an early population of small people," Dr. Eckhardt said. "What we are disputing is that people with the brain size of a chimp made these stone tools in the cave. The easiest explanation is that the specimen with the small brain has a small brain because it is abnormal, not a new species."

←

This guy makes no sense. An African Grey parrot has the intelligence of a four year old, and look at how small its brain is.

That means that a travel-sized human's brain could easily be capable of figuring out tools. Sheesh.