Hobbit" Human Ancestor Found in Asia - National Geographic News

[Ivan Seeking]

"Hobbit" Discovered

"Hobbit" Discovered: Tiny Human Ancestor Found in Asia

Hillary Mayell
for National Geographic News
October 27, 2004

Scientists have found fossil skeletons of a hobbit-like species of human that grew no larger than a three-year-old modern child (See pictures). The tiny humans, who had skulls about the size of grapefruits, lived with pygmy elephants and Komodo dragons on a remote island in Indonesia as recently as 13,000 years ago. [continued]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1027_041027_homo_floresiensis.html

 

[bross7]

So is it a good thing that I found some ring in a hunk of rock?

Really interesting discovery. So many things that have yet to be uncovered on this Earth, and so little that we can do with it when we do find it.

 

[tumor]

Next they going to find big foot

 

[setAI]

I'm waiting for them to find the ELVES!

 

[Phobos]

amazing discovery!

 

[tumor]

I'm also waiting for them to find G.W.Bushe's brain.

 

[Gabrielle]

I'm also waiting for them to find G.W.Bushe's brain.

If you're going to criticize someone, it would be nice to spell the name correctly. It's Bush.

 

[Dooga Blackrazor]

It is indeed an interesting discovering. But it can't compete with reading about the real hobbits. Ironically I am referring to the critters from Tolkien's book.

I would have to defend tumor. J-orange doesn't deserve to have his name spelt correctly in my opinion.

 

[tumor]

If you're going to criticize someone, it would be nice to spell the name correctly. It's Bush.

Sorry about it, sometimes I wish they could find mine too.

 

[Kerrie]

It's quite humbling to know that we are still discovering finds like these on Earth despite how far we think we have come.

 

[Padford]

Next they going to find big foot

i saw bigfoot in the guiness world records... 1998 i think,
not sure of its realness tho...

 

[Sariaht]

If we find a 500 year old skeleton, how will we be able to revive the hobbits if we forbid cloning?

 

[iansmith]

If we find a 500 year old skeleton, how will we be able to revive the hobbits if we forbid cloning?

You would not be able to clone it anyway. The DNA and nucleus would be degredated beyond recovery

 

[Cosmo16]

It would be so much cooler if we could find Gandalf to! :)

Seriosly, it is an awesome find though.

 

[Thallium]

Next thing they will find that we humans are an evolutionary setback.

 

[Padford]

It would be so much cooler if we could find Gandalf to! :)

Seriosly, it is an awesome find though.

Well, i must say that would be great, however, i have found a couple of fatal flaws in your idea:

1) Gandalf is a wizard, they never die - and seeing he was in the prime of life for the filming of lord of the rings a mere year ago, we are unlikely to find his skeleton anytime soon...

2) Gandalf is from middle earth, which, is not this one - to find his skeleton we would have to take the passenger ferry from the undying lands to middle Earth and be find him in all his skeleton mighty'ness', and there is no ferry from here to the undying lands; oh, how i despair!

...

 

[Ivan Seeking]

...First runner-up: 'Hobbit' fossils
The first runner-up for breakthrough of the year was the discovery on the Indonesian island of Flores of fossils from a species of tiny humans who stood about 3 feet (1 meter) tall and had a brain less than a third the size of modern humans. Yet, the diminutive hominid lived about 18,000 years ago. This suggests that Homo floresiensis shared the planet with Homo sapiens, or modern people.

Science said some described the find as “the biggest discovery in half a century of anthropological research.” [continued]

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6724037/

 

[Andre]

I was fortunate enough to attend http://www.pleistocenemammals.com/aktiviteiten.htm (Sorry Dutch), where one of the scientist told all about this discovery in a excavation pit in a cave of Liang Bua on the Island of Flores.

A few highlight of his narrative.

Although Flores is part of the Indonesian island chain, it's not on the continental shelf like the main islands and it's past the natural barrier between Asia and Australia. Modern Homo Sapiens may have circumnavigate around it, while reaching Australia.

Dwarfing of island species is a well known -but highly debated- phenomenon. As usual media reports can be misleading since there have been also normal to big sized stegodons on the same island.

The mini men are also mentioned in the local myths and saga. They were depicted as forest people, living in a cave, a bit of a nuissance, since they were stealing food in the village. But they were also cute so they were tolerated. The most remarkable of that tale is that it is not about unusual supernatural things as usual.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

It sounds like something out of a Sci Fi book.

I have started a thread devoted to anecdotal evidence for, and speculation about potential encounters with these little people. This is such an exciting discovery! It really fires the imagination.
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=50855

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Hobbit caught in academic crossfire

One of Indonesia's leading scientists has rejected one of Australia's greatest archaeological discoveries.

Last month, Australian scientists announced the discovery of a new human species after the remains of a small-bodied hominid were found on the Indonesian island of Flores.

The creature was quickly dubbed the 'hobbit' and heralded as one of the biggest finds since the discovery of the Neanderthal man more than a century ago.

Called Homo floresiensis, or the hobbit, it stood just one metre tall with a brain smaller than a chimpanzee.

But one of Indonesia's most senior palaeanthropologists, Professor Teuku Jacob, has claimed the skeleton is not a new species but simply the remains of a small human related to a local pigmy population.

To make matters worse he is also disputing the hominid's sex.
[continued]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200411/s1251165.htm

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Nature is fairly clear on the point

With the discovery of Flores Man, a new species of human from just 18,000 years ago, reported in this issue of Nature, the Pacific Rim is yet again proving to be the dusty attic of evolution — full of unusual and often bizarre artefacts of biology. Homo floresiensis, nicknamed 'hobbits' by the researchers, were tiny tool-making people, who hunted tiny elephants and coexisted with modern humans colonizing the area. In this web focus, we gather together the new papers on Flores Man, as well as recent papers from Nature on some of the other oddities that have sprung up from this fascinating region. All content is free to registered users. [continued]

http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/flores/

 

[Ivan Seeking]

...The scientists said the model shows that the 3-foot specimen, nicknamed Hobbit, had a brain unlike anything they had seen before in the human lineage. The brain is chimplike in size, about 417 cubic centimeters.

Yet the Hobbit's brain shared wrinkled surface features with the much larger brains of both modern humans and Homo erectus, a tool-making ancestor that lived in southeast Asia more than 1 million years ago. Some of those brain features are consistent with higher cognitive traits.

These brain features coincide with physical evidence of advanced behaviors, such as hunting, firemaking and the use of stone tools, which were found alongside the bones in a cave on the remote equatorial island of Flores.[continued]

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050303/ap_on_sc/hobbit_brain_2

 

[hypatia]

Dosen't get much better then a " wrinkled surface brain" now does it? I really love these kinds of discoveries. Thanks for the update!

 

[Ivan Seeking]

There was a bit about this on Nova tonight.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3209/01.html

First, according to the show and/or the scientists interviewed, it appears that these little people probably survived on the island until a volcanic eruption about 12,000 years ago. However, local lore has it that they survived until much later. Now, of course, these claims are considered much more seriously. Some of the anthropologists involved are beginning to ask question such as: Did they [the hobbits] migrate and survive the volcanic event? Did they ever breed with humans? Could we have modern humans that are a hybrid of our known ancestors, and the hobbits?

And one thought that strikes me as well. The typical island dwarfing of mammals is assumed to account for the little people. The thought is that they and us have common ancestors, and when the oceans rose after the last ice age, these populations were isolated from the rest of the world. If this dwarfing is so likely as is now discussed - and as is evident in other island mammals - then it seems possible that this may have happened more than once. Could there have been other species of hobbits?

Edit: Oh yes, one scientist tells that a geologist friend once confided in her that he had seen "little people" somewhere else - I think she said in Africa - but he was afraid to tell anyone for fear of ridicule. Only now does his story seem remotely plausible.

 

[misskitty]

This is amazing. These questions are some really good food for the brain. I wonder why they died out though and we did not. It would have seemed likely that they would have survived with us if their brains are thought to be of the higher cognitive intelligence levels. Thanks for the update Ivan! Keep us posted!

 

[Ouabache]

You would not be able to clone it anyway. The DNA and nucleus would be degredated beyond recovery

I also caught this recently on NOVA PBS special The Little People of Flores
We ought not discount the potential for cloning. If they did recover a sufficient number of intact fragments of DNA. With today's methods of sequencing, fragment sequences can quickly be analyzed by computer. By comparing strands with overlapping sequences, whole strands of DNA could be deduced. As I understand it, that is also how the human genome was mapped. Once we have a complete map of all its chromosomes (and extra nuclear DNA), we could reconstruct a full set. Perhaps by the time we finish sequencing their DNA, we will have worked out the bugs of cloning with somatic DNA.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

I just watched the show again and caught a bit missed the first time. The Geologist mentioned claimed to see the little people on Flores. So this and local lore suggest that there may be living hobbits.

In addition to all of the other staggering implications of the find thus far, the hobbit brains may serve as an entirely new model for human intelligence.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

A brief intermission
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1189977381292772054

 

[hypatia]

"runs to get snacks" this is getting good

 

[mapper]

um, we have midgets, couldn't this just be the remains of a really old midget skeleton?

Little people scare me.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

um, we have midgets, couldn't this just be the remains of a really old midget skeleton?

Apparently not. For one, they are half the size of a normal human but their brains are a third of the size. the shape of the skull is also very different from that of humans. Originally there was some conjecture about this being an isolated clan with genetic mutations or maladies, but this is also ruled out according to the scientists interviewed. The fact that their brains are so small makes this all very strange and intriguing. Evidence of a fire pit, tools, hunting, and even a dwarf elephant skeleton that was presumably killed for food, was found in the cave. Also, apparently some evidence suggests that they hunted Komodo Dragons, which 13,000 years ago - at nearly a 1000 Lbs - were twice the size that they are now. That must have been quite a fiece opponent for a guy three feet tall.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Inside Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, the bones of the hobbit rested undisturbed for 18,000 years.
But no longer.

In what is being called a true case of scientific skullduggery, the remains of the newly discovered human species have suffered irreparable damage since entering the care of paleontologists.

The damage to the bones of this diminutive being - named Homo floresiensis and nicknamed hobbit by scientists - is so extensive that it will limit scholarly research on the species, say members of the Indonesian Center for Archaeology-based discovery team.

Considered the most important discovery in human origins in five decades, the remains are marred by broken jaws and smashed bones.

"The equivalent in the world of art would be somebody slashing the Mona Lisa and then trying to fix it with chewing gum," says paleontologist Tim White of the University of California-Berkeley, who was not on the discovery team. [continued]

http://archeonet.nl/engels.php?itemid=6738&catid=112

Bad news aside, the Homo Floresiensis homepage
http://www.uow.edu.au/science/eesc/geoquest/hf/

 

[hypatia]

Thats shocking! Even that they would transport{except to a final restore/study spot} wet bones is unheard of. They are so unstable, a meer touch can crumble them in some cases, let alone a casting!

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Further fossil finds from Flores

... Both mandibles share distinctive dental features, and they lack chins — a chin being a unique feature of all Homo sapiens regardless of their stature, including most microcephalics
(Fig. 1, overleaf).In addition, the new tibia and arm-bone fossils not only confirm that the Liang Bua hominids were short, about a metre tall, but also indicate that they had relatively long arms. In many ways, the LB1 skeleton’s body proportions are less like any adult human’s, including adult pygmies, than those of an australopithecine — an earlier hominid lineage, thought to have been confined to Africa. Another notable point is that the Liang Bua fossils come from a lengthy temporal span during which the cave’s inhabitants were hunting animals, producing stone tools and making fire. Although the original LB1 skeleton is estimated to be 18,000 years old, a child’s radius was found in deposits estimated to be 12,000 years old, and the new mandible is estimated to be 15,000 years old; other finds may be as old as 95,000 years2,3. The fossils also all seem to be similarly small, refuting the contention that the LB1 skeleton was simply an aberrantly dwarfed, pathological specimen. If they were pathological, then the Liang Bua fossils would have had to have come from a population of short, microcephalic humans that survived for a long time, or one that was susceptible to high frequencies of microcephaly and dwarfism [contnued]

http://www.uow.edu.au/science/eesc/geoquest/hf/docs/Lieberman.pdf

 

[Ivan Seeking]

CBS) Little animals. Little people. Ms. Hobbit lived here, eating her dragons and elephants 18,000 years ago. But people living on the island today will tell you that her descendants were still here very recently.

In the hamlets under the volcano, villagers talk in a matter-of-fact way about very little people their grandparents told them about. They wore no clothes, had long arms, and lived in caves high up on the volcano. The village chief told 60 Minutes that the volcano is called Abu Lobo, and the little people were called Abu Gogo, which, literally translated, means “grandma who eats everything.”

..."They were very hairy and short, only about 3-feet high. The women have very long breasts, which they used to throw over their shoulders. They also had very wide mouths," says one team member. "If we think about them, they are not nice people at all. Abu Gogo means 'very greedy.' They used to eat everything."...[continued]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/28/60minutes/main691775_page2.shtml

It is said that the village attacked the Abu Gogo and burned their cave, presumably killing most them, when a baby was taken and killed by the hobbits.

This may be the first paragraph in a new book of human history.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

"Hobbit" Humans Were Diseased, Not New Species, Study Says

The "hobbit" humans that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores some 18,000 years ago were actually a population of modern humans stricken with a genetic disease that causes small brains, a new study says.

The argument is being made by a group of scientists who have analyzed all the scientific evidence presented so far about the evolution of the proposed species Homo floresiensis. [continued]

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/hobbit-1.html

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Hobbit cave digs set to restart

Archaeologists who found the remains of human "Hobbits" have permission to restart excavations at the cave where the specimens were found. [continued]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6294101.stm

 

[Ivan Seeking]

... In the new study, Dean Falk, of Florida State University, and her colleagues say the remains are those of a completely separate human species: Homo floresiensis.

They have published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [continued]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6311619.stm

 

[majinmonkey]

wow, what if this is an example of convergant evolution, not divergent. maybe we don't share a recent common ancestor at all, but the hominid structure offered advantiges for them.
Arent there pygmies that live on new zealand or somewhere?
wow, intense

 

[Ivan Seeking]

...Tocheri, an expert in the evolution of the human wrist, could see immediately that the hobbit's wrist bones looked just like those of a chimpanzee, or an early hominid such as Australopithecus, and had none of the specialisations for grasping that are seen in the wrist bones of modern humans. A careful statistical comparison gave the same conclusion.

"The modern human wrist hasn't looked like this for at least 800,000 years, and maybe much longer," says Tocheri. "It was immediately apparent to me that the hobbit is the real deal."

...the leading advocate of the microcephaly explanation, remains unconvinced. No one has studied the wrist bones of microcephalic humans, he notes, so it is pure conjecture to say they would not look like the hobbit's bones.[continued]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12667-hobbit-wrist-bones-suggests-a-distinct-species.html

 

[Ivan Seeking]

An Australian team claims the little people were not a new human species, but modern humans with a form of dwarfism caused by poor nutrition.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7276943.stm

 

[RetardedBastard]

Bones of Archaic 3-feet tall humans discovered - some ONLY 900 years old!

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/03/080310-palau-bones.html"

Some of the bones are ancient and indicate inhabitants of particularly small size, scientists announced today.

The remains are between 900 and 2,900 years old

The smaller, older bones represent people who were 3 to 4 feet (94 to 120 centimeters) tall and weighed between 70 and 90 pounds (32 and 41 kilograms), according to the paper.

According to Berger, the estimated brain size of the early Palauans is about twice the size of the hobbit brain.

Several other features, including the shape of the face and hips, suggest that the Palauan bones should be classified as Homo sapiens.

If the interpretation of the Palauan remains is correct, the find may add more fuel to the debate over whether the Flores hobbit is a unique species, Berger said.

Aside from being tiny, the Palauan bones show that some of these people lacked chins and had deep jaws, large teeth, and small eye sockets, according to the paper.

Some of these features were considered important in originally distinguishing the hobbit as a unique—and archaic—species, Berger said.

But the Palauan remains suggest these features may just be a consequence of insular dwarfism, a shrinking process that some scientists attribute to the stresses of a small island environment.
​

So, is the Hobbit really a different species or a variation within humans (given how we have found a hobbit-like group of humans in Palau)?

 

[Lanka]

It sounds to me like a variation within humans. Humans, after all, do adapt to best fit their surroundings and being short and having such distinctive characteristics could be beneficial. I recently read an article of a different group of humans in Greenland (I believe) who were found to look human in structure, but they had thicker bones, longer hands, larger brains and skulls, et cetera. They are believed to have been some of the earliest people to have adapted to extremely cold weather.

 

[Evo]

I've merged this with Ivan's thread. The answer is in post #41.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

...The hypothesis has been described as "sheer speculation" by some experts, including Professor Peter Brown of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, one of the original members of the team that discovered the remains.

"The conclusions in this paper are not supported by the facts," he said. "The authors have not examined the original fossil, have little and no experience with fossil hominids and depend upon data obtained by others." [continued]

Based on the first skull found, some skeptics were all but certain that it was a microcephalic human, until the team found more skeletons. When they were faced with an entire tribe of mycrocephalic midgets that lived for I think thousands of years, they abandoned the idea. So if the skulls are virtually identical to that of a microcecphalic skull, how does island dwarfing or malnutrition account for this? There is also a problem with the size of the brain and the complex skills that they apparently had, such as fire making, hunting, and tool making.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

The latest on the Hobbits, from Nova
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/hobbit/program.html

It sounds like things are leaning heavily towards a new species.

I just noticed that earlier I said hydrocephalic, when I should have said microcephalic. Just a bit of a difference there.

 

[Ian]

"The tiny humans, who had skulls about the size of grapefruits"

It's not a 'human' or a 'hobbit', its a monkey!
Look, we found live orangutangs and fondly call them 'the old men of the forest'. If there were no living 'tangs' some bright spark would probably have found a 'tang' skeleton and truly called it an old man from the forest, but its just a monkey!

 

[baywax]

Apparently the evolution of our species isn't as cut an dried as some people would like to think. This tiny human has very few features in common with Neanderthals yet existed during the paleolithic. Nice find Ivan

 

[House M.D]

That is tremendous!

Very Interesting find, thanks!

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Hobbits 'are a separate species'

Scientists have found more evidence that the Indonesian "Hobbit" skeletons belong to a new species of human - and not modern pygmies.

The one metre (3ft) tall, 30kg (65lbs) humans roamed the Indonesian island of Flores, perhaps up to 8,000 years ago.

Since the discovery, researchers have argued vehemently as to the identity of these diminutive people.

Two papers in the journal Nature now support the idea they were an entirely new species of human...[video included]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8036396.stm

How many old legends are now called into question as potentially legitimate, in principle?

One really wild story comes from one of the original researchers on this who claimed to have seen a living hobbit, on Flores!