News & Views item - March  2005

 

 

New Data Support Contention That the Little Lady of Flores Forces Rethink of Human Evolution. (March 4, 2005)

    At the end of October last year both the lay and scientific press featured the find by a combined Australian and Indonesian team involving Peter Brown and Michael Morwood from Australia's University of New England and T. Sutkna from the Indonesian Centre for Anthropology of a skull and bones from eight individuals in a cave on Indonesia's island of Flores over 2003 and 2004. The researchers deduced that the bones belonged to a a species of human not previously known and designated it Homo floresiensis. The species were immediately dubbed Hobbits because of their diminutive size (just on one meter in hight.

 

The Australian and Indonesian researchers summarised their findings in Nature:

However, some critics, in Australia and elsewhere, took issue with the conclusions contending that what had been unearth was nothing more than a tribe of pygmies, with at least one member having a deformed skull and brain, a condition called microcephaly. But now a group led by Dean Falk, a palaeoanthropologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee have published in Science (Falk D., et al. Science published online. doi:10.1126/science1109727 (2005).) strong evidence in support of Homo floresiensis being a new species. As news@nature reports, "The research explains how a computerized tomography scan of the H. floresiensis skull was used to create a facsimile cast at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Then the cast, in particular, the area where the brain fits, was compared with casts from a chimpanzee, H. erectus, a contemporary Homo sapiens and a microcephalic from Europe. Analysis was also done on a number of other specimens, including those of human pygmies. The comparisons show the creature that lived on Flores Island is according to Falk, 'definitely a new species'". The data are not consistent with the suggestions made by the critics of the research.

 

The University of New England's Morwood added that the data indicate advanced development of the front lobes of the brain the area associated with reasoning and that would be with the species being able to make or refine stone tools as were  found with the bones.