News & Views item - April 2007

 

 

New Analysis Supports Flores Man is a Distinct Species. (April 23, 2007)

    TFW was a bit slow on the uptake but work reported at the Paleoanthropology Society's annual meeting in Philadelphia on March 27/28 by postdoctoral researcher Matthew Tocheri of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. supports the contention by the Australian/Indonesian team that discovered the 18,000 year-old fossils that Flores Man is not Homo sapiens.  "It isdefinitely not a modern human. It's not even close," Dr Tocheri, who defended his Ph.D. dissertation from Arizona State University in Tempe early this month told his audience at the meeting.

CREDIT: REUTERS/HO/PETER SCHOUTEN/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY

 

However, Robert Martin of the Field Museum in Chicago, one of the staunchest opponents of designating Flores Man as a separate species, claiming rather that it is most probably a microcephalic modern man, remains unconvinced by the new analysis.

 

Flores Man was immediately referred to as a hobbit following the announcement of the discovery

 

But the new evidence that Dr Tocheri reported had paleoanthropologist Carol Ward of the University of Missouri, Columbia telling Science, "It's the most convincing evidence so far that it really is something different," while lower-limb expert Henry McHenry of the University of California, Davis said, "It clinches it for me that [the Flores fossil] was not modern."

 

According to Science, Dr Tocheri's analysis was "prompted when he first saw casts of the hand bones [of Flores Man] at a lecture last fall, he was struck immediately by their primitive shape. [H]e used three-dimensional imaging to analyze an innovation in the modern human hand. Living people and our most recent ancestors possess a complex of five bones that mesh together to ease stress on the wrist when the hand is used forcefully, for example in pounding large tools or in precision work. Neandertals had this derived shock-absorber complex, too; it is first seen in the hand of an 800,000-year-old human ancestor, H. antecessor, from Atapuerca, Spain."

 

After critical analysis of high quality casts made for Stony Brook University biological anthropologist William Jungers of the bones, Dr Tocheri became convinced that his initial impression that the three bones in the wrist closely resembled those of an ancient hominid, not modern humans was correct.

 

It now remains for the "hobbit" bones to be compared with a wrist of a microencephalic human.