Opinion- 31 December 2004 |
No.
2 on Science' Breakthroughs of the Year - No. 1 on Nature's
List of Most Popular Stories for 2004
Little lady of Flores forces rethink of human
evolution |
|
From Science, Vol 306, Issue 5704,
2013-2017
Online Extras on H.
floresiensis
Papers and Articles |
P. Brown et al.,
" A New
Small-Bodied Hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia,"
Nature 431, 1055 (2004)
M. J. Morwood et al.,
"Archaeology and Age of a New Hominin from Flores in Eastern
Indonesia," Nature 431, 1087 (2004)
A. Gibbons,
"New Species of Small Human Found in Indonesia," Science
306, 789 (2004)
M. Balter,
"Skeptics Question Whether Flores Hominid Is a New Species,"
Science 306, 1116 (2004)
M. Balter,
"Skeptic to Take Possession of Flores Hominid Bones," Science
306, 1450 (2004)
- J. Diamond,
"The Astonishing Micropygmies," Science 306, 2047
(2004)
-
A Perspective about Homo floresiensis in
this issue of Science.
|
Interesting Web Sites
|
-
Flores Man
- A Nature Web special.
-
Homo floresiensis
- Information, images, articles, and links provided
by the
School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of
Wollongong, Australia..
-
"Skeleton reveals 'Lost World of Little People'"
- News release, images, and other information from
the Public Affairs Office of the University of New England,
Australia.
-
"Hobbit-Like Human Ancestor Found in Asia"
- An article by H. Mayell from National Geographic
News.
-
The Hall of Human Ancestors
- From the
Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution, with a
section on
early human phylogeny.
- Becoming
Human
- A multimedia presentation from Arizona State
University's Institute of
Human Origins.
- Fossil Hominids
- From the Talk.Origins
Archive. A collection of
paleoanthropology links is included.
|
|
On
October 28 TFW reported:
Peter Brown from Australia's University of New England and T. Sutkna from the Indonesian Centre for Anthropology are the senior authors of the
lead article in today's Nature which has engendered world-wide
interest by the popular media.
The Sydney Morning Herald
- "Found - the newest members of the human family"
ABC online - "'Hobbit' joins
human family"
The Australian - "Hello,
stranger," and adds, "Australian and Indonesian
scientists have discovered an unknown -- and very short -- member of the
human family."
The New
York Times' headline reads "Scientists Find Skeletons of Miniature
People" and follows it up with the somewhat histrionic first paragraph,
Once upon a time, but not so long ago, in 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.
The Australian
and Indonesian researchers were rather less flamboyant but more informative in
their summary for Nature
and the research continues. The Australian Research Council (ARC) awarded one of
its 2005 Discovery Grants for a "project, involving international collaborative
links between Australian universities and Indonesian universities and
institutions, [which] is at the cutting edge of palaeoenvironmental research and
will provide valuable training as well as information which will be of great
benefit to other researchers in the region. Being focused on prehistoric
patterns of resource exploitation, land use and management issues, it is
relevant to current important issues about the environment, human impact and
sustainability, and will help promote awareness of these issues in the
Australian and Indonesian communities."
Perhaps not unexpectedly, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, made no
public comment with regard to what the world's two most prestigious scientific
weeklies headlined and virtually trumpeted in their pages.
As for the
Minister responsible for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson, the
silence was deafening. In fact the only media release referring to Flores at all
comes in list of ARC Discovery Grants mentioned above.
On the other
hand Science says of the work of Australian Peter Brown and his
Colleagues:
Sometimes big discoveries come
in small packages. In October, the startling news that a team of Indonesian
and Australian researchers had found a new species of tiny hominid in a cave
on the Indonesian island of Flores made headlines all over the world, and
some researchers described it as the biggest discovery in half a century of
anthropological research. If the team is right, the remains of
Homo floresiensis, as the species was
dubbed, suggest that modern humans shared Earth with other hominids as
recently as 18,000 years ago. The skeleton's very small brain--a mere 380
cubic centimeters, compared with about 1400 cm3 for
H. sapiens--led its discoverers to
hypothesize that it had evolved from an earlier population of
H. erectus that got stuck on the
island and then shrank in size to make maximum use of scarce resources.
Science goes on to recognise
that there is current controversy with respect to the conclusions reached by the
research team and point out "Just how quickly the debate is resolved remains to
be seen, because the best way to solve it--analyzing still-unpublished fragments
of other hominids found in the cave--is now threatened by a fresh controversy
over who has the right to study the tiny remains. But the discoverers of H.
floresiensis predict that there are many other small hominids on the
islands of Indonesia just waiting to be found."
Nature for its part has
devoted a large section of its online space to the discovery including a
multimedia interactive graphic.
Click on the graphic to go to the
Nature site. Then work through the material at leisure.
And
Australasian
Science devotes three pages of its Jan/Feb 2005 issue to an article by Peter
Brown who together with Mike Morwood was one of the senior Australian
researchers.
In short this discovery is a
big deal, perhaps even bigger than Warnnie breaking
the record of most test wickets taken.
Alex Reisner
The Funneled Web