Word: hobbits
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...female with a brain the size of a grapefruit. In 2004, they announced in Nature magazine that the bones were the remains of a previously unknown species of human?which they named Homo floresiensis?that coexisted for a time with modern Homo sapiens. The remarkable discovery of this ancient hobbit meant the history of human evolution would have to be rewritten. For a moment, it seemed, myths could be true...
...claims. Did the remains found on Flores really belong to a special race of tiny humans? Now, in a paper published in the latest issue of the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), experts from the U.S., Indonesia and Australia have dashed cold water on the hobbit hypothesis. Based on their first-hand examination of the bones, the scientists concluded that Flores man isn't a member of a distinct human species. They claim instead that the specimen is the remains of an unfortunate pygmy with a form of microcephaly, a developmental disorder that shrinks the head...
...Flores bones. That changed in a paper published in the current issue of the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). A team of researchers from the U.S., Indonesia and Australia report on their own investigation of the Flores bones and conclude that the so-called hobbit isn't a separate species, but just an unfortunate pygmy with a form of microcephaly, a developmental disorder that shrinks the head and the brain. Or as the archaeologist Alan Thorne, one of the authors of the PNAS paper, says: "They are just like hobbits. They're the products of someone...
...fossil. (Thorne insists the deformity must have happened before death). Colin Groves, an Australian biological anthropologist who is an author on an upcoming paper in the Journal of Human Evolution that discounts the microcephaly hypothesis, says the PNAS team subtly shaped the evidence to fit their conclusion: that the hobbit was just a developmentally stunted human. "They have a scattergun approach," he writes in an email. "They are convinced from the very start that it is pathological, so they find anything that remotely resembles pathology and apply it to the poor hobbit." Henry Gee, a senior editor at Nature...
...only the Flores debate could be so clearly decided. The one definitive piece of evidence could be DNA tests of the original skeleton that might prove for sure whether the hobbit belonged to Homo sapiens or something else, but such samples will be difficult to recover, because DNA doesn't keep long in a tropical environment. What's certain is that the scientific stakes are extremely high: if the Flores find is really a separate species, then the history of human evolution will have to be rewritten. Instead of automatically evolving toward bigger brains, at least one branch of humanity...