Word: homo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...island uncovered ancient bones that included the 18,000-year-old skeleton of a 1-m-tall 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...
...scene, the ebu gogo suddenly vanish. But then a team of researchers found the 18,000-year-old bones of 3.5-ft-tall people with grapefruit-sized brains and announced in Nature two years ago that they were the remains of a previously unknown, hobbit-like species of human: Homo floresiensis. The finding made the cover of National Geographic and threatened to upend the history of human evolution. It seemed for a moment as if any legend could be true...
...Nature paper - Peter Brown and Michael Morwood, both of the University of New England in Australia - aren't about to surrender their belief in a new species. In an email, Brown says that the PNAS paper "provides absolutely no evidence that the unique combination of features found in Homo floresiensis are found in any modern human." Morwood points out that supporting papers have previously been published in elite journals like Science and Nature, while Brown argues that the asymmetry in the skull was due to the fact that the original skeleton was buried in 30 ft. of sediment, which deformed...
...human evolutionists than there are fossils to go along with them." But the Flores debate seems to bring out the inner fifth-grader in grownups with PhDs. After Brown was quoted in Discover magazine this past January saying that Eckhardt was "thick as a plank" for trying to refute Homo floresiensis, Eckhardt attended a scientific meeting where he took off his shirt and had his wife measure his chest. "We were able to establish to the satisfaction of the audience of 300 people that I was in fact thicker than two short planks," he says. (See pictures of London...
...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...