Word: skeletonized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...limestone caves. Like leprechauns, the Ebu Gogo (the name roughly means "grandmother who eats everything") were assumed by anthropologists to be mythical. That was until a team of Australian and Indonesian researchers excavating a cave on the 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...
...backing down. In an e-mail, Brown told TIME that the PNAS paper "provides absolutely no evidence that the unique combination of features found in Homo floresiensis are found in any modern human." He argues that the asymmetry in the skull was due not to disease but to the skeleton being buried for thousands of years in 30 feet of sediment, which deformed the fossil. (Thorne insists the deformity must have happened before death.) Henry Gee, a senior editor at Nature who was responsible for overseeing publication of the original Flores article, calls the PNAS paper "very interesting" but argues...
...Such feuds aren't surprising, perhaps. After all, as Thorne says, "There are more human evolutionists than there are fossils to go along with them." And the argument isn't likely to be settled soon. DNA tests of the skeleton might prove conclusively that it's from a modern human, but DNA doesn't last long in the tropics, so any effort to recover genetic material is likely to fail. Meanwhile, the search for additional fossil evidence is on hold because Jakarta has barred further excavations at the site where the hobbit was found. For now, he remains in scientific...
...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 the 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...
...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...