[fire_mat99]

Australian scientists who found a new species of hobbit-sized humans

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australian scientists who found a new species of hobbit-sized humans who lived about 13,000 years ago on an Indonesian island said on Thursday they expect to discover more new species of hominids on neighboring islands.


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The partial skeleton of Homo floresiensis, found in a cave on the island of Flores in 2003, was of an adult female that was 3 feet tall, had a brain smaller than a chimpanzee's, and probably lived alongside modern humans on the island.


Australian and Indonesian scientists have since unearthed seven small hominids called "Flores man" from the Liang Bua limestone cave, the youngest living 13,000 years ago.


"The finding of this distinctive human species, this endemic human species on Flores, also implies that there will be similar endemic species on other islands in that vicinity," project leader Mike Morwood, associate professor in archaeology at Australia's University of New England, said on Thursday.


"So, you're likely to have a distinctive little hominid population on Lombok, on Sumbawa, on Timor, and on Sulawesi, and each of those will be distinct species, because they will have evolved in isolation," he told a news conference in Sydney.


"Flores man" is thought to be a descendent of Homo erectus, which had a large brain, was full-sized and spread out from Africa to Asia about 2 million years ago.


Morwood said the discovery of hominids on Flores was unexpected as no Asian land animal at the time had crossed the sea to the islands in eastern Indonesia and hominids were not believed to be developed enough to build and sail a craft.


But if Homo erectus reached Flores and evolved into "Flores man" then others probably reached nearby islands and also evolved into new human species. Legends tell of small, man-like creatures existing on eastern islands long ago.


The discovery of hominids in Southeast Asia almost to the start of agriculture 10,000 years ago means they were "contemporaries of modern humans," said Morwood, and added another piece to the complex puzzle of human evolution.


HUNTING STEGODONS


The hominid family tree, which includes humans and pre-humans, diverged from chimpanzees about 7 million years ago.


Morwood said the "Flores man" evolved in isolation, becoming so small because of environmental conditions such as food shortages and a lack of predators.


Scientists have pieced together an image of a hairless, dark-skinned dwarf species with a head the size of a grapefruit, sunken eyes, a flat nose and large teeth and mouth projecting forward with virtually no chin.


What surprised scientists was that despite the shrinking of the brain "Flores man" still performed complex tasks like making miniature stone tools, hunting miniature Stegodon elephants and giant Komodo dragons and using fire to cook.


"They were making sophisticated stone tools, some of which appear to be directly associated with the hunting of big game like Stegodon, like Komodo dragon...and for butchering these large animals," said Morwood.


"So despite very, very small brains, this hominid population was doing sophisticated things," he said.


The remains discovered have been dated as old as 95,000 years and as young as 13,000 years ago, meaning the Flores man's time overlaps modern humans by about 40,000 years, but it is not clear whether there was any interaction between the two on Flores.





Scientists suspect "Flores man" became extinct after a massive volcanic eruption on the island around 12,000 years ago, but local folk tales suggest the hominids may have still been living on Flores up until the Dutch arrived in the 1500s.

The expedition discovered "Flores man" while looking for records of modern human migration to Asia. The hominid find was reported in the latest edition of science journal Nature.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...e_hominid_dc_5

[Wet Chicken]

I read about this yesterday. Pretty cool stuff Guess they weren't to smart as they lived right next to an active volcano I'm willing to bet that as time goes by that they will be able to prove that they were all republican

[bassetman]

Wait till Little Napper shows up and pees all over the sicehce!

[Wet Chicken]

Tell him to tie it in a knot, or use the restroom down the hall

[moebius]

Tolkien was right

[linskyjack]

Does this mean they have found the Missing Link---heck, and I thought it was Bush.

[moebius]

Originally Posted by linskyjack

Does this mean they have found the Missing Link---heck, and I thought it was Bush.

lol

[Wino]

Originally Posted by Wet Chicken

I read about this yesterday. Pretty cool stuff Guess they weren't to smart as they lived right next to an active volcano I'm willing to bet that as time goes by that they will be able to prove that they were all republican

It's not like they really had a choice of where they lived back then. I will bet they were not right-wingers, as they appear to have had too much intelligence.

[Ciberblade]

I forget if it was the Washington Times or Post that I first read this story...had a few more interesting details...

...I'm busy today, but if I can...will try and find it.

[plschwartz]

/www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1337198,00.html
.

Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London, says: "One of the first things I thought of, on learning about the Flores skeleton, was a possible parallel with the orang pendek [found in Sumatra]." Bert Roberts offers hints of new discoveries just below the research horizon: "When I was back in Flores just three weeks ago, Gert van den Bergh [from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research at Texel, and the team's expert on the fossil elephants] and I headed off to a village in central Flores where we heard the most amazing tales of little hairy people whom they called ebu gogo: ebu meaning "grandmother" and gogo "he who eats anything".

"The ebu gogo were short - about a metre tall - long-haired, pot-bellied, with ears that stuck out, walking with a slightly awkward gait, and had longish arms and fingers. They murmured at each other and could repeat words parrot-fashion. They could climb slender trees but were never seen holding stone tools, whereas we have lots of sophisticated artefacts associated with Homo floresiensis. That's the only inconsistency with the archaeological evidence. Gert had heard of these stories 10 years ago and he thought them no better than leprechaun stories - until we unearthed the hobbit."

Could the ebu gogo still be alive? Roberts thinks it is possible. "The villagers said that the last hobbit was seen just before Dutch colonists settled that part of Flores in the 19th century," he said, adding that searches of the remaining rainforest on Flores, and the caves specifically associated with the ebu gogo stories, could turn up samples of hair or other material, if not living, breathing specimens.

The possibility of finding ebu gogo alive should not be dismissed as fantasy, because mammals unknown to science do still turn up - and South-East Asia is a particular hotspot for such finds. An antelope, Pseudoryx nghetinhensis, from the Lao-Vietnamese border, was described as recently as 1993. An ox-like creature, the kouprey, was discovered in Cambodia in the 1940s.

Morwood and Roberts have targets already in their sights. Many Indonesian islands contain peculiar faunas and have deep, barely explored limestone caves. "Sumba and Sulawesi are high on our hitlist," says Roberts. Morwood starts work on Sulawesi next year.

A larger theme raised by the discovery concerns the uniqueness of our human heritage, something which, in hindsight, has been in question for decades. Back in the 1960s, the great anthropologist Louis Leakey speculated that the human lineage had been distinct from that of the apes for 20m years or so. In the 1970s, extinct ape-like primates such as Ramapithecus, living around 10-20m years ago, were presumed to lie on the human lineage. But this consensus swept into reverse with the discovery that Ramapithecus was more akin to orang-utans - and molecular evidence showing that the DNA of humans and chimpanzees were so similar that a separation of more than 3-5m years was ruled out.

But opinions have, slowly, been changing back. The force has come from the discoveries of extinct members of the human lineage of ever greater antiquity. Ardipithecus ramidus, discovered in Ethiopia in the mid-1990s by Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues, put back the human-chimp divergence to at least 4.4m years ago. If this put the molecular evidence under strain, it was snapped by the discovery in Chad by Michel Brunet of the University of Poitiers, France, and colleagues of "Toumaï" - Sahelanthropus tchadensis, a member of the human lineage that could be as old as 7m years. Louis Leakey has been partially vindicated, with the effect that our own complacency at our distinctiveness with respect to the animal world has been reinforced.

By the same token, evidence for the diversity of human species through time has been downplayed, first by the cultural inertia of stories of an upwards progression towards the human state; second, by the curious chance that Homo sapiens happens to be the only species of human around today - a situation probably unprecedented in 7m years. The evidence for the coexistence of humans and Neanderthals in Europe for at least 10,000 years until Neanderthals disappeared around 30,000 years ago, and the fact that anthropologists have known for years of the multiple lineages of prehumans living in Africa between 4-2m years -has done little to dent the robust idea that humans are so distinct from the rest of the animal world that they rule the earth by virtue of inherent perfection, or divine fiat.

The Flores finds could change all that with a single stroke.

For one thing, they underscore the fact of human diversity until very recent times. "Maybe little folk from Flores will hammer the point home more effectively because they are so different in anatomy but so close in time," says Tim White. "How will the creationists cope?"

For another, the evidence challenges the human-centric idea that humans characteristically modify their surroundings to suit themselves, rather than allowing natural selection to adapt them to their environment. If the Flores skeleton is evidence of the kind of evolutionary size change more associated with animals such as rats and elephants, this, says Brown "is a clear indicator" of human-like creatures "behaving like all other mammals in terms of their interactions with the environment".

"Darwin and Wallace would be pleased," adds Tim White. "What better demonstration that humans play by the same evolutionary rules as other mammals?"

Of perhaps more current concern to anthropologists is the degree to which Homo floresiensis, with its small stature and - especially - tiny brain, will force a redefinition of humanity, at least in terms of anatomy. "I think the discovery challenges the very notion of what it is to be human," says Stringer.

"Here is a creature with a brain the size of a chimpanzee's, but apparently a tool-maker and hunter, and perhaps descended from the world's first mariners. Its very existence shows how little we know about human evolution. I could never have imagined a creature like this, living as recently as this."

Russell Ciochon, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Iowa, says: "I suspect that creationists will act very negatively toward this discovery.

"It shows that humans were not alone. There may be other dwarfed species lurking in the caves of other isolated islands. Each new discovery will subtract some essence from the uniqueness of humans. I wonder if this discovery might even be discussed in our current political campaign?

Strangely enough the reports suggested that these creatures were wearing only one ornimentation....a Bush-Cheney button

[plschwartz]

If the ebu gogo are still alive and found Mulder because of his miniature equipment has volunteered to test compatibility issues

[bassetman]

Originally Posted by fire_mat99

Australian scientists who found a new species of hobbit-sized humans

Guess that explains Mulder and GG!

[lizard]

Hi All!

Real interesting articles there, fire_matt99 and plshwartz. thanks.

According to plshwartz's article, the 'ebu gogo' was a short, hairy creature rumored to live in Central Flores.
I found this article about Flores Man with links to references, and thought you might be interested...
It says 'orang pendek', is also a short, hairy creature, but rumored to live in Central Sumatra!.....Hmm....
They said 'orang pendek' was [found in Sumatra] in the article from the Guardian...

http://www.nature.com/news/2004/0410.../041025-2.html

Flores, God and Cryptozoology

The discovery of Homo floresiensis raises hopes for yeti hunters and, says Henry Gee, poses thorny questions about the uniqueness of Homo sapiens.

When the first human colonists arrived on the island of Flores in eastern Indonesia a few thousand years ago, they had no idea that they were treading on the remains of a lost world.

Until around 12,000 years ago, when a volcanic eruption seems to have ended the party, Flores was a looking-glass garden of Komodo dragons and even larger lizards, giant tortoises and enormous rats. Alongside them were tiny, primitive elephants and, as we now know, tiny, primitive people1,2.

Probably descended from full-sized Homo erectus that made landfall on Flores as much as 900,000 years ago3, the islanders dodged the dragons and hunted the elephants. Killers and quarry became smaller with each generation, instances of the well-known phenomenon of endemic dwarfing in small, inbred island populations, until they were transformed into new species. Homo erectus became Homo floresiensis.

These people, each a metre tall as an adult, lived on Flores from at least 38,000 years ago to 18,000 years ago2. But fossilization is a chancy business, so it is likely that they were there long before that interval... and long after it. They may have been alive when modern Homo sapiens arrived in the region. Yet as far as we know, Homo floresiensis survived for thousands of years, unnoticed and unmolested by humans, before becoming extinct.

Florid tales

The discovery that Homo floresiensis survived until so very recently, in geological terms, makes it more likely that stories of other mythical, human-like creatures such as yetis are founded on grains of truth.

In the light of the Flores skeleton, a recent initiative4 to scour central Sumatra for 'orang pendek' can be viewed in a more serious light. This small, hairy, manlike creature has hitherto been known only from Malay folklore, a debatable strand of hair and a footprint. Now, cryptozoology, the study of such fabulous creatures, can come in from the cold.

Another argument in favour of such searches comes from the recent discovery of several new species of large mammal, notably in Southeast Asia.

For example, Pseudoryx nghetinhensis5, a species of ox from the remote Vu Qiang nature reserve on the border between Vietnam and Laos, was first described from hunting trophies in only 1992. Another species of bovid, the kouprey (Bos sauveli), was discovered in Indochina in 1937.

Neither of these creatures is as exotic as a yeti or orang pendek, but the point is made. If animals as large as oxen can remain hidden into an era when we would expect that scientists had rustled every tree and bush in search of new forms of life, there is no reason why the same should not apply to new species of large primate, including members of the human family.

Cryptic clues

The discoverers of Homo floresiensis suggest that their find could be the first of many, and that other species of recently extinct humans might be discovered on other isolated islands.

But whether other recently extinct (or extant) hominid species are found or not, the fact that even one distinct species of human was found to have lived alongside modern man not only enriches our understanding of recent human diversity; it could change our view of ourselves in a fundamental way.

As far as we know, Homo sapiens is the only species of human that yet lives on the planet. It is very easy to take this solitary estate (and our consequent separateness from the rest of the animal world) for granted, so much has it become ingrained in our philosophy, ethics and religion, even our science.

Until very recently, evolutionary thought was couched in terms of a linear, progressive trajectory rising from lower life forms and culminating in man. I have argued elsewhere that this view is not, regrettably, as extinct as it should be6.

In palaeoanthropology, this idea is seen in the view that only one species of hominid has existed at any one time, each one succeeding the next in a scheme of orderly replacement. This idea began to crumble in the 1970s7, since when discoveries of ancient relatives of humans have revealed a marked diversity of form. Human evolution is like a bush, not a ladder8.

But these discoveries concerned the more remote reaches of human ancestry. Despite the fact that some of our relatives, such as Neanderthal man and Homo erectus, are thought to have become extinct in relatively recent times9, our complacency that this view holds for recent history has not been shaken.

Until now. If it turns out that the diversity of human beings was always high, remained high until very recently and might not be entirely extinguished, we are entitled to question the security of some of our deepest beliefs. Will the real image of God please stand up?



References
Brown P., et al. Nature, 431. 1055 - 1061 (2004). | Article |
Morwood M. J., et al. Nature, 431. 1087 - 1091(2004). | Article | PubMed |
Morwood M. J., et al. Nature, 392. 173 - 176 (1998). | Article | ISI | ChemPort |
Green D., Tracking down the 'jungle yeti'
Dung V. V., et al. Nature, 363. 443 - 445 (1993). | Article | ISI |
Gee H., et al. Nature, 420. 611 (2002). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |
Leakey R. E. F. & Walker C. Nature, 261. 572 - 574 (1976). | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |
Wood B., et al. Nature, 418. 133 - 135 (2002). | Article | PubMed | ISI | ChemPort |
Swisher III C. C., et al. Science, 274. 1870 - 1874 (1996). | Article | PubMed |

The latest discoveries have put hominids on this planet for 7 million years. If environmental conditions existed at one point in time in Earth's history and at one location on the planet that were favorable to a change in genetic make-up that gave birth to a single hominid species, I think we have to assume that it may be quite possible that similar conditions existed at other locations at some time in Earth's history.

_

[lizard]

Here's a story about an expedition to track the 'orang pendek'...
Not really 'News', but interesting...and referenced in the last post.

Tracking down the 'jungle yeti'
By David Green
BBC News Online, Manchester
Wednesday, 8 September, 2004.

Two amateur explorers hope to prove the existence of the mythical "jungle yeti" by capturing the creature on film.

Adam Davies, of Bramhall, Greater Manchester, and Andrew Sanderson, of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, are travelling to Sumatra in Indonesia to hunt it down.

Three years ago, the pair found a footprint and hairs which, when analysed by scientists, did not match any known species.

They believe it is evidence the orang pendek, as it is called, does exist.

The creature - also known as the Little Man of the Forest - was first chronicled by the explorer Marco Polo in 1292 during his travels in Asia.

Although widely believed to exist by islanders, the creature has been dismissed by most scientists as a myth, similar to the Himalayan yeti or the Loch Ness Monster.

The orang pendek - which is reputed to be related to the orang-utan - is said to measure up to 5ft (1.5m) tall and walk like a man.

Most alleged sightings have taken place in the areas of Mount Tujuh and Mount Kerinci in the west of the island, where the two explorers made their discovery in 2001.

The footprint and two red-brown hairs were analysed by Dr Hans Brunner, who helped clear Lindy Chamberlain of murdering her baby daughter in Australia in the 1980s after she claimed it had been killed by a dingo.

He said they were not from a known species, raising speculation that they might just be evidence of the orang pendek's existence.

"What we want to do now is capture it on film," said Mr Davies, who spends his holidays hunting down mythical creatures.

"I appreciate it is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but I'm determined to give it a good go."

"We've proved it exists organically and we're delighted about that," he claimed. "The hairs are organic proof."

Dr Brunner said they were hairs from an unknown species of primate and that was backed up by a primatologist at Cambridge University who said the prints were also a primate's.

"We're going to publish a scientific paper shortly based on years of research, not only by us but by [conservation group] Fauna and Flora International who have worked out there in Sumatra for many years."

But the future of the orang pendek - if it exists - is threatened by illegal logging which is destroying the jungle habitat, but which many Sumatrans see as their only way of making a living.

Adam hopes that proving the creature's existence will bring the eyes of the world on the island and make the orang pendek a protected species.

"Capturing it on film will light people's imaginations and arouse interest. That's important because that's an area which is under extreme environmental pressure and it will help that area to be preserved.

"But I would just love to see it. Now I know it definitely exists I want to give it a damn good shout at finding it."

The pair's hunt for the orang pendek is just one of many crypto-zoology expeditions they have been on.

Last year, they searched in vain for the Allghoi Khorkhoi - the Mongolian death worm - in the Gobi desert and were arrested on suspicion of being Chinese spies, before being released.

In 1998 and 2000 they searched - again, in vain - for the Mokele M'embe - a dinosaur rumoured to live in the Congo.

"That was our most dangerous trip," remembers Adam. "There was a civil war going on and rocket launchers at the airport in Kinshasa."

The orang pendek expeditions have been by far their most successful ventures, but the pair are still beset by scepticism from the general public.

"It's very easy to be seen as a nutter," admits Adam. "And so we're very careful that anything we do find is analysed independently by scientists."

And it would be even more strange if these creatures were related to these "Big Foot's" and "Sasquatch's" and other "Big Brother" types....
...other 'legendary' creatures that only a rare few have claimed to have witnessed...

[fire_mat99]

old thread but What about city of atlantis