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Daryl Bambic

Mike Morwood: Archaeologist whose 'hobbit' discovery sparked fresh debate on human evol... - 0 views

  • far from being the linear narrative of successive waves of colonisation out of Africa, as once thought, the process was, in fact, one with numerous twists and turns involving many different species.
  • among the most outstanding discoveries in paleoanthropology in over half a century.
  • because the cave also unearthed sophisticated stone tools similar to others found around the world in Homo erectus sites
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Flores tools were tiny, the right size for people of only 3ft tall with a brain the size of a chimp or grapefruit
  • Remarkably, the skull was found in a layer of sediments dating back only 18,000 years, long after the Neanderthals had vanished from the face of the Earth, having lost the evolutionary battle to Homo sapiens, the sole human species on Earth by then. This had huge ramifications for the varying theories of human evolution.
  • it could have been a descendant of Homo erectus that arrived early on Flores, perhaps using boats, and which, becoming stranded, evolved its petite size as an adaptation to the limited food supply available.
  • They also proposed the unimaginable, that Homo floresiensis lived contemporaneously on Flores with Homo sapiens.
  • Detractors
  • isease of some sort that produced the specimen’s unusual features.
mauromongiat

Homo floresiensis: the Hobbit - 0 views

    • mauromongiat
       
      The homo floriensis Would be a small human if it did'nt have such a small brain. The fact that the brain of the homo floriensis is so small is a proof that it is a different specie from the homo sappien.
  • The brain size of the floresiensis skull is extraordinarily small, at 380cc. This is as small as any australopithecine ever discovered, and fairly typical for a chimpanzee. (Chimps range from about 300 to 500cc, averaging about 400cc, but are physically bigger than floresiensis.) This is smaller than would be expected even for a dwarf form of Homo erectus, and suggests there was active selection for a small brain size for some reason. (Human pygmies, incidentally, are nothing like H. floresiensis; their brains are almost as large as those of normal-sized humans)
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