Hobbits and House Elves (the fossil evidence)

[justcarol67]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "bluesqueak" <pipdowns at e...>
wrote:
> 
> Looks like they may have found evidence of the 'little people'. 
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3948165.stm
> for a report on hobbit sized hominids - interestingly, the remains 
> date back only 18,000 years, which is co-existent with modern humans.
> 
> Pip!Squeak


Carol:
Unfortunately the skeleton has a chimp-sized brain, smaller than that
of homo habilis, which died out two million years ago and made only
the most primitive stone tools. Homo Floresiensis sounds like some
sort of australopithecine that outlived its time but with shorter arms
and more humanlike body proportions. How could such a creature make
the tools found with this partial skeleton? Most likely they were made
by the modern humans that lived in the area at the same time.

What bothers me most is that the articles are extrapolating from one
skeleton to a whole species and assuming that the species lasted up to
12,000 years ago based on a (supposedly) 18,000 year-old fossil. The
articles from the popular media (newspapers and radio) are also
bringing in hobbits and Lilliputians, as well as local legends of
little people that may have as much (or as little) factual basis as
sightings of Bigfoot. Some of these articles refer to the Asian Homo
Erectus (the supposed ancestors of Floriensis) as ancestors of modern
humans, but Java man (to use the old terminology) did not evolve into
modern humans, who AFWK evolved from an African variant of Erectus
best represented, to my knowledge, by Richard Leakey's Turkana Boy. (I
confess that I'm not quite up to date here, but most of the
significant fossil finds since the mid-90s that I'm familiar with have
involved much earlier species, mostly variants of australopithecus,
and most of them have been in Africa.)

To return to our hobbit-sized skeleton, could this new *partial*
skeleton be a midget born to normal-sized people, which happens now
and could have happened then? Or is the find misdated? A child
misidentified as an adult? But still, the location and the brain size
are suspicious. Maybe it's a hoax. It ain't a hobbit--they'd have had
larger brains. ;-) House elf? Yeah. Winky's Ice Age ancestor?
--though, to be serious again for a moment, I don't know how, or
whether, the Ice Age affected the Southern hemisphere. I can see a
pygmy species evolving from Java man but I can't see creatures with a
chimpanzee-sized brain creating sophisticated tools. Habilis didn't.
The much larger Erectus didn't. Neanderthal and early Homo Sapiens
(e.g., Cro-Magnon) did, but Neanderthal's brain was even larger than
ours, if not quite so sophisticated in terms of capacity for spoken
language.

Note that parts of this post are facetious, as signaled by the tone
and grammar, but I do get tired of the media treating every
paleontological find as revolutionary (and every dinosaur as a bird's
ancestor), and it's misleading to bring in legends and fiction in
relation to scientific discoveries. Anything for a headline, even if
it means underestimating the intelligence of the general public. And
the first online article I read on this discovery had "home" for
"homo" in the fossil's name.

Even the scientists are leaping to conclusions, trying to get their
names before the public. I do agree with one point that the scientists
are making: It's high time that people stopped thinking that human
evolution occurred in a straight line or that only one human species
could exist in one place at the same time. (You'd think that the
coexistence of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon for 20,000 years would have
disproved that theory, but no: many paeloanthropologists assume that
Cro-Magnon, and not the inability to adapt after the Ice Age ended,
drove the Neanderthals to extinction.) I think that a lot of fossils
lumped under homo habilis are actually gracile australopithecines
labeled as habilis because of the damaging theory that two human
species could not coexist (unless one was a robust australopithecine
and the other a human ancestor). Maybe someone will go back and
reclassify those specimens and a lot of others and stop assuming that
every find is a direct ancestor of Homo Sapiens. Homo Floriensis, if
it's real and correctly dated, certainly isn't.

Anyway, here's an interview of two paleontologists with contrasting
viewpoints that at least gets away from hobbits and Lilliputians, but
the speculation based on limited evidence, especially by Tim Flannery,
reminds me of what we do in HPfGU, only it's presented as science:

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2004/s1229757.htm

Carol, waiting to hear from Richard Leakey on this one, assuming that
he hasn't entirely traded paleoanthropology for conservation