New Branch on the Family Tree
Posted on | January 30, 2007
The discovery on Flores Island of prehistoric human skeletons—the so-called hobbits—ignited the usual raging anthropological debates. Here’s more support for the notion that the remains represented a new hominid species, and not stunted specimens of modern Homo sapiens, with whom they were contemporaneous:
In the latest salvo in a heated scientific shootout, an international team led by Florida State University anthropologist Dean Falk compared the Hobbit’s skull to those of nine people with microcephaly, a rare condition in which the head is abnormally small due to improper brain development.
They concluded the 3-foot-tall (1-meter) adult woman had a highly evolved brain, unlike that of a microcephalic person, confirming she belongs to the proposed extinct species Homo floresiensis, closely related to modern Homo sapiens.
“Lo and behold, it doesn’t look anything like a microcephalic. In fact, it’s antithetical,” Falk said in an interview, rebutting scientists like primatologist Robert Martin of the Field Museum in Chicago who suggest the skull came from a person with microcephaly.
A previous study by Falk had been criticized because it compared the Hobbit, with a brain a third the size of modern people, to just a single microcephalic skull.
H. floresiensis seems to have become extinct about twelve thousand years ago.
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