The battle for Middle-Earth

In 2004, I was a member of an Australian and Indonesian team that reported the discovered remains of a one-metre tall adult human from the Indonesian island of Flores (DOI: 10.1038/nature02956). Named Homo floresiensis, but better known as the hobbit, the find was terribly exciting: the individual had a brain the size of a chimpanzee with many anatomical features that harked back to some of the earliest known humans. I was involved with the radiocarbon dating of the site and discovered that the main skeleton was only around 18,000 years old while a white volcanic ash laid down 13,000 years ago capped the final remains of this species.  This may all sound a long time ago but geologically speaking it was yesterday; in Europe, Neanderthals appear to have died out by 30,000 years ago. Next to ourselves, the ages from Flores make the hobbits the most recently surviving species of human.

The skull of Homo floresiensis: the Hobbit
With the news coverage of the discovery, a few researchers voiced concern that the remains may represent a diseased individual and not a new species.  This is par for the course when it comes to discovering new human species. When one of the first Neanderthals was found in 1856, one expert described it as a child who had had suffered from rickets, got bashed over the head and then struggled on through life with arthritis.  In the case of the main Flores skeleton, critics proposed the individual had a dreadful complaint that leads to the under-development of the brain; an affliction called microcephaly.  These anxieties have been put together in a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073 pnas.0605563103). This paper has had quite a bit of airtime in the news. Although interesting, not everyone is convinced. Part of the reason is that since the discovery, there have been several more published papers on finds from Flores that support the original interpretation. At least nine individuals with similar dimensions have now been excavated from cave sediments spanning tens of thousands of years (DOI: 10.1038/nature04022); it seems pretty unlikely that a community suffering from such a dreadful complaint as microcephaly would have survived this length of time. Not only that, but the technology for making the stone tools found with the hobbit remains is the same as that discovered in one million year old deposits in central Flores (DOI: 10.1038/nature04618); consistent with the hobbits being descendents of the earliest colonists. And to top it all, analysis of the inside of the skull showed that these individuals had highly-developed brains that would have allowed the hobbits to solve problems and plan for the future (DOI: 10.1126/science.1109727). Whether they had the foresight to see this argument coming is another matter.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

500 years of drought and flood: trees and corals reveal Australia’s climate history

Image
500 years of drought and flood: trees and corals reveal Australia's climate history Patrick Baker , University of Melbourne ; Chris Turney , UNSW Australia , and Jonathan Palmer , UNSW Australia Australia is the land of drought and flooding rains, and in a recent paper we’ve shown that’s been the case for more than 500 years. As part of our Australia and New Zealand Drought Atlas we’ve published the most detailed record of drought and wet periods (or “pluvials”) since 1500. The data reveal that despite the severity of the Millennium Drought, the five worst single years of drought happened before 1900. But 2011 was the wettest year in our 513-year record. The dominant theme of Australia’s drought history is variability. We may get one year of extremely wet conditions (for example in 2011) or we might get six years of extremely dry conditions (such as 2003-2009). North Queensland may be flooded out while Victoria suffers with drought. Or in extreme circumstances, the entir...
Read more

The Tropics and the Furious Fifties

Image
There’s an old sailor’s expression: “Below 40 degrees south there is no law, below 50 degrees south there is no God.” Since the sixteenth century, sailors have spoken in awe of the violent westerly winds and seas they experienced fighting their way across the Southern Ocean. With few landmasses to slow them down, the winds found across 40 degrees latitude often reach speeds of twenty-five knots—about 40 percent stronger than their northern hemisphere counterparts—earning them the title the “roaring forties.” As shipping pushed farther south, explorers realized that these winds form part of a vast storm belt that includes the “furious fifties” and “screaming sixties,” names more reminiscent of terrible rock bands than a major part of our planet’s circulation system. The early hunters and traders didn’t understand it at the time, but these winds are created by a procession of low-pressure systems carried east by the jet stream, a river of cold air hurtling and twisting round the Antarct...
Read more

Death of a colony

Image
Cape Denison holds a special place in the history of Antarctic exploration. A small outcrop of rocks on the remote East Antarctic coastline, Cape Denison is forever associated with one of the most spectacular and often forgotten tales of survival. A century ago it was the main base of operations for one of the great explorers of the south: the Australian scientist Sir Douglas Mawson . Privately funded, three bases and one research ship supported a science team that explored a region the size of the United States between 1911 and 1914. Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition, however, suffered terribly during their time at Cape Denison: a sudden turn of events led to tragedy on the ice, the death of two men, allegations of cannibalism and with the return of winter sea ice, an extended stay in Antarctica. But when they first came upon Cape Denison, Mawson was ecstatic. Greeted by squawking penguins: ‘ We were soon inside a beautiful, miniature harbour completely land-locked. The su...
Read more