Carl Zimmer presents a timeline of the Homo floresiensis story, with a summary of the latest paper that casts doubt on its status as a legitimate species. Bottom line: it's still unsettled! As usual, the answer is only going to come from more digging and more data on the populations that lived on Ling Bua.
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Finally: more bones.
Last October the world marveled at the announcement of the discovery of a new species of hominid, Homo floresiensis, in a cave called Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores. One conclusion was more shocking than the next. First, this hominid stood only three feet high,…
Two years ago this month, I was taken aback by some explosive news. A team of Indonesian and Australian scientists reported that they had discovered fossils of what they claimed was a new species of hominid. It lived on the island of Flores in Indonesia, it stood three feet tall, and it had a brain…
So lets recap: Its been almost eight months now since scientists announced the discovery of Homo floresiensis, the diminutive people that some claim belong to a new branch of hominid evolution and skeptics claim were just small humans. We seem to have entered a lull in the flow of new scientific…
It's been twenty months now since scientists reported discovering fossils on the Indonesian island of Flores belonging to a three-foot-tall hominid with a brain the size of a chimp that lived recently as 12,000 years ago. Homo floresiensis, as this hominid was dubbed, has inspired two clashing…
Hm, this is useful. I had wondered what happened to the "hobbit find".
I'd been wondering myself. Thanks for the link, PZ.
Well, what does the bible say on the matter?
Aw, nuts. I read "Homo fluorensis", and thought it was some kind of cool DNA-splicing project to create bioluminescent humans. Turns out my Latin sucks as much as my reading skills.
I don't know about anyone else, but I can't get over the nagging suspicion that H. floresiensis is a hoax. The sealing of the discovery site and the behaviour of the Indonesian paeleontologist are a little too hinky for my taste.
The Indonesian palaeontologist (Teuku Jacob) is against H. floresiensis being a new species, though. And his shady behavior (IIRC the sealing of the discovery site is due to him) damages his credibility as a naysayer, IMO. If he wants this resolved, he needs to throw his weight behind further exploration of the site, and he seems very reluctant to do that. We need more bones!
One of the documentary/cable channels (History? Discovery?) recently had an hour-long on this topic, which seemed to cover basically every point Zimmer does. In hindsight, I'm impressed by the good quality of the thing.
I look at the floresiensis skull and I see something that's a lot closer to an erectus skull than a sapiens'. The major difference to erectus is that the eyes are proportionately bigger, as you'd probably expect. But compared to sapiens, the differences seem as big as the differences between Flores and a chimpanzee.