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Our not so distant relative
Scientists have discovered a new species of human in remotest
Indonesia. Henry Gee reports on the Hobbit-like creature which
questions our unique heritage.
Thursday October 28, 2004
The Guardian
W hen Indonesian and Australian archaeologists started to excavate a
limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, they weren't
prepared for what they found, the skeleton of an entirely new species
of human, Homo floresiensis, that lived as recently as 18,000 years
ago.
"When we first unearthed the skeleton, I was simultaneously
gobsmacked, puzzled and amused," says geochronologist Bert Roberts of
the University of Wollongong.
"We had been looking for the remains of the earliest modern humans in
Indonesia, so when we found the skeleton of a completely new species
of human, with so many primitive traits and that survived until so
recently, it really opened up a whole can of prehistoric worms. The
discovery of Homo floresiensis was sweet serendipity."
Peter Brown, an anthropologist from the University of New England in
Armidale, New South Wales, says: "I would have been less surprised if
someone had uncovered an alien." The discovery at Liang Bua cave,
described in Nature this week, could alter our outlook on our own
place in nature.
The discovery raises obvious questions about the diversity of the
human family, such as whether undiscovered human-like species might
survive today. Are we really the sole human custodians of our planet?
Could the existence of Homo floresiensis rehabilitate persistent
rumours of undiscovered human-like species elsewhere, notably the
orang pendek of Malay folklore? Could cryptozoology come in from the
cold?
Unlike parts of Indonesia closer to the Asian mainland, far-flung
Flores has been an island for at least a million years. As is the case
with islands elsewhere, the fauna of Flores evolved in its own way,
producing creatures larger or smaller than their mainland relatives: a
looking-glass lost world of tiny elephants, giant rats, Komodo dragons
and even larger, extinct lizards.
This isolation had its effects on the human inhabitants. One of the
most surprising things about the skeleton is its size: in life, no
more than a metre tall, about the same size as one of the giant rats.
Living in a hole in the ground and chased by lizards of mythical
proportions, the creature has, perhaps inevitably, been nicknamed
"hobbit" by some of the researchers - a reference to the tiny
hole-dwelling heroes of The Lord of the Rings.
For Brown, it was the smallness of the skull that showed that Homo
floresiensis was truly different. When he measured the skull volume
and found it a chimp-sized 380cc, he says his jaw "dropped to my
knees. Small stature is easy to accommodate, but small brain size is a
bigger problem - it still is." And yet these tiny-brained creatures
were skilled enough to make finely crafted stone tools.
The clue to the origin of Homo floresiensis comes from earlier work
sug gestive of the presence on Flores of earlier, full-sized
prehumans. Michael Morwood, of the University of New England, New
South Wales, co-director of the excavation, working closely with his
Indonesian counterpart, RP Soejono, of the Indonesian Centre for
Archaeology in Jakarta, whose team discovered the skeleton.
In the mid-1990s, Morwood and his colleagues unearthed stone tools on
the island dating back 800,000 years. The implication was that the
toolmakers, presumably Homo erectus, were capable of navigating the
open sea. It is possible that once marooned on Flores, a population of
Homo erectus set its own evolutionary course, morphing into Homo
floresiensis.
When a small population of animals is cut off from a parent population
for an extended period, it follows its own evolutionary course. Size
change is a typical response. Small size is an ad vantage on isolated
islands, where resources are scarce, so this might have been what
predisposed the inhabitants of Flores towards smallness.
It is hard to comprehend the significance of the survival of such a
strange species of human until what is, in geological terms, a very
recent date. To put this in context, by 18,000 years ago, modern Homo
sapiens had been in Indonesia for at least 20,000 years.
Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London, says: "One of
the first things I thought of, on learning about the Flores skeleton,
was a possible parallel with the orang pendek [found in Sumatra]."
Bert Roberts offers hints of new discoveries just below the research
horizon: "When I was back in Flores just three weeks ago, Gert van den
Bergh [from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research at Texel,
and the team's expert on the fossil elephants] and I headed off to a
village in central Flores where we heard the most amazing tales of
little hairy people whom they called ebu gogo: ebu meaning
"grandmother" and gogo "he who eats anything".
"The ebu gogo were short - about a metre tall - long-haired,
pot-bellied, with ears that stuck out, walking with a slightly awkward
gait, and had longish arms and fingers. They murmured at each other
and could repeat words parrot-fashion. They could climb slender trees
but were never seen holding stone tools, whereas we have lots of
sophisticated artefacts associated with Homo floresiensis. That's the
only inconsistency with the archaeological evidence. Gert had heard of
these stories 10 years ago and he thought them no better than
leprechaun stories - until we unearthed the hobbit."
Could the ebu gogo still be alive? Roberts thinks it is possible. "The
villagers said that the last hobbit was seen just before Dutch
colonists settled that part of Flores in the 19th century," he said,
adding that searches of the remaining rainforest on Flores, and the
caves specifically associated with the ebu gogo stories, could turn up
samples of hair or other material, if not living, breathing specimens.
The possibility of finding ebu gogo alive should not be dismissed as
fantasy, because mammals unknown to science do still turn up - and
South-East Asia is a particular hotspot for such finds. An antelope,
Pseudoryx nghetinhensis, from the Lao-Vietnamese border, was described
as recently as 1993. An ox-like creature, the kouprey, was discovered
in Cambodia in the 1940s.
Morwood and Roberts have targets already in their sights. Many
Indonesian islands contain peculiar faunas and have deep, barely
explored limestone caves. "Sumba and Sulawesi are high on our
hitlist," says Roberts. Morwood starts work on Sulawesi next year.
A larger theme raised by the discovery concerns the uniqueness of our
human heritage, something which, in hindsight, has been in question
for decades. Back in the 1960s, the great anthropologist Louis Leakey
speculated that the human lineage had been distinct from that of the
apes for 20m years or so. In the 1970s, extinct ape-like primates such
as Ramapithecus, living around 10-20m years ago, were presumed to lie
on the human lineage. But this consensus swept into reverse with the
discovery that Ramapithecus was more akin to orang-utans - and
molecular evidence showing that the DNA of humans and chimpanzees were
so similar that a separation of more than 3-5m years was ruled out.
But opinions have, slowly, been changing back. The force has come from
the discoveries of extinct members of the human lineage of ever
greater antiquity. Ardipithecus ramidus, discovered in Ethiopia in the
mid-1990s by Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, and
colleagues, put back the human-chimp divergence to at least 4.4m years
ago. If this put the molecular evidence under strain, it was snapped
by the discovery in Chad by Michel Brunet of the University of
Poitiers, France, and colleagues of "Touma�" - Sahelanthropus
tchadensis, a member of the human lineage that could be as old as 7m
years. Louis Leakey has been partially vindicated, with the effect
that our own complacency at our distinctiveness with respect to the
animal world has been reinforced.
By the same token, evidence for the diversity of human species through
time has been downplayed, first by the cultural inertia of stories of
an upwards progression towards the human state; second, by the curious
chance that Homo sapiens happens to be the only species of human
around today - a situation probably unprecedented in 7m years. The
evidence for the coexistence of humans and Neanderthals in Europe for
at least 10,000 years until Neanderthals disappeared around 30,000
years ago, and the fact that anthropologists have known for years of
the multiple lineages of prehumans living in Africa between 4-2m years
-has done little to dent the robust idea that humans are so distinct
from the rest of the animal world that they rule the earth by virtue
of inherent perfection, or divine fiat.
The Flores finds could change all that with a single stroke.
For one thing, they underscore the fact of human diversity until very
recent times. "Maybe little folk from Flores will hammer the point
home more effectively because they are so different in anatomy but so
close in time," says Tim White. "How will the creationists cope?"
For another, the evidence challenges the human-centric idea that
humans characteristically modify their surroundings to suit
themselves, rather than allowing natural selection to adapt them to
their environment. If the Flores skeleton is evidence of the kind of
evolutionary size change more associated with animals such as rats and
elephants, this, says Brown "is a clear indicator" of human-like
creatures "behaving like all other mammals in terms of their
interactions with the environment".
"Darwin and Wallace would be pleased," adds Tim White. "What better
demonstration that humans play by the same evolutionary rules as other
mammals?"
Of perhaps more current concern to anthropologists is the degree to
which Homo floresiensis, with its small stature and - especially -
tiny brain, will force a redefinition of humanity, at least in terms
of anatomy. "I think the discovery challenges the very notion of what
it is to be human," says Stringer.
"Here is a creature with a brain the size of a chimpanzee's, but
apparently a tool-maker and hunter, and perhaps descended from the
world's first mariners. Its very existence shows how little we know
about human evolution. I could never have imagined a creature like
this, living as recently as this."
Russell Ciochon, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Iowa,
says: "I suspect that creationists will act very negatively toward
this discovery.
"It shows that humans were not alone. There may be other dwarfed
species lurking in the caves of other isolated islands. Each new
discovery will subtract some essence from the uniqueness of humans. I
wonder if this discovery might even be discussed in our current
political campaign? It is no secret that Bush is anti-evolution. If he
is smart, he will not touch this one."
Further reading:
Fission-track ages of stone tools and fossils on the east Indonesian
island of Flores by MJ Morwood, PB O'Sullivan and A Raza, Nature vol
392, pp173-176 (1998) Earlier evidence that Homo erectus crossed open
sea to reach the remote island of Flores
New ages for human occupation and climatic change at Lake Mungo,
Australia by James M Bowler and colleagues, Nature vol. 421, pp837-840
(2003)
A new hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa by Michel
Brunet and colleagues, Nature vol 418, 145-151 (2002)
Scientists have discovered a new species of human in remotest
Indonesia. Henry Gee reports on the Hobbit-like creature which
questions our unique heritage.
Thursday October 28, 2004
The Guardian
W hen Indonesian and Australian archaeologists started to excavate a
limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, they weren't
prepared for what they found, the skeleton of an entirely new species
of human, Homo floresiensis, that lived as recently as 18,000 years
ago.
"When we first unearthed the skeleton, I was simultaneously
gobsmacked, puzzled and amused," says geochronologist Bert Roberts of
the University of Wollongong.
"We had been looking for the remains of the earliest modern humans in
Indonesia, so when we found the skeleton of a completely new species
of human, with so many primitive traits and that survived until so
recently, it really opened up a whole can of prehistoric worms. The
discovery of Homo floresiensis was sweet serendipity."
Peter Brown, an anthropologist from the University of New England in
Armidale, New South Wales, says: "I would have been less surprised if
someone had uncovered an alien." The discovery at Liang Bua cave,
described in Nature this week, could alter our outlook on our own
place in nature.
The discovery raises obvious questions about the diversity of the
human family, such as whether undiscovered human-like species might
survive today. Are we really the sole human custodians of our planet?
Could the existence of Homo floresiensis rehabilitate persistent
rumours of undiscovered human-like species elsewhere, notably the
orang pendek of Malay folklore? Could cryptozoology come in from the
cold?
Unlike parts of Indonesia closer to the Asian mainland, far-flung
Flores has been an island for at least a million years. As is the case
with islands elsewhere, the fauna of Flores evolved in its own way,
producing creatures larger or smaller than their mainland relatives: a
looking-glass lost world of tiny elephants, giant rats, Komodo dragons
and even larger, extinct lizards.
This isolation had its effects on the human inhabitants. One of the
most surprising things about the skeleton is its size: in life, no
more than a metre tall, about the same size as one of the giant rats.
Living in a hole in the ground and chased by lizards of mythical
proportions, the creature has, perhaps inevitably, been nicknamed
"hobbit" by some of the researchers - a reference to the tiny
hole-dwelling heroes of The Lord of the Rings.
For Brown, it was the smallness of the skull that showed that Homo
floresiensis was truly different. When he measured the skull volume
and found it a chimp-sized 380cc, he says his jaw "dropped to my
knees. Small stature is easy to accommodate, but small brain size is a
bigger problem - it still is." And yet these tiny-brained creatures
were skilled enough to make finely crafted stone tools.
The clue to the origin of Homo floresiensis comes from earlier work
sug gestive of the presence on Flores of earlier, full-sized
prehumans. Michael Morwood, of the University of New England, New
South Wales, co-director of the excavation, working closely with his
Indonesian counterpart, RP Soejono, of the Indonesian Centre for
Archaeology in Jakarta, whose team discovered the skeleton.
In the mid-1990s, Morwood and his colleagues unearthed stone tools on
the island dating back 800,000 years. The implication was that the
toolmakers, presumably Homo erectus, were capable of navigating the
open sea. It is possible that once marooned on Flores, a population of
Homo erectus set its own evolutionary course, morphing into Homo
floresiensis.
When a small population of animals is cut off from a parent population
for an extended period, it follows its own evolutionary course. Size
change is a typical response. Small size is an ad vantage on isolated
islands, where resources are scarce, so this might have been what
predisposed the inhabitants of Flores towards smallness.
It is hard to comprehend the significance of the survival of such a
strange species of human until what is, in geological terms, a very
recent date. To put this in context, by 18,000 years ago, modern Homo
sapiens had been in Indonesia for at least 20,000 years.
Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London, says: "One of
the first things I thought of, on learning about the Flores skeleton,
was a possible parallel with the orang pendek [found in Sumatra]."
Bert Roberts offers hints of new discoveries just below the research
horizon: "When I was back in Flores just three weeks ago, Gert van den
Bergh [from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research at Texel,
and the team's expert on the fossil elephants] and I headed off to a
village in central Flores where we heard the most amazing tales of
little hairy people whom they called ebu gogo: ebu meaning
"grandmother" and gogo "he who eats anything".
"The ebu gogo were short - about a metre tall - long-haired,
pot-bellied, with ears that stuck out, walking with a slightly awkward
gait, and had longish arms and fingers. They murmured at each other
and could repeat words parrot-fashion. They could climb slender trees
but were never seen holding stone tools, whereas we have lots of
sophisticated artefacts associated with Homo floresiensis. That's the
only inconsistency with the archaeological evidence. Gert had heard of
these stories 10 years ago and he thought them no better than
leprechaun stories - until we unearthed the hobbit."
Could the ebu gogo still be alive? Roberts thinks it is possible. "The
villagers said that the last hobbit was seen just before Dutch
colonists settled that part of Flores in the 19th century," he said,
adding that searches of the remaining rainforest on Flores, and the
caves specifically associated with the ebu gogo stories, could turn up
samples of hair or other material, if not living, breathing specimens.
The possibility of finding ebu gogo alive should not be dismissed as
fantasy, because mammals unknown to science do still turn up - and
South-East Asia is a particular hotspot for such finds. An antelope,
Pseudoryx nghetinhensis, from the Lao-Vietnamese border, was described
as recently as 1993. An ox-like creature, the kouprey, was discovered
in Cambodia in the 1940s.
Morwood and Roberts have targets already in their sights. Many
Indonesian islands contain peculiar faunas and have deep, barely
explored limestone caves. "Sumba and Sulawesi are high on our
hitlist," says Roberts. Morwood starts work on Sulawesi next year.
A larger theme raised by the discovery concerns the uniqueness of our
human heritage, something which, in hindsight, has been in question
for decades. Back in the 1960s, the great anthropologist Louis Leakey
speculated that the human lineage had been distinct from that of the
apes for 20m years or so. In the 1970s, extinct ape-like primates such
as Ramapithecus, living around 10-20m years ago, were presumed to lie
on the human lineage. But this consensus swept into reverse with the
discovery that Ramapithecus was more akin to orang-utans - and
molecular evidence showing that the DNA of humans and chimpanzees were
so similar that a separation of more than 3-5m years was ruled out.
But opinions have, slowly, been changing back. The force has come from
the discoveries of extinct members of the human lineage of ever
greater antiquity. Ardipithecus ramidus, discovered in Ethiopia in the
mid-1990s by Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, and
colleagues, put back the human-chimp divergence to at least 4.4m years
ago. If this put the molecular evidence under strain, it was snapped
by the discovery in Chad by Michel Brunet of the University of
Poitiers, France, and colleagues of "Touma�" - Sahelanthropus
tchadensis, a member of the human lineage that could be as old as 7m
years. Louis Leakey has been partially vindicated, with the effect
that our own complacency at our distinctiveness with respect to the
animal world has been reinforced.
By the same token, evidence for the diversity of human species through
time has been downplayed, first by the cultural inertia of stories of
an upwards progression towards the human state; second, by the curious
chance that Homo sapiens happens to be the only species of human
around today - a situation probably unprecedented in 7m years. The
evidence for the coexistence of humans and Neanderthals in Europe for
at least 10,000 years until Neanderthals disappeared around 30,000
years ago, and the fact that anthropologists have known for years of
the multiple lineages of prehumans living in Africa between 4-2m years
-has done little to dent the robust idea that humans are so distinct
from the rest of the animal world that they rule the earth by virtue
of inherent perfection, or divine fiat.
The Flores finds could change all that with a single stroke.
For one thing, they underscore the fact of human diversity until very
recent times. "Maybe little folk from Flores will hammer the point
home more effectively because they are so different in anatomy but so
close in time," says Tim White. "How will the creationists cope?"
For another, the evidence challenges the human-centric idea that
humans characteristically modify their surroundings to suit
themselves, rather than allowing natural selection to adapt them to
their environment. If the Flores skeleton is evidence of the kind of
evolutionary size change more associated with animals such as rats and
elephants, this, says Brown "is a clear indicator" of human-like
creatures "behaving like all other mammals in terms of their
interactions with the environment".
"Darwin and Wallace would be pleased," adds Tim White. "What better
demonstration that humans play by the same evolutionary rules as other
mammals?"
Of perhaps more current concern to anthropologists is the degree to
which Homo floresiensis, with its small stature and - especially -
tiny brain, will force a redefinition of humanity, at least in terms
of anatomy. "I think the discovery challenges the very notion of what
it is to be human," says Stringer.
"Here is a creature with a brain the size of a chimpanzee's, but
apparently a tool-maker and hunter, and perhaps descended from the
world's first mariners. Its very existence shows how little we know
about human evolution. I could never have imagined a creature like
this, living as recently as this."
Russell Ciochon, a paleoanthropologist from the University of Iowa,
says: "I suspect that creationists will act very negatively toward
this discovery.
"It shows that humans were not alone. There may be other dwarfed
species lurking in the caves of other isolated islands. Each new
discovery will subtract some essence from the uniqueness of humans. I
wonder if this discovery might even be discussed in our current
political campaign? It is no secret that Bush is anti-evolution. If he
is smart, he will not touch this one."
Further reading:
Fission-track ages of stone tools and fossils on the east Indonesian
island of Flores by MJ Morwood, PB O'Sullivan and A Raza, Nature vol
392, pp173-176 (1998) Earlier evidence that Homo erectus crossed open
sea to reach the remote island of Flores
New ages for human occupation and climatic change at Lake Mungo,
Australia by James M Bowler and colleagues, Nature vol. 421, pp837-840
(2003)
A new hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa by Michel
Brunet and colleagues, Nature vol 418, 145-151 (2002)
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