Thursday, October 28, 2004
A new cousin
Upon reading my email this morning I was surprise and excited to read about the discovery of a skull representing a previously unknown species of man. The new species lived on an Indonesian island 18 000 years ago as in named Homo floresiensis. Our newly discovered cousin is thought to have have branched from Homo erectus when it took up life on the island; like many island living species they then evolved to become considerably smaller than their ancestors.
The idea of a living, hominid relative only 18 000 years ago is pretty exciting stuff and was enough to motivate me into writing up a post about it, that is until I had a bit of a look around the web. Carl Zimmer has a great post describing the implications of discovery, PZ Myers has a nice picture laden post summarizing the papers published in Nature and a National Geographic article and Nature's own website has some excellent free coverage.
Fine, I thought, I'll just post a few extracts from each article and link to them so people get their science on, as it were. Which would be fine, but Prashant Mullick has already done that, rendering me absolutely redundant. So that's it, no comment, no analysis just links.
Well, alright I'll add this, the researchers would no doubt love to get some DNA out of the skeletons but that's going to prove to be a problem. DNA has been extracted from older samples (for instance ~30 000 year old neanderthal skeletons) but that is largely because hydroxyapetite - a mineral in bones - can crystallize after death, binding and protecting DNA in the process. The nature article says that "the skeleton had the consistency of wet blotting paper" which suggests there aren't many mineral crystals in there and DNA will be hard to come by.
2 Comments:
Oh, and this is Huw, BTW. To lazy to create Blogger account (and I suspect I would be unable to resist creating some sort of blog thing).
I am going to reply on here in case anyone else thinks the same thing. Anyway, you are right that migration leading to geographical isolation, leading to the evolution of traits specific for the new location which finally lead to speciation is pretty standard evolutionary theory.
I think the most interesting things about the Flores find aren’t even strictly scientific; just the idea that there was an entirely different species of man living only 20 000 years ago fills me with wonder. How would or species have reacted had we meet them? We definitely had contact with H. erectus and the Neanderthals but these guys where even weirder.
On the scientific side it is interesting to note a brain the size of grapefruit seem capable of fashioning and using tools, hunting 1 tonne animals and using fires to cook. Also interesting is the fact that one of the reasons given for the extinction of their ancestors H. erectus is that they weren’t flexible enough to undergo the rapid, massive expansion in brain size that our ancestors underwent before we left Africa and subsequently spread and out competed/killed erectus in Asia. If the ‘hobbits’ could become 3ft tall in the space of maybe as little as 100 000 then maybe we need to rethink that.
Some more of the really exciting stuff is explained in the post by Carl Zimmer that’s linked to up there.
