18,00 year old human skeletons found in Flores

Hobbit' a new addition to human family

More and better informationthere.

The most interesting thing about this find is that there is an oral tradition in Indonesia of a small "human" that uses fire, but no clothing, living deep in the forests. It has been speculated that these might be Homo erectus survivals but no one ever took it seriously enough to mount a systematic search for such a being. As the youngest Flores remains are dated c.13,000 BP it is now evident that; 1) such a being did in fact exist and; 2) it survived into the range of human oral tradition. This brings up the third (slim) possibility, that it might still exist.

Wow! That's interesting.

Acquiunk... where did you hear about this oral tradition? I'd like to read more.

I think it is neat that they hunted dwarf elephants. Hard to even visualize this, but I'm trying.

Piffka, I have no readily available on line source for those traditions. But the are illuded too at the end of the article in today's New York Times;

"Among today's Ngadha people of central Flores and the Manggarai of West Flores there are local stories of little people who lived in caves until the arrival of the Dutch traders in the 16th century".

Link

double post removed

Thanks... that wasn't in the New Scientist or in the []/IIndependent[/I] article. I'll bet there are going to be some Google searches on the Ngadha, the Manggarai and Flores.

Piffk

Here is a collection of Nature articles on Homo floresiensis

http://www.nature.com/news/specials/flores/index.html

and a BBC article on Orang pendek, the mythical "Jungle Yeti of Java

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/3631256.stm

Acquiunk -- thanks very much. That first link, in particular, was very informative. I encourage any of the a2kers interested in this to check it out. Lots of interactive bits & video clips.

Thanks again!

It still amazes me how many changes our race has gone trough to survive this planet. I cant imagine when/why a mutation of 'dwarfisim' was a positive mutation . Looooooong shot..
but maybe it is due to these ' little people' that we have the gene still today? Granted , today the gene is recessive and only pops up something like 1-100,000 people.
But all mutations have to come from somewhere. Maybe...? Who knows.
Great thread!!!!

The little people were not dwarfs, they were of normal proportions (except that their arms were relativley long compared to their body length). Dwarfism causes stunted limbs, while the body and especially the head remain of "normal" size.

The length of a human population depends largely on their diet and the abundance of food available. there are lots of statistical data to demonstrate this. For example, based on measurement s of army recruits, at the beginning of the 20th century the Swedes were the shortest people in Europe 70 years later when the country had developed itself from a poor agricultural society to a modern industrial one and the amount of food coupled with better nutritional science (applied in schools) and the availability of free health care, had made the Swedes into the tallest people in Europe (a position now taken over by the Dutch).

Small body size is an advantage in certain environmental conditions. A small body requires less energy to be maintained and needs less energy to cool or heat itself. If the supply of food is small and there are no larger races to compete with (as was often the case in remote places like dense tropical forests (think about pygmies), deserts (think about khoisan bushmen) and on isolated islands) the individuals with smaller body sizes have a better chance of survival. In the case of this particular species of humans the other factor where size matters, the skull, was sufficiently small to allow the species as a whole to grow small (In modern humans the size of the skull means that females cannot become too small, or they will no longer be able to give birth naturally).

With regard to small humans living on islands, I was interested to learn more about the Andaman Islanders (stone age people no taller than 1,5 meters), which made the news due to the Tsunami disaster.

They are the remnants of small darkskinned races that once inhabited most of Asia until they were displaced or absorbed by taller modern humans. There are still isolated communities of them in Malaysia and the Philippines and they are rumoured to exist even on Sumatra.

The human race is more diverse than even I thought.

I have read an article that disputes the find in Guardian;Life.

This is really exciting. I'm going to hold off jumping for joy until DNA tests have been done though. This is a great lift for the people of Indonesia after all they've been through. Great work by their team for removing the bones in the condition they were in. Can't wait to hear what they're gonna call her. Lucy's been done, obviously. Any Indonesian folks out there who can offer some suggestions? Well, when you find a star you name it! and she already is!!!!

They found more! BBC

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