Palau-- *New Human? OR Fast Evolution?

[Michaelangelica]

I just watched a nat.Geo.documentry on this the first I have seen. Not relly convinced. i would like to see waht the DNA they said they could get says

Ancient Bones of Small Humans Discovered in Palau

John Roach

for National Geographic Magazine

March 10, 2008

 

Thousands of human bones belonging to numerous individuals have been discovered in the Pacific island nation of Palau.

 

Some of the bones are ancient and indicate inhabitants of particularly small size, scientists announced today. (See pictures of the Palau remains and where they were found.)

 

Palau, hobbit and modern human skulls

* "Hobbit" Humans Were Diseased Cretins, Study Suggests (March 6, 2008)

* "Hobbit" Human Was Unique Species, Wrist Bones Suggest (September 20, 2007)

* "The People That Time Forgot: Flores Find" in National Geographic Magazine (April 2005)

 

The remains are between 900 and 2,900 years old and align with Homo sapiens, according to a paper on the discovery. However, the older bones are tiny and exhibit several traits considered primitive, or archaic, for the human lineage.

 

"They weren't very typical, very small in fact," said Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

 

Berger was on vacation in 2006, kayaking around rocky islands about 370 miles (600 kilometers) east of the Philippines, when he found the bones in a pair of caves.

 

(Watch video: "Ancient Little People Found?")

 

The caves were littered with bones that. .

Ancient Bones of Small Humans Discovered in Palau

 

Tiny Pacific skeletons stir hobbit debate

 

Tuesday, 11 March 2008 Maggie Fox

Reuters

islands of Palau

Related Stories

 

* Is the hobbit just a dwarf cretin?, Science Online, 05 Mar 2008

* Hobbit is new species, brain study shows

* Scientist to study Hobbit morphing

 

Tiny skeletons found in the caves of the Pacific islands of Palau undercut the theory that similar remains found in Indonesia might be a unique new species of humans, researchers report.

 

The Palau skeletons, which date to between 900 and 2800 years old, appear to have belonged to so-called insular dwarfs, humans who grew smaller as a result of living on an island, the researchers say.

 

They say their findings, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE, show it is possible the same thing happened on the Indonesian island of Flores.

 

This is where small skeletons dating 15,000 to 18,000 years old have intrigued scientists since they were discovered in 2004.

 

Some groups have proposed that the Flores humans, who would have been about 1 metre tall as adults, represent the distinct species Homo floresiensis.

 

Others argue they were small because of nutritional deficiencies, genetic defects or because they were similar to pygmies, dwarfs or other shorter types of people.

Tiny Pacific skeletons stir hobbit debate › News in Science (ABC Science)

 

Pacific ‘dwarf’ bones cause controversy

Pacific ‘dwarf’ bones cause controversy : thecrit.com

 

UNITED KINGDOM| Evolution shrank some primates’ brains

mouse_lemur_in_anjajavy1-214x300.jpg

Categories: Science, Research and Technology Advancements

January 28, 2010

 

Primate brains have not always gotten bigger as they evolved, according to new research. The findings challenge the controversial argument that Homo floresiensis, also known as the hobbit, had a tiny, chimp-sized brain because of disease.“It was assumed that brain sizes generally get bigger through primate evolution,” said Nick Mundy, a Cambridge University evolutionary geneticist and lead author of the study. While that may be true for most primates, “we find very strong evidence in several lineages that brain sizes actually have gotten smaller.” The brains of marmosets, mouse lemurs and mangabeys have shrunk significantly. The brain of the mouse lemur, a teacup-sized, nocturnal primate found in Madagascar, is 27 percent smaller than that of the common ancestor of all lemurs, Mundy said. The paper, which appears Jan. 27 in Biomed Central, analyzed brain size and body mass from 37 current and 23 extinct primate species and used three different models to reconstruct how the brain evolved. Though its not clear why smaller brains would be advantageous to some species, the brain’s voracious energy consumption may have played a role, Mundy speculated. If food was scarce, it may have been better to sacrifice intelligence to use less energy. [...]

News | TheArchaeologicalBox.com

[Buffy]

"Fast Evolution" is exactly what is predicted by the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium....moving to a small island is exactly the kind of environmental shock that drives rapid changes in morphology...

 

Creationist critics often charge that evolution cannot be tested, and therefore cannot be viewed as a properly scientific subject at all. This claim is rhetorical nonsense, :confused:

Buffy