Convoluted human evolution: hobbits seperate species (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, February 16, 2016, 00:59 (3204 days ago) @ David Turell

Another take on Hobbits, this one stating that they are a separate species: - http://phys.org/news/2016-02-mystery-hobbits-humans.html - "The new study, based on an analysis of the skull bones, shows once and for all that the pint-sized people were not Homo sapiens, according to the researchers. - "Until now, academic studies have pointing in one direction or another—and scientific discourse has sometimes tipped over into acrimony. - "One school of thought holds that so-called Flores Man descended from the larger Homo erectus and became smaller over hundreds of generations. - "The proposed process for this is called "insular dwarfing"—animals, after migrating across land bridges during periods of low sea level, wind up marooned on islands as oceans rise and their size progressively diminishes if the supply of food declines. - *** - "Joining forces with Philippe Charlier, a palaeopathologist at Paris-Descartes University specialised in solving ancient medical mysteries, the researchers secured high-resolution images recently generated in Japan to compute maps of bone thickness variation. - "There is a lot of information contained in bone layers of the skull," Balzeau told AFP. - "The results, he said, were unambiguous: "There were no characteristics from our species"—that is, Homo sapiens. - And while they found evidence of minor maladies, there was nothing corresponding to the major genetic diseases other researchers had pointed to. - "But if one part of the mystery may be solved, another remains intact. - "For while the scientists could not exclude the possibility that the "hobbit" was a scaled-down version of Homo erectus, which arrived on the neighbouring island of Java some million years ago, nor could they be sure that H. floresiensis was not a species it its own right." - Comment: Until this is settled, they look a lot like us, and therefore will remain Homo. With all the branches of Hominins at the start, it looks like convergence, with humans a definite purpose of the process.