Comments on: Look! Up in the Sky! Flying Hobbits!

By: Elliot Kennel

Elliot Kennel — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 12:13:43 +0000

Carl, a very insightful article, thank you! I’ve been following the homo floresiensis story since it broke in the popular literature. One thing that has interested me is the oral tradition surrounding the existence of diminutive humans in Rampasa. There had been speculation from anthropologists that homo floresiensis might have survived until quite recently based on tales from Liang Bua. Now it turns out that people still live in Rampasa and tend to corroborate testimony from Liang Bua. The Rampasa villagers claim to be descended from diminutive hairy humans who used stone tools. However, since the current villagers are 4 feet tall instead of 3 feet tall, their stories tend to be dismissed. The implicit assumption is that homo floresiensis DNA is incompatible with homo sapiens, and therefore if there are pygmies (or descendents of pygmies) today, they can not be related to the skeletal remains of pygmies from thousands of years ago.
There is also a long-standing tradition that a dimutive hairy bipedal creature (known variously as orang pendek, orang pendak or ebu gogo) still exists in the forest. Of course this is treated with great skepticism as well.
This is not my field at all, but I think perhaps the skepticism is a bit parochial. Certainly chimpanzees and orangutangs can coexist with humans. Why not another biped?
Also, is it really possible to ascertain that homo floresiensis was a separate species and could not mate with humans, based on bone structure and appearance? Other species (say, dogs) seem to have even greater variation.
So I wonder why several of the anthropologists seem to be content to discount the oral traditions
that suggest that a race of small hairy primitive 3 foot tall humans once lived on Flores and eventually interbred and assimilated with normal humans. What is so heretical about these stories? I hope that some competent anthropologist will take these claims seriously and investigate them.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 17:43:12 +0000

“Are we talking De-evolution now guys?”

No. The notion of evolutionary “progress” — from small to large, simple to complex, or stupid to clever — is almost entirely fallacious. We may be tempted to think that the transition from ur-worm to earthworm is progression, while the transition from ur-worm to tapeworm is regression, but in reality both transitions are examples of evolution — populations changing in response to the environment. Earthworms and tapeworms (and humans and hobbits, if hobbits are real) all exist because they are better at surviving and reproducing than their now-extinct ancestors, sisters, and cousins. If some of them have lost the need to live outside a host organism, or to lug around a bloated, power-hungry brain, it doesn’t mean that they’ve “devolved”; it just means that they’ve evolved in a different way than we have.

Stephen Jay Gould can be a bit of a snob, but I recommend his book Full House as a wonderful argument against the concept of evolutionary progress.

By: david

david — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 13:30:56 +0000

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution - The Premise
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is the widely held notion that all life is related and has descended from a common ancestor: the birds and the bananas, the fishes and the flowers — all related. Darwin’s general theory presumes the development of life from non-life and stresses a purely naturalistic (undirected) “descent with modification”. That is, complex creatures evolve from more simplistic ancestors naturally over time. In a nutshell, as random genetic mutations occur within an organism’s genetic code, the beneficial mutations are preserved because they aid survival — a process known as “natural selection.” These beneficial mutations are passed on to the next generation. Over time, beneficial mutations accumulate and the result is an entirely different organism (not just a variation of the original, but an entirely different creature).

Are we talking De-evolution now guys?

By: SteveF

SteveF — Sat, 18 Jun 2005 18:42:57 +0000

The Neanderthals had larger brains than us.

By: Sean

Sean — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 21:06:08 +0000

This was a fascinating article.

It raises one question for me.

“Safi and his colleagues conclude that mammal brains may shrink thanks to many evolutionary forces, including a species’s diet, social system, or the length of its pregnancy.”

Could it be that moving into a new niche or adopting new behaviors puts a selective pressure on the population for larger brains but as their neural architecture re optimizes over generations to accommodate the new structure in more efficient ways, the selective pressure for smaller, more energy efficient brains becomes greater?

Brain size might be the result of a tug of war between the needs of the metabolism and the demands of the environment.

Maybe this is an obvious point to a biologist but it is a new thought for me so… hurray for me!

By: Hungry Hyaena

Hungry Hyaena — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 02:05:16 +0000

An excellent post, regardless of whether or not it provides more fuel for either side of the H. floresiensis debate. The Safi bat study is enlightening and exciting. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

By: Doug

Doug — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 00:16:50 +0000

I keep wondering why Flores is being described as ‘desert’ and ‘isolated’ when it’s neither. If these descriptions are relevant to the hypothesised reduction in hominid brain size then in this case they don’t apply.

Also, I understood that there was no evidence linking the tools to Homo Floresiensis. Anatomically modern humans have been in the area for at least 60,000 years and there are traces of them (tools etc) everywhere.

By: James

James — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 19:59:46 +0000

It doesn’t seem absurd to argue that as Homo floresiensis evolved a smaller brain, it retained the circuitry that made tool use possible. At least it’s a hypothesis worth testing.

I see no absurdity in the argument but, just out of honest curiosity, how is a hypothesis of this nature tested?

By: Thomas Palm

Thomas Palm — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 18:40:50 +0000

The New Caledonian crow is adept at using tools despite its relatively tiny brain. Admittedly it is a brain much different from ours, but it does show that you don’t need a big brain just to use tools.

By: Jeff Medkeff

Jeff Medkeff — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 17:41:06 +0000

As far as I can tell, the skeptics completely, and improperly, ignore the influence of culture on floresiensis. Is floresiensis’ brain so small that it can’t even learn to make and use tools when taught?

It is one thing to invent a tool technology, another thing to learn to use what has already been invented. Cephalopathological Homo sapiens of many sorts can learn to use tools, and teach others how to use them. Chimps can learn tool use from humans, and then teach each other.

The hypothesis is that floresiensis evolved from bigger-brained ancestors, who indisputably used tools and passed on their technology through generations. The skeptics need to explain why and how floresiensis’ brain evolution must have disrupted this process, before their case will sound rigorous to me.