Human evolution: Now "the Hobbit" may revise "major tenets of human evolution"?

In "Rethinking 'Hobbits': What they mean for human evolution", we are advised by Scientific American (November 2009),

New analyses reveal the mini human species to be even stranger than previously thought and hint that major tenets of human evolution need revision.

Really?

Not only was H. floresiensis being held up as the first example of a human following the so-called island rule, but it also seemed to reverse a trend toward ever larger brain size over the course of human evolution. Furthermore, the same deposits in which the small-bodied, small-brained individuals were found also yielded stone tools for hunting and butchering animals, as well as remainders of fires for cooking them—rather advanced behaviors for a creature with a brain the size of a chimpanzee’s. And astonishingly, LB1 lived just 18,000 years ago—thousands of years after our other late-surviving relatives, the Neandertals and H. erectus, disappeared

More about the Hobbit (Flores man or homo Floriensis) controversy here.

It's never been clear to me that Flores man is a separate species. I think some people just need them to have been one, and they seize on anything that advances their case. Fortunately for them, no Florensians are alive today, so we can't answer the fundamental question of whether they could produce live, eventually fertile children with other humans.

Anyway, a friend writes to remind me that agnostic Australian philosopher David Stove, author of Darwinian Fairytales, pointed out some while ago:

If you discovered tomorrow a new and most un-Darwinian-looking species of animals, in which every adult pair produced on average a hundred offspring, but the father always killed all of them very young, except one which was chosen by some random process, it would take an armor-plated neo-Darwinian no more than two minutes to “prove” that this reproductive strategy, despite its superficially inadvisability, is actually the optimum one for that species. And what is more impressive still, he will be able to do the same thing again later, if it turns out that the species had been misdescribed at first, and that in fact the father always lets three of his hundred offspring live. In neo-Darwinianism's house there are many mansions: so many, indeed, that if a certain awkward fact will not fit into one mansion, there is sure to be another one into which it will fit to admiration.

—David Stove, collected essaysAgainst the Idols of the Age, p. 244,

It would be wisest to believe nothing and nobody about any of these speculations. All we know is, some intriguing skeletons were found, and the people they once belonged to lived pretty much as other humans did at the time, despite very small brains. Thus, human brain size is not well correlated with performance of basic hunter gatherer tasks. That in itself is not surprising. Check the brain absent stories here, for example. The human brain is very plastic.

Here's more on the Hobbit (Flores man).


Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Human evolution: We know little, and with good reason

A friend writes,

This weekend I watched Alien From Earth- a documentary that outlines the consternation that the 'Man of Flores' has caused amongst evolutionary anthropologists. Here is what Nature science editor Henry Gee had to say on the matter ('Evolution of the Gaps' is once again all too evident):

Despite decades of patient work we still know rather little about the evolution of humanity…the remains we have are very scarce and very meager and that means that there are probably lots of different species that existed, lived for hundreds of thousands of years and then became extinct and we know nothing about them…All you need is just one to completely blow apart your well entrenched comfortable idea of the linear progress of evolution.

Basically, it's not clear that the one-metre tall humans who occupied Indonesian island Flores for millennia lived any differently from other ancient humans, so the obsession with classifying them as a different species sounds like just that - an obsession.

See also:

Flores find a clear misfit for human evolution sequence?

The little lady of Flores files

First "hobbits" [an early name for Flores humans], now Pygmies?

Flores find a clear misfit for human evolution sequence?

In 2004, a find of some very small humans (about a metre tall) was announced. They lived on the Indonesian island of Flores from about 93 000 years ago to about 12 000 years ago. At Access Research Network, Robert Deyes, in Homo Floresiensis: The Flower That Is Shaking The Human Evo Tree,

... what is becoming clear from these studies is that in many aspects of its anatomy H. floresiensis presents us with a clear 'misfit' for the human evolutionary sequence. In the words of one review "[H. floresiensis] threatens to overturn our understanding of where we come from and the type of ancestors that have shared the human family tree" (Ref 4).

[ ... ]

While Gee's wild speculation over missing species seems undeserved of the title of objective science, his concerns do tell of a crisis for evolutionary biologists. In short, H. floresiensis has today become the flower that is shaking the human evolutionary tree. Findings such as these turn our cherished notions of human evolution upside down since they show tool-making, small-brained hominin species living alongside humans as recently as 12,000 years ago.

Here's Nova on the subject.

In my view, the two most significant facts about homo Flo are that (1) they basically lived like other early humans for the many tens of thousands of years for which we have records and that (2) small brains did not stop them from doing so. I would take the "new species" claims with caution.

My Deprogram column on that at Salvo 7 here doesn't seem to be on line yet.

I see where Deyes also wrote about the migrating Monarch butterfly, noting,

Evolutionary biology must move beyond its hand-waving generalizations if it is to truly gain the title of a rigorous scientific discipline. In the meantime, protein systems such as the Monarch's Cryptochromes will continue to challenge what we claim to know about evolutionary origins.

The Monarch is our national butterfly in Canada, and also the national butterfly of the United States - no surprise, due it its remarkable migration.

The more we know, the less we believe in handwaving of any kind.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

The "little lady of Flores" files: Something I want to write down before I forget:

The other day I was at my local grocery store and I noticed what appeared to be a girl child shopping.

But I quickly realized - watching from behind - that it could not be a child.

Movements too precise, too disciplined. Honed by decades of experience, not mere years.

Well, she turned around and - it was a woman only slightly younger than me.

An almost proportionate dwarf. She came up only to the bottom of my rib cage - and I am only 5 ft tall.

Thus she was less than a metre tall, for sure.

Of course I immediately ceased to look at her - continuing to look would have been rude.

Her head struck me as slightly too large for an adult, in proportion to her body, which is why I describe her as a "nearly proportionate" dwarf.

Then, a few days later, I saw another nearly proportionate dwarf - a different woman - in another part of town - about the same size.

So I am even more skeptical than I used to be of claims that Flores man represents a "different species" of human.

I always was skeptical of the claims that the little lady of Flores was a different human species from us, but am especially so when I run into normal humans who just happen to be very small. It's not a crime here in Canada.

I think it more likely that - just as the elephants on Flores were unusually small, so were the people. While it would be interesting to know the reason for that, we need not assume that the people were a different species.

First “Hobbits”, Now Pygmies?

Recently, an extinct group of tiny people, Flores man, was found and declared to be a new human species.

However, in the following puzzling development,

INDONESIAN scientists have found a community of Pygmy people on the eastern island of Flores, near a village where Australian scientists discovered a dwarf-sized skeleton last year and declared it a new human species, a newspaper says.

This latest discovery will likely raise more controversy over the finding of homo floresiensis, claimed by Australian scientists Mike Morwood and Peter Brown in September last year. They dubbed the new species "hobbits".

Kompas Daily reported yesterday that the Pygmy community had been found during an April expedition in the village of Rampapasa, about 1km from the village of Liang Bua where the "hobbits" were found.

Could it be something in the air down there that shrinks people?

Anyway, this discovery certainly ratchets up the row over origins because some scientists dispute that Flores man is really a new species at all, and are accusing its promoters of scientific “terrorism”.