“New species” of human found

<body leftmargin="0" bgcolor="#000060" text="#FFFFFF" link="#FFFF00" vlink="#FF9900"> <b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="4"> “New species” of human found</font></p> </b> <p class="MsoNormal"><font face="Arial" size="1">Posted Oct. 27, 2004<br> Special to World Science</font> <b> <font size="2" face="Arial"><br> <br> </font><font face="Arial" size="2">The discovery of a new species of human living on the Indonesian island of Flores as recently as 18,000 years ago demonstrates that human diversity in the recent past was much greater than expected. </font></p> <p><font face="Arial" size="2">The biggest surprise about the partial skeleton, discovered at a cave site called Liang Bua, is that it belonged to an individual who, while fully adult, was barely a metre tall and had a skull the size of a grapefruit. </font></p> <p><font face="Arial" size="2">Peter Brown and colleagues, who describe the fossil remains in Nature this week (with an accompanying report on the archaeology and dating from Michael Morwood and colleagues), think that the new species was descended from the archaic (but full-sized) creature Homo erectus, from which Homo sapiens is also believed to have evolved. </font></p> <p><font face="Arial" size="2">H. erectus spread from Africa to Asia, as far as Indonesia, perhaps as long as two million years ago: the Liang Bua remains could represent the descendants of a population of H. erectus that became isolated on Flores some time during the past few hundred thousand years, evolving into a distinct dwarf form. </font></p> <p><font face="Arial" size="2">As a form of dwarf human, the new species fits right in with the bizarre extinct fauna of Flores, which until recently was a kind of Lost World. Flores was home to a range of archaic creatures extinct elsewhere, often morphed into dwarf or giant forms: these included a dwarf form of the primitive elephant Stegodon, as well as full sized Komodo dragons and an even larger species of giant lizard. </font></p> <p><font face="Arial" size="2">Although marooned on its island home, this newly found species of human lived at a time when relic populations of full-sized H. erectus may still have been living in nearby Java, and when the entire region had in any case been colonized by H. sapiens. </font></p> <p><font face="Arial" size="2">Modern humans have been in New Guinea for at least 50,000 years, and in Australia for a comparable period of time. In view of this, one is entitled to ask a seemingly inescapable question - what other surprises about recent human diversity remain to be discovered in some remote corner of the Earth? </font></p> </b> <p> <b> <font size="2" face="Arial"><a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/world-science">http://groups.yahoo.com/group/world-science</a></font> </b> </p> </body>