Dispute Over Hobbit Man Intensifies with New Bones

The debate over the status of Homo florensiensis has not calmed down (see 09/28/2005), even with the discovery of more bones in the Ling Bua cave on the island of Flores as announced in Nature (437, 1012-1017 (13 October 2005) | doi: 10.1038/nature04022).  Michael J. Morwood and colleagues are still sticking with their identification of it as a new species, and are even claiming the little humans had affinities with the Australopithecines.  This would mean that they evolved into a species of Homo independently, developing human-like characteristics and even learning to use stone tools by convergent evolution.

H. floresiensis’ diminutive stature, long arms, and nearly chimp-size brain resemble body proportions of australopithecines, Morwood says.  That group of human ancestors lived more than 2 million years ago.  The Flores population may have directly evolved into a Homo species from an unknown Asian australopithecine, Morwood speculates.   (Emphasis added.)

Bruce Bower in Science News, however, stressed that the young dates of the bones – 12,000 years, by radiocarbon dating – indicate this population survived much longer than originally believed.  (The new arm bone dates at 15,000 years, while the new jaw dates to 12,000 years; the original find was dated at 18,000 years, with some bones thought to be as old as 95,000 years.)
    Other scientists claim Morwood et al. misidentified them as a new species, and argue, instead, that the skull represents a true Homo sapiens with microcephaly.  Robert D. Martin (Field Museum, Chicago) said that a small-brained non-human creature could not have made the sophisticated stone tools found among the remains.  Robert B. Eckhardt (Penn State) agreed, claiming that Morwood had underestimated the brain and body size of the population.  He said, “I’m absolutely, totally confident that H. floresiensis will not last.”

When Homo florensiensis gets renamed as Homo sapiens that lived in modern times, remember the fanfare and chutzpah displayed by the evolutionary paleoanthropologists over this discovery.  Nature and other Darwin foghorns were cocky they had another missing link with which to hammer the creationists.  Remember also the incredible leap of imagination that Morwood et al. asked us to believe, that a population of Lucy’s children moved to Indonesia and evolved into tool-making modern humans independently.  The date of 12,000 years for some of the bones must have been a staggering disappointment to the Darwinists.  The true date is most likely much less than that.  Maybe a living Hobbit will sneak up behind them on Oct. 31 and scare the living daylights out of them – or rather, into them.