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10/10/2006 Archived Entry: "Zimmer Reviews Homo Floresiensis"

Carl Zimmer, science writer and author of The Loom, reviews the current state of discussion about Homo floresiensis, the diminutive fossils found in Indonesia. "Recently there's been so much stuff coming out pro and con that I have had to skip a couple opportunities to blog on Homo floresiensis--mainly because I've been frantically deep in the first draft of my current book on a very different topic: Escherichia coli. (I assume Homo floresiensis carried Escherichia coli in its gut, but the overlap stops there.) [...] As we come up on the second anniversary of the initial announcement of Homo floresiensis, we're in a strange spot. Microcephaly turns out to be a very peculiar condition that makes it very hard to distinguish humans from a possible species of very small hominids. Many different genes can give rise to the same conditions, producing different shapes to the brain, as well as different changes to other parts of the body. Scientists actually have a lot to learn about microcephaly--for one thing, many studies rely on remains in museum collections, which almost never included anything below the skull. At this point it's not even clear if discovering more tiny hominids on Flores would make the case for a separate species. Under some conditions, it might be possible that a small population of islanders had a high proportion of microcephaly-triggering genes floating about. But that may be moot if nobody's actually digging in the Liang Bua cave."

(tags: Hobbits, HomoFloresiensis, CarlZimmer, TheLoom)