Welcome your new ancestor to the Homo family tree; boffins have discovered a new tiny species of human A team of archeologists has pieced together bone fragments to reveal what is, apparently, a new species of human. The discovery of a foot bone lodged in the Callao Cave, a limestone grotto on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, gave the researchers, led by the University of Philippines and the National Museum of Natural …
And the subtitle says 'in a Filopino cave.' It's technically not grammar, but still it certainly ain't right.
ETA: It's not helping that it's not clear just which correction OC meant to make there, or even whether he's saying 'Filipino' is the wrong version or the correct one. I'm assuming it's the correction.
" lived on the island 700.000 years ago' or " started populating the islands 67.000 years ago"
These bones are 67k years old; other finds point to humanoids living on the islands 700k years back, but those might not have been the same species as no direct evidence to that effect has (yet) been found.
My precious..
This, along with the hobbits intrigues me. I saw reports saying this must have meant sea faring primitives given these have been islands for a looong time, and the out-of-Africa hypothesis for Homo-X evolution. Or there was some parallel evolution, or our understanding of our geological history is incorrect. Or perhaps the classification of these bones is incorrect.
"Islands" are fun for evolution quirkiness
Read up about it (insular dwarfism & insular gigantism)
It is common for island creatures to evolve to a different size be ii considerably larger or smaller than their mainland counterparts
.. For "island" you can interpret it as any smallish restricted habitat e.g. get similar stuff in areas "cut off" by high mountains etc.
"Having watched studies of human evolution develop over a number of years it seems very likely that proposed evolutionary trees will get revised. Or refined according to choice of words."
Likely, because even NOW scientists are fudging things as they go. For example: one of the tenants of classifications, the definition of species: "
From the dictionary:
"a group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding."
From UC Berkeley:" A species is often defined as a group of individuals that actually or potentially interbreed in nature."
From Wikipedia: " A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction."
And yet, with these CLEAR definitions of species, we still see homo sapiens, homo neanderthals, and homo denisova spoken/written/researched about as different species, when it is clear that they (all three) interbred very successfully for thousands of years. They are different subspecies of a singlet species. When I put this question to a conference of biologists, NONE could give even one explanation as to why we still refer to them as different species when these three populations could so clearly interbreed and produce fertile offspring.
I think biologists dont know what to do!
Look at the wiki page for homo denesova: "The Denisovans or Denisova hominins ( /dɪˈniːsəvə/ di-NEE-sə-və) are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans in the genus Homo."
Um-- NO!. They interbred with neanderthals and modern humans... successfully. the are NOT an extinct species. Further, as a DISTINCT subspecies, Denesova and Nearnderthal are extinct. As a DISTINCT subspecies, modern man exists only in some places in Africa, and it is almost certain that the homo sapiens subspecies will go extinct. All three should be classified as a subspecies of "homo neandersapiendenisova"
And yet.... it hasn't happened.
I still think it's fascinating. And a rich source of puns. So Pleistocene, morphology, and an escape from Sundaland..
But fun trying to extrapolate based on limited data, ie a few bones and other remains. Plus the island dwarfism potentially causing it's own evolutionary drift in various branches of the Homo- family tree. I also think it's great that a generation ago, much of this stuff would only be really known amongst interested anthropologists, and now thanks to the magic of the Internet, we can learn and share so much knowledge.
I've also often wondered what triggered evolution, and how flexible the branches were in the early days, ie the interbreeding, and presumably a combination of genetics and competition leading to the dominance of Homo Sapiens rather than Neanderthals, which to me seemed to have some potential advantages.
The article says 'not fully grown' so inferring fully grown size sounds a bit like Time Team archeology - "Here's a single post hole. From this we can determine that it was a fully thatched, four fur semi with en-suite sacrifice facility, large mammoth preparation area and outside screened toilet hole with hot and cold running stream".
I had a girlfriend like that once. Well, apart from the actual killing and bringing home a rhinoceros as that's generally frowned upon in polite society nowadays, never mind running afoul of laws protecting endangered species.
But if one had dared to look at her the wrong way ...
Every time they dig up some bones belonging to a previously unknown humanoid species it always reminds me of the time, a very long time ago, I read HP Blavatsky's books 'The secret Doctrine', concerning the root races and sub races from now long lost continents. Written in 1888.
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