It sounds too incredible to be true, but this is not a hoax. A species of tiny human has been discovered, which lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores just 18,000 years ago.
Researchers have so far unearthed remains from eight individuals who were just one metre tall, with grapefruit-sized skulls. These astonishing little people, nicknamed 'hobbits', made tools, hunted tiny elephants and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area.
News@nature.com tells the story of a find that changes the world of palaeoanthropology, and challenges our perception of what it means to be human.
posted
How would we treat Neanderthals if they were still around? What about Lucy's species? They wouldn't be human and not as intelligent, but they were certainly smarter than chimpanzees which are showing the ability to understand speech.
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Oops, missed that one. Oh well... I think it merits more discussion than it got though and here are two more links to it Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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nfl, Seen Shaun of the Dead? We could use them on those fun high risk game shows. Like MXC times ten! Posts: 1947 | Registered: Aug 2002
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You know, it isn't a foregone conclusion that Homo Sapiens are more intelligent than Neanderthals were. It's possible, and we generally assume it because, after all, we're the ones who made it, but how do we actually know that?
Somebody has a book in which H. Sapiens didn't colonize the new world until relatively modern times, but Homo Erectus (I think it was Homo Erectus) did. Who is the author of that one? Turtledove? His non-human hominids are like you're describing--less intelligent than we are, but more intelligent than pretty much anything else on the planet. We enslave them in his story.
If we were to discover a surviving colony of these tiny hominids, I wonder how we'd treat them? Part of me thrills at the thought of discovering them--imagine how fantastic that would be to get to meet an intelligent species that wasn't exactly the same as us! Imagine their language(s)! Imagine their cultures, their arts, their everything! My god that would be cool. Imagine how much we'd learn about ourselves by having the opportunity to interact with beings that weren't of our same species.
On the other hand, I can all too easily imagine us trapping them, vivisecting them, using them as bushmeat, enslaving them, etc.
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We can't actually be sure that we are smarter than other hominins that have lived before us, but paleoanthropological evidence is pretty strong that we are the smartest. There's a pretty strong and obvious correlation between brain size and intelligence and earlier hominins all had smaller brain. What really bothers me is that we would be right to treat them as less than us. Why should we theoretically let them vote when they clearly are less intelligent. But then I remember that "anthropologists" made the same claims about Blacks, that their brains were actually smaller and other nonsense. So I guess the question should be would homo sapien be the only species of human?
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Robert Sawyer, maybe, Noemon? One of my roommates is a reading a book that sounds awfully similar to what you described.
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I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be Turtledove. I've read all of his novels that don't involve magic and the magic ones tend to involve the Byzantine Empire.
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The thing is, brain size is not a perfect yardstick for determining intelligence, and not even brain size proportionate to body size can guide us perfectly in this sort of thing. There are numerous examples in nature of animals displaying levels of cognitive functioning that are completely out of keeping with what one would expect, given their brain size.
Perhaps a more accurate (certainly more popular in recent years) approach is to gauge approximate intelligence by comparing the relative size of measurable regions of the brain whose functions we are relatively certain of, as well as cellular features of the brains in question. Now, with the types of beings that we're talking about this isn't possible, since there aren't any of them running around for us to examine, but still the fact that science has moved on to these other ways of trying to determine intelligence from brain features is indicative of how poor of a yardstick gross brain size comparisons really are.
Another way of comparing intelligence of different populations might be to compare the sophistication of the tools they produced in a given time period. Even that isn't perfect, though; Austrailian aborigines, for example, had much less sophisticated tools than did Europeans at the time that the two populations met, but that wasn't indicative of the intellectual superiority of the Europeans, or intellectual inferiority of the aborigines.
Still, you *might* be able to make valid observations about two species intelligence if you examined, say, the tools produced by two similarly sized populations in areas with similar climates, with similar predators and domesticatable animals and plants. Even that might not be valid though; determining intelligence is a notoriously tricky thing to do.
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posted
No, I'm not thinking of Sawyer's books. Those are ones that posit an alternate reality in which Neanderthals became the sole intelligent hominid. As a result of some high energy physics experiments, a portal is opened between their world and ours, and the two species have the opportunity to interact.
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There's also pure archealogical evidence. The complexity of tools has more or less risen in a straight line with what we believe to be intelligence. Chimpanzees use termite "fishing poles" and chimpanzee bonobos use stones to crack nuts. Since chimpanzees stone tools have been increasingly specialized and improved upon. The problem is differentiating from evolution of tools naturally from evolution of humans. If nearderthals had lived until the present day would they have eventually invented cars?
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I think NFL raises an interesting point. What if we did discover a race of hominids that were smarter than any other animals but unquestionably inferior to humans. How would we (morally) be obligated to treat them?
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quote:There's also pure archealogical evidence. The complexity of tools has more or less risen in a straight line with what we believe to be intelligence. Chimpanzees use termite "fishing poles" and chimpanzee bonobos use stones to crack nuts. Since chimpanzees stone tools have been increasingly specialized and improved upon. The problem is differentiating from evolution of tools naturally from evolution of humans. If nearderthals had lived until the present day would they have eventually invented cars?
Newfoundlogic, I think that you may have skimmed past what I said in an earlier post:
quote:Another way of comparing intelligence of different populations might be to compare the sophistication of the tools they produced in a given time period. Even that isn't perfect, though; Austrailian aborigines, for example, had much less sophisticated tools than did Europeans at the time that the two populations met, but that wasn't indicative of the intellectual superiority of the Europeans, or intellectual inferiority of the aborigines.
Still, you *might* be able to make valid observations about two species intelligence if you examined, say, the tools produced by two similarly sized populations in areas with similar climates, with similar predators and domesticatable animals and plants. Even that might not be valid though; determining intelligence is a notoriously tricky thing to do.
Now, Neanderthal and Homo Sapien populations coexisted in Europe for some time, right? That meets the criteria I laid out for the comparison of their tools being a valid way of looking into the two populations' levels of intelligence. Are you familiar with any studies that have set out to do this? I'm not, off the top of my head. Anybody? If not we can do some digging (so to speak) and see what we can find out.
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My problem is that the antropology I'm familiar with deals a lot with number.number mya. In other words millions of years ago, not with anything or anyone that actually lived the same time humans did. That's why comparing Austrialian aboriginees with Europeans doesn't work for me. I'm thinking more along lines of powerdrill vs. biface handaxe. I'm really going crazy over this because of what I've learned about chimps. So assuming that pre-homo hominins are smarter than chimps... I still think theory that they could be alive at the same time as humans works because there are still chimps and gorillas.
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Blacwolve, you're right--that is an interesting question. Lets say that this species had an intelligence level equivalent to that of, say, a person with Down's syndrome. What rights would it be fair to confer on them? Would their lesser intelligence give us the right to claim the land that they lived on, use them as research subjects (as happens in Turtledove's "unpopular no ones ever heard of book"), use them as slaves for manual labor, etc?
Would it be right to declair their territory an autonomous region over which H. Sapiens didn't have jurisdiction? Would it be right to take up an attitude of non-interference in their society, doing our best to not "contaminate" it with H. Sapien concepts and technologies, or would this be cruel and unjustifiable? Anytime that a more technologically advanced human society has come into contact with a markedly less technologically advanced society, the result hasn't been pretty, and the power imbalance has resulted in damage to the less technologically advanced culture. I can't think of an exception to this, anyway. Can anyone else? Would we, as a species, screw this one up the way we have encounters between different H. Sapien groups throghout history? I'd love to think not, but I'm afraid I have a hard time doing that.
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Well, I think that we can be fairly sure that the technological gap between contemporary H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis, if it existed at all, was nowhere near the chasm that seperates a powerdrill and a biface handaxe.
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If you read the articles there is evidense to suggest that these 'hobbits' were in fact tool users on level with earlier versions of Homo Sapiens. Fire, stone age tools (crafted stone spear heads, axes, knifes, butchering tools). Its even possible that they made boats and water crafts. Thats right, 1/3 our brain size and just as smart as earlier versions of us, or so it would appear. If it does get proved that the tools found on the island were infact made by Flores man (which is the most likely thing right now I believe), then that would provide strong evidense that brain size does not directly correlate to inteligence. That or that our brains are highly underdeveloped for what they could be based on their size. There are just so many cool implecations from this discovery my mind is overwhelmed with them right now.
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According to the chart I saw on...hm...either the BBC News site or the Nature.com, one or the other, they're a parallel species evolved independendly from Homo Erectus. I'll go look for a link.
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On Monday I can comment more on how advanced the "hobbits" were, for now ethical questions will suffice to provide perplexity.
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These aren't just short people. Their cranial capacity is much smaller than ours (although, as Alcon said, their tools were reasonably sophisticated, so it would seem that their intelligence wasn't diminished by small brain size.)
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Well, I never did find the chart I was hunting for, but I did come across this
quote:Probably descended from full-sized Homo erectus that made landfall on Flores as much as 900,000 years ago, the islanders dodged the dragons and hunted the elephants.
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After reading the Nature article I have come to a conclusion: that it is too early to conclude anything about the "hobbits." While Nature is the source for any science related news they have always published genus and species according to the discoverers. Until the fossils are reviewed by anthropologists who didn't make the discovery I refuse to make rash judgements. Since when haven't discoverers not claimed that their find was its own species?
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