H. Floresiensis
Posted 23 Jan, 2005 at 11:18 by brent in /History | Permanent link
I just finished reading an interesting article in the February 2005 issue of Scientific American. The article describes the discovery of what could be a new species of the genus Homo on the island of Flores. Some interesting characteristics were similarities to H. Erectus, the diminutive height of 1 meter at adulthood, relatively advanced tools, and apparently existing as recently as 13000 years ago.
So I say "what could be" because there is still alot of research occurring as the discovery is relatively recent and there is also some controversy surrounding the discovery as it upsets some currently held beliefs about the dominance of, well, us. Furthermore the advanced tools they possessed seem to contradict the correspondingly small brains they had along with small bodies.
What came to mind as a potential reason why they might have been effective thinkers is in the process of diminuition they would probably have sloughed off less valuable portions of the brain and reorganized it so that other areas could have taken over increasing the number of connections to different areas resulting in higher associative power vs. raw processing power. Connections between disparate processing areas do seem to have interesting results according to Ramachandran (regarding synesthetes). They are working on examining the inside of the braincase to understand some surface characteristics of the brain. They are also working on seeing if they can recover some DNA for further examination.
They may be able to simulate the study though with say breeds of dogs that are similar but vary in size to understand how diminuition affects the restructuring of their brains and the corresponding intelligence of the animal, though it would probably be more relevant for a species that isn't domesticated.
Even more interesting is there is a possibility that similar finds may exist on islands nearby or in other locations where myths of diminutive people exist (as they did on Flores).