MaxedOutMama
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
The Aussies speak
This particular story may be a hoax (I haven't found confirmation yet), and it's probably a misrepresentation of the fundamental findings anyway. I doubt they've really found a whole new and recent species of hominid. But scientists have been working in Liang Bua on Flores, as this AAA abstract shows.
The archeological record on Flores has long posed quite a few questions, because there is a very early record of hominids there, and Flores has been isolated. In any case, the second link above has one very interesting abstract. Scroll down to number 28, in which Ian Gilligan discusses the evidence for adaptation to climate of human populations. Aussie archeology has been startlingly innovative, probably because of the environment. The natural question, of course, is if Neanderthalid types developed all by themselves in Australia from a "human stock", where does that leave the categorization of European Neanderthals? Why would they not be an ethnic variant rather than a different species?
It's disputed, but there has also been some work on mitochondrial DNA taken from Australian fossils that seems to blow away the conclusions derived from mitochondrial DNA analysis of Neanderthals. We'll see, but my guess is the Aussies are going to revolutionize human history all by themselves. I suppose that one of the reasons scientists are reluctant to classify Neanderthals as human is that creationists are adamant about the fact they're human. (I'm not one, but that doesn't mean everything they say is wrong, either.)
The Aussies were the ones that proved that a strain of bacteria caused a lot of stomach ulcers, when in this country the medical consensus had long been that stomach problems were idiosyncratic. Their science seems to be innovative in general. In the US the Clovis wars are still going on.
The archeological record on Flores has long posed quite a few questions, because there is a very early record of hominids there, and Flores has been isolated. In any case, the second link above has one very interesting abstract. Scroll down to number 28, in which Ian Gilligan discusses the evidence for adaptation to climate of human populations. Aussie archeology has been startlingly innovative, probably because of the environment. The natural question, of course, is if Neanderthalid types developed all by themselves in Australia from a "human stock", where does that leave the categorization of European Neanderthals? Why would they not be an ethnic variant rather than a different species?
It's disputed, but there has also been some work on mitochondrial DNA taken from Australian fossils that seems to blow away the conclusions derived from mitochondrial DNA analysis of Neanderthals. We'll see, but my guess is the Aussies are going to revolutionize human history all by themselves. I suppose that one of the reasons scientists are reluctant to classify Neanderthals as human is that creationists are adamant about the fact they're human. (I'm not one, but that doesn't mean everything they say is wrong, either.)
The Aussies were the ones that proved that a strain of bacteria caused a lot of stomach ulcers, when in this country the medical consensus had long been that stomach problems were idiosyncratic. Their science seems to be innovative in general. In the US the Clovis wars are still going on.
