Posted on 03/06/2005 1:19:07 PM PST by Truth666
An Australian academic who has examined the skeletal remains of a three-foot hominid discovered in an Indonesian cave and nicknamed a "hobbit" disputed Friday a report that they represent a new species of human.
Professor Maciej Henneberg, head of anatomy at Adelaide University, said he thought the bones found in 2003 on Indonesia's Flores island were simply those of a normal human stunted by a viral disease, microcephaly -- a conclusion rejected in the earlier report by another team of scientists.
That team analyzed the find and said the partial skeleton was evidence of a new, dwarf species of human. Their conclusion was reported on Science Express, the online edition of the U.S. journal Science.
Henneberg spent several days in Jakarta last month helping to document the bones estimated to be 18,000 years old.
"I had time to thoroughly inspect the bones of the skeleton," Henneberg said.
"This skeleton is not a skeleton of a healthy, normal individual. I am simply saying this is a human being who suffered from a growth disorder," he said.
Scientists nicknamed the skeleton "the Hobbit" after the diminutive title character of a book by fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings.
The Hobbit was one of seven skeletons, which scientists date in a range of 95,000 to 12,000 years old, dug up in different layers of earth in the Flores cave.
The discovery has excited anthropologists, who had believed that, after the extinction of Neanderthals 30,000 years ago, Homo sapiens was the only extant human species.
A member of the original team that discovered the group termed Homo floresiensis, Professor Richard Roberts, hailed the findings of the U.S. report, saying the evidence proved that this was the brain of a different species of human despite being only "the size of a grapefruit."
"This person has an extremely small brain but it was extremely well wired," he said. This enabled the small people to conduct ocean crossings and develop sophisticated stone tools, said Roberts, of the University of Wollongong, near Sydney.
He said the findings debunked the theory that modern humans developed simultaneously around the world, a theory known as multi-regional evolution.
Personally, I do not trust many of these radical archeological findings. This area of science is wrought with fraud and the eager willing. Let us not forget the Tasaday of the Philippines (the fake stone aged tribe), or Nebraska Man (pigs tooth), the Piltdown man (pieces of human skull and an orangutan jaw), and Archaeoraptor liaoningensis (faked feathered dinosaur fossil) to name a few. Until these finding have decades of extensive testing and massive peer review I'll just keep this nugget of info in my odd pile.
There is such a rush for science to find the oldest, biggest, smallest, or otherwise incredable find. Often in that rush they are taken by frauds, con-artists or plain sloppiness. Only time and further research will find the truth. Conclusion jumping in these matters only makes fools. Once incomplete research is in print, it stays there forever. Too many mistakes and the grants dry up.
Did you not just finish telling me these were normal skeletons?
There's no issue about the other six, it's an equatorial rain forest environment, where God placed the small people of the world (pygmy races).
There most certainly is an issue with the other six. Skeletons aren't found in a uniform random distribution in the equatorial rainforest. They cluster around highly habitable sites. What the proximity of the other skeletons says is that there is a high probability of relationship between Florensis and the other inhabitants of that site.
This is the reason why the forgery was at that location - guess what the other candidate location to have placed the microcephaly patient's skull was...
Do you have any actual eye-witness or forensic evidence to present that there was forgery involved?--other than your dispeptic convictions about biological science, I mean?
See post 14. microcephaly, per se, has been fairly well ruled out. There might conceivably be more exotic pathological explanations, but the most obvious one is a non-starter, from almost the beginning of the investigation.
Horsepucky. You made up some BS out of whole cloth. There is no evidence whatsoever of any intentional forgery, or it would have been reported in the major media, which a brief scan convinces me is not the case. Truth666 is obviously a bit of a misnomer.
the "hobbit" remains don't have any bearing on the Replacement (a master race theory) vs Multiregionalist controversy, other than showing that Replacement advocates will saddle on almost anything right away. Regarding the microcephaly, a lesson from history:
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~bramblet/ant301/two.html
"Rudolph Virchow (1821-1902), professor of pathological anatomy at the University of Berlin and founder of the field of cellular pathology. His hobby was archeology and he was to found the German Anthropological Society in 1869. Virchow's influence in Germany through the second half of the 19th century was comparable to Cuvier's in France through the first half of the same era. Virchow believed that people of the Stone Age were identical in biology to modern humans and he attributed the different anatomy of the Neanderthal to a combination of severe rickets, repeated fractures, and severe arthritis. The Neanderthal specimen thus was relegated to controversy."
Huge asteroid to fly past Earth (Toutatis hoax - how and why)
space.com | 04/09/29
Posted on 09/29/2004 5:00:09 AM PDT by Truth666
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1230167/posts
(yes, that's right -- he's also proved that the asteroid Toutatis is a hoax)
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Gods |
Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. |
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