The Forelimb And Hindlimb Remains From Liang Bua Cave | John Hawks Weblog

The forelimb and hindlimb remains from Liang Bua cave | john hawks weblog

Here's something else I've missed over the past weeks, and as we can see from the title, it concerns studies on the Homo floresiensis fossils from Liang Bua cave on the island of Flores - and for once, it's the post-cranial material that comes under the spotlight. Much of the controversy that raged after the initial discovery and analysis centred on the skull remnants, and the correspondingly small brains that would have been contained therein. At times, it seemed to the outside world - or me, at least - that the entire debate centred on the skulls as the potentially defining feature that determined whether or not a new species of Homo had indeed been found, or if the remains derived from diseased modern humans, with almost no attention being paid to the rest of the skeletal material. Here's a brief extract from the linked article...

What some people dispute is whether this small-bodied population was also a small-brained hominid species. So the argument for pathology is principally about the brain size of LB1. If LB1 was an unusual individual in which some pathological condition resulted in small adult brain size, it wouldn't by itself be sufficient to evidence a small-brained hominid species. Some critics (e.g. Jacob et al. 2006, Hershkovitz et al. 2007) have examined other parts of the skeleton, including the postcrania, looking for possible correlates of developmental abnormalities in the brain. This process is essentially the paleopathology method of diagnostics -- looking for a suite of characters that result from known disorders, and comparing those to the traits of a skeletal individual.

The postcranial descriptions provided by Jungers et al. (in press) and Larson et al. (in press) are potentially very relevant to this process. With substantially more space than earlier descriptions, they could provide the comparative basis to conclude that the morphology of LB1 is within a normal range of variation for those features previously described as consistent with pathology. By themselves, the ranges of variation might not be sufficient to test the hypothesis -- after all, many living people are diagnosed with pathologies based on a combination of factors, not because any single factor lies outside the normal range of variation. But such information would certainly be a start.

The overall impression I get (though it's probably best to read the post in full to get a clearer impression) is that there seems to be less evidence that there is an Australopithecine element to H. floresiensis, as had been suggested in earlier articles, that the suggested pathologies are more likely to be natural features, and that this is indeed, a previously unknown species. One way or another, as more research is done, more data comes to light - and who knows, perhaps further fossil finds, we'll be spending the next few years wondering exactly how this population of small-bodied humans came to evolve at all, surviving undiscovered by the outside world for tens of millennia.