Wednesday, September 26, 2007

More information about Homo floresiensis. This is a press release from the Smithsonian (by way of Physorg). Here is the kicker paragraph:

The team turned its research focus to the most complete of the 12 skeletons discovered and specifically toward three little bones from the hobbit's left wrist. The research asserts that modern humans and our closest fossil relatives, the Neandertals, have a very differently shaped wrist in comparison to living great apes, older fossil hominins like Australopithecus (e.g., "Lucy") and even the earliest members of the genus Homo (e.g., Homo habilis, the "handy-man"). But the hobbit's wrist is basically indistinguishable from an African ape or early hominin-like wrist—nothing at all like that seen in modern humans and Neandertals.

This is an HTML link to the Science article, which is, apparently, free to all. I wonder what John Hawks will say--he has always regarded the specimens as pathological.

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