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Possible New Species Discovered

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JRoberts

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This reminds of "Clan of the Cave Bear" series by Jean M. Auel. It is about prehistoric clans including the mingling between the "big people" and the "flatheads." (the flatheads where a short stocky less developed people without verbal language) Similar? :)

Anyways, it is interesting and I'd like to know why they went extinct and whether or not they had verbal language. Questions that will be answered in the future, I imagine.

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To have early humans on the remote island of Flores is surprising enough. That some are only about a meter tall with a chimp-size brain is even more remarkable. That they were still there less than 20,000 years ago, and [that] modern humans must have met them, is astonishing."

FRODO LIVES!

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The Flores people used fire in hearths for cooking and hunted stegodon, a primitive dwarf elephant found on the island. Although small, the stegodon still weighed about 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds), and would pose a significant challenge to a hunter the size of a three-year-old modern human child. Hunting must have required joint communication and planning, the researchers say.

And this made me think of the Ewoks from Star Wars fighting against the Storm Troopers. So cute.

I'm going to Ignore the no-chin comment. That just ruins the cuteness.

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What this brings to mind is the Pygmy tribes of Africa. Are they a different branch of homo sapiens than we are? I was just looking around at some sites with information on pygmies. One mentioned they rarely live past 50, although I'm not sure if that is any different from other people who live in such primitive conditions as they do (the rainforests of Central Africa).

It also said this:

Anthropologists have automatically assumed that these hunters/gatherers, are the most primitive members of the human race, or of even an earlier evolutionary age.

Does anyone know anything about pygmies?

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I found this on encyclopedia.com:

Among the Negritos [non-African pygmies]are the Batak and the Agta of the Philippines, the Andaman Islanders, and the Semang of the Malay Peninsula. They speak various Asian languages, which belong to the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austronesian language family. The theory that all Pygmies are survivors of the ancestral human type, or are migrants of common stock from S Asia in prehistoric times, remains unproven. Gene studies have shown the Andaman Islanders to have a strain of mitochondrial DNA that is common in Asians.

So pygmies also live in the same part of the world where this 18,000 year old skull was discovered.

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This reminds of "Clan of the Cave Bear" series by Jean M. Auel.  It is about prehistoric clans including the mingling between the "big people" and the "flatheads."  (the flatheads where a short stocky less developed people without verbal language)  Similar?  B)

Is that not J.R.R. Tolkien you are thinking of? :yarr: (I love that emoticon). B)

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I think the flatheads in Clan of the Cave Bear were meant to be Neanderthals.

What this brings to mind is the Pygmy tribes of Africa.  Are they a different branch of homo sapiens than we are? 

No, they are Homo sapiens sapiens just like the rest of us.

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No, they are Homo sapiens sapiens just like the rest of us.

So you're saying that there is no such thing as a "branch" within homo sapiens. If you mean "distinct species" then of course the answer is "no". Otherwise, I don't see that the answer to the question is obvious, one way or the other. There are enough morphological features among the Khoisan which genetically distinguish them from the recent arrivals from the north (paired with what evidence we have archaeologically) that it's entirely legitimate to talk of them as being a historical "branch" within human evolutionary history. The problem, as I understand it, is that there simply isn't enough data on all of the pygmy groups to establish that they really are a historical unity.

However, getting back to the question of whether African Pygmies are on a different branch from "us", that would depend on who "we" are. The answer to that seems clearer (and negatory), since it implies the greatest genetic divergence between African Pygmies and the rest of mankind. But really that judgment has to be made by somebody with knowledge of all this newfangled haplogroup approach to human history.

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Anyways, it is interesting and I'd like to know why they went extinct and whether or not they had verbal language. Questions that will be answered in the future, I imagine.

According to the Anthropological research that I have read, a Homonid of this type should have been capable of verbal communication. I will post some lengthy descriptions on why when I can find my book about it.

Also though, if you read the articles, it is hinted that they MADE (not used-big difference) tools, and that they hunted in groups (likely hypothesis) to capture larger animals. These are bits of evidence to suggest some form of communication.

My only problem with this is their brain size. It is a scientific fact that the size of the brain has something to do with the ability of advanced forms of language. Their brain was much smaller than humans-which is why I'm interested in seeing what they discover.

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I've read somewhere that, compared to other species, our gene pool is woefully small, way below normal levels. Apparently at some point in time in our history a super-volcano wiped out all but 10,000 human beings. Compared to say, dogs, our level of genetic variation is rather small.

Regardless, Macro-evolution has always been something of a personal interest to me, from the battles between early invertibrates, mollusks, and arthropods, to dinosaurs and human development, it is all very interesting to me. My belief is that human beings, in terms of the grander scale of evolution, are akin to the first fish that left the ocean and started life on dry land. So has nature shown the stregnth of intellegence over instinct, I think that in the next few million years we may see more sentient animals take the reigns.

... that is, unless the humans do something to prevent that. Though in a few million years I scarcely doubt we will still be humans in the common sense of the word.

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I've read somewhere that, compared to other species, our gene pool is woefully small ...

Before the genome was sequenced, there was great debate and varied predictions about the total number of genes. Some experts in the field estimated well over 100,000 genes. A quite recent re-evaluation of the sequencing results lowered the total estimate to be even lower than the original results implied. The total number of genes is now estimated to be in the low to mid twenty-thousand range. There are plants that, apparently, have a larger number of genes than we! But it turns out that the key to biological sophistication lies not simply in the number of genes, but with the number of proteins that are expressed. In that regard we are not as limited as other species, with multiple proteins being expressed, and that makes a world of difference.

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I've read somewhere that, compared to other species, our gene pool is woefully small, way below normal levels. Apparently at some point in time in our history a super-volcano wiped out all but 10,000 human beings. Compared to say, dogs, our level of genetic variation is rather small.

If you don't mind me asking-where did you read this?

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