Saturday, April 13, 2019

Tiny Hominids in the Ancient Philippines

Back in 2007, archaeologists reported what appeared to be a human foot bone from a cave on Luzon in the Philippines, dated to roughly 67,000 years ago.

This discovery inspired them to keep digging in the cave, and they eventually found more hominid bones, including these teeth. These are adult hominid teeth but they are tiny, which makes the excavators think this person was less than 4 feet tall (1.2 m).

It's a very cool discovery because it adds to the growing picture of very diverse hominids living in the geologically very recent past, perhaps recent enough to have fed old folktales about goblins, bigfoot, and other semi-human creatures. But a few bones and teeth is not a lot to hang a news species on.

4 comments:

G. Verloren said...

But a few bones and teeth is not a lot to hang a news species on.

Is there some way they'd be able to rule out other explanations, such as an adult individual suffering from dwarfism? Or is it really that tenuous a claim?

John said...

The shape of the teeth would be extraordinarily weird for Homo sapiens; such teeth would be a major deformity in a modern human.

Kpgoog said...

Don't islands frequently result in dwarf / pygmy varieties? It has occurred in/on Sicily (rhinos, hippos), Santa Rosa Island (mammoth)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_dwarfism

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/gigantism-and-dwarfism-islands/

http://archive.vcstar.com/news/fossil-found-on-santa-rosa-island-may-reveal-new-information-on-pygmy-mammoths-ep-292300072-351597711.html/

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