Eonix Papers

How a hobbit is rewriting the history of the human raceThe discovery of the bones of tiny primitive people on an Indonesian island six years ago stunned scientists. Now, further research suggests that the little apemen, not Homo erectus, were the first to leave Africa and colonise other parts of the world, reports Robin McKie
It remains one of the greatest human fossil discoveries of all time. The bones of a race of tiny primitive people, who used stone tools to hunt pony-sized elephants and battle huge Komodo dragons, were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004.

The team of Australian researchers had been working in a vast limestone cavern, called Liang Bua, in one of the island’s remotest areas, when one scientist ran his trowel against a piece of bone. Carefully the group began scraping away the brown clay in which pieces of a tiny skull, and a little lower jaw, were embedded.

This was not any old skull, they quickly realised. Although small, it had special characteristics. In particular, it had adult teeth. “This was no child, but a tiny adult; in fact, one of the smallest adult hominids ever found in the fossil record,” says Mike Morwood, of Australia’s University of Wollongong and a leader of the original Flores expedition team.

The pieces of bone were carefully wrapped in newspaper, packed in cardboard boxes and then cradled on the laps of scientists on their journey, by ferry and plane, back to Jakarta. Then the pieces of skull, as well as bones from other skeletons found in Liang Bua, were put together.

The end result caused consternation. These remains came from a species that turned out to be only three feet tall and had the brain the size of an orange. Yet it used quite sophisticated stone tools. And that was a real puzzle. How on earth could such individuals have made complex implements and survived for aeons on this remote part of the Malay archipelago?

Some simply dismissed the bones as the remains of deformed modern humans with diseases that had caused them to shrink: to them, they were just pathological oddities, it was alleged. Most researchers disagreed, however. The hobbits were the descendants of a race of far larger, ancient humans who had thrived around a million years ago. These people, known as Homo erectus, had become stranded on the island and then had shrunk in an evolutionary response to the island’s limited resources.

That is odd enough. However, new evidence suggests the little folk of Flores may be even stranger in origin. According to a growing number of scientists, Homo floresiensis is probably a direct descendant of some of the first apemen to evolve on the African savannah three million years ago. These primitive hominids somehow travelled half a world from their probable birthplace in the Rift Valley to make their homes among the orangutans, giant turtles and rare birds of Indonesia before eventually reaching Flores.

It sounds improbable but the basic physical similarity between the two species is striking. Consider Lucy, the 3.2 million-year-old member of Australopithecus afarensis. She had a very small brain, primitive wrists, feet and teeth and was only one metre tall, but was still declared “the grandmother of humanity” after her discovery in Ethiopia in 1974. Crucially, analysis of Lucy’s skeleton shows it has great similarities with the bones of H. floresiensis, although her species died out millions of years ago while the hobbits hung on in Flores until about 17,000 years ago. This latter figure is staggeringly close in terms of recent human evolution and indicates that long after the Neanderthals, our closest evolutionary relatives, had disappeared from the face of the Earth around 35,000 years ago, these tiny, distant relatives of Homo sapiens were still living on remote Flores.

The crucial point about this interpretation is that it explains why the Flores people had such minuscule proportions. They didn’t shrink but were small from the start – because they came from a very ancient lineage of little apemen. They acquired no diseased deformities, nor did they evolve a smaller stature over time. They were, in essence, an anthropological relic and Flores was an evolutionary time capsule. In research that provides further support for this idea, scientists have recently dated some stone tools on Flores as being around 1.1 million years old, far older than had been previously supposed.

The possibility that a very primitive member of the genus Homo left Africa, roughly two million years ago, and that a descendant population persisted until only several thousand years ago, is one of the more provocative hypotheses to have emerged in anthropology during the past few years,” David Strait of the University of Albany told Scientific American recently. This view is backed by Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London. “We are still grappling with what this discovery has done for our thinking and our conventional scenarios.”

In addition, Mike Morwood says he has now uncovered stone tools on nearby Sulawesi. These could be almost two million years old, he believes, which suggests the whole region was populated by very ancient humans for a startlingly long part of human prehistory. “This is going to put the cat among the pigeons,” Morwood says.

However, it is the hobbits’ similarity to ancient African apemen that provides the most compelling evidence for their ancient origins. In the Journal of Human Evolution, a team led by Debbie Argue of the Australian National University, recently reported that analysis of H. floresiensis shows they most closely resemble apelike human ancestors that first appeared around 2.3 million years ago in Africa. In other words, their stock may be not quite as old as Lucy’s but probably comes from a hominid, known as Homo habilis, that appeared on the evolutionary scene not long after Lucy’s species disappeared. Homo habilis’s features now seem to match, most closely, those of H. floresiensis.

Consider those hobbit feet, for example. The skeleton unearthed on Flores had a foot that was 20cm in length. This produces a ratio of 70 per cent when compared with the length of the hobbit’s thigh bone. By contrast, men and women today have foot-to-thigh bone ratios of 55 per cent. The little folk of Flores had singularly short legs and long, flapper feet, very similar to those of African apemen, even though limbs like these would have made their long march from Africa to Flores a painful business.

Similarly, the hands of H. floresiensis were more like apes than those of evolved humans, their wrists possessing trapezoid bones that would have made the delicate art of stone tool-making very difficult. Their teeth show primitive traits while their brains were little bigger than those of chimpanzees, though CT scans of skull interiors suggest they may have had cognitive skills not possessed by apes.

Nevertheless, this little apeman, with poor physique, a chimp-sized brain and only a limited ability to make tools, now appears to have left Africa, travelled thousands of miles and somehow colonised part, if not all, of south-east Asia two million years ago.

Scientists had previously assumed only a far more advanced human ancestor, such as Homo erectus, was capable of undertaking that task and only managed to do so about a million years ago when our predecessors had evolved powerful physiques, a good gait and the beginnings of intellect. Without these, we would have got nowhere, it was implied.

Then along came little H. floresiensis which, quite simply, has “no business being there,” says Morwood. And you can see what he means. Apart from the sheer improbability of a jumped-up ape travelling from Africa to Indonesia, there is the particular puzzle of how it got to Flores.

Primitive hominids were almost certainly incapable of sailing. So how did it arrive on the island in the first place? It is a puzzle, although Stringer believes the region’s intense tectonic activity is significant. “After the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, people were found far out at sea clinging to rafts of vegetation. Things like that could have happened regularly in the past and people could have been swept out to sea and washed ashore on Flores. Alternatively, there could have been short-lived connections between now separate islands.”

Thus, ancient African apemen travelled half the world, made homes across Indonesia and, in one case, were washed out to sea to end up colonising a remote island that was already populated with pygmy elephants, called stegadons, and giant Komodo dragons, which are still found on the island. It is a truly fantastic tale, worthy of Rider Haggard, and it has turned the study of human evolution on its head.

And then there is the report that dates the stone tools found on Flores as being 1.1 million years old. “That is utterly remarkable on its own,” adds Morwood. “Until we found these dates, the longest period of island isolation that we knew about occurred on Tasmania where the aboriginal people were cut off from mainland Australia 11,000 years ago. We thought that was an amazing length of time. But now we have found an island where early humans were cut off from the rest of evolution for more than a million years.” In addition, there are those completed digs carried out by Morwood which suggest that some type of human being was making stone implements up to two million years ago.

A crucial aspect to this remarkable story is the region’s geography, Morwood believes. The ocean currents and the remoteness of Flores make the island difficult to get to, so once a species does get there, it will remain well protected on it, he argues. “Flores seems to protect species that are long past their use-by dates. There were those pygmy elephants, and the Komodo dragon, for example. And now we have Homo floresiensis. It may be that only a few animals get there but when they do arrive they tend to survive for a long time, which has been science’s good fortune.”

That is putting it mildly. Had not the original Australian team, led by Morwood, uncovered those hobbit remains in 2004, the story of humanity’s African exodus would have been considered a fairly simple affair.

According to this version of events, Homo erectus evolved from apemen predecessors, such as Australopithecus africanus, in Africa and then headed off around the Old World more than a million years ago, armed with a great physique and a modest intellect. These allowed it to settle across Africa, Asia and Europe. This diaspora was then followed by a second wave of humans – our own species, Homo sapiens – which emerged from Africa 100,000 years ago and took over the planet, replacing all pockets of its predecessors it encountered.

Now a far more complex picture is emerging. Ancient apemen, who might have been thought to lack the nous for global conquest, appear to have done the trick almost a million years earlier. One of the major tenets of human evolution, the story of our world conquest, is now urgently in need of revision.

As to the fate of H. floresiensis, that is unclear. The species disappears abruptly from the archaeological record 17,000 years ago. But why? They had apparently survived quite happily on the island for more than a million years. So what did for them in the end?

There are two competing answers. The first suggests that the species, after all the good fortune that had helped it endure the vicissitudes of life in the Malay Archipelago, ran out of luck. “There is a thick layer of ash in the Liang Bua cave above the most recent hobbit remains,” says Stringer. “We now know this was caused by a major volcanic eruption which occurred about 17,000 years ago. So it may be that they were just unlucky with the local geology.” According to this vision, the little folk of Flores were wiped out by choking plumes of volcanic ash or died of starvation on an island denuded of vegetation.

It would have been a pretty terrible way to go. Yet neither Stringer nor Morwood is convinced that was what happened, despite the tight link between dates of eruptions on the island and the disappearance of the species from the fossil record. Instead, they suspect a very different agent: the bloody hand of modern humans. “Look at our track record,” says Morwood. When Homo sapiens entered Europe 40,000 years ago, on its route out of Africa, they would have encountered the continent’s original inhabitants, the Neanderthals. Within a few millenniums, the Neanderthals had been rendered extinct.

Stringer agrees. Homo sapiens left Africa about 100,000 years ago and by the time hobbits became extinct on Flores, modern humans were all over south-east Asia. “I cannot see Homo floresiensis keeping modern humans off the island. There must have been encounters between them and us. It is wonderful to speculate what might have happened when they met up, but I suspect that those moderns used up the resources that the hobbit needed to survive.”

Robin McKie is the science editor of the Observer

Picture of a print from David Roberts’ Egypt & Nubia, issued between 1845 and 1849.
The New Wikimedia Commons has a lot of interesting images, many in the public domain from before 1925.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1GNO8ZCBJ6WNY/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Changing History
Four new ways to write the story of the world
[Read more →]

I have restored the old ’site blog’ here, on the way to some more work on the various websites to do with the eonic effect, at history-and-evolution.com, and eonic-effect.net.
You can see read the First and Last Men netbook at http://eonix-papers.com/lfm.htm

New material and a fourth edition of World History and the Eonic Effect are on the way, so a remake of the various websites is in order.

A Salute to the Wheel
Always cited as the hallmark of man’s innovation, here is the real story behind the wheel – from its origins to its reinvention

The Age of Paine
Thomas Paine has sometimes had few readers beyond those students who are required to read his great revolutionary pamphlet “Common Sense,” the firebrand Paine wielded to spread the flame of independence throughout the British colonies in America.
[Read more →]

Evolution’s revolution
Mike Belbin looks at the emergence of human culture and the vital role of symbolism
Also check out:
http://darwiniana.com/2009/07/02/the-left-anwil…uage-evolutionthe-left-anwilson-and-language-evolution/

“Do materialists really think that language just ‘evolved’, like finches’ beaks …?” – AN Wilson, ‘Why I believe again’ New Statesman April 6 2009

“We are annoying to the leopard because our ancestor stole fire from theirs” – South Amerindian story

What kind of animal are humans? To the crude materialist we are, according to taste, chiefly animal; bundles of needs, habits and reactions; savage or simple. To the spiritual believer, animal matter required something extra, something originally separate, to become human. Is human culture then just another kind of animal behaviour? What does it mean to trace humanity’s development from nature to society? What is the ‘missing link’ between natural history and anthropology? If animals communicate, and they do, is there anything special about human language?
[Read more →]

Does religion have a monopoly on ‘enchantment’?
Weber linked rationalisation with ‘the disenchantment of the world’. But is it fair to equate the lack of religion to an absence of magic and mystery?
In 1918, the German sociologist, Max Weber, claimed that the spreading influence of scientific rationalism meant that religious explanations of the world would become increasingly pushed aside. [Read more →]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroaster

Until the late 1600s, Zoroaster was generally dated to about the sixth century BCE, which coincided with both the “Traditional date” (see details below) and historiographic accounts (Ammianus Marcellinus xxiii.6.32, fourth c. CE). However, already at the time (late nineteenth century), the issue was far from settled, with James Darmesteter pleading for a later date (c. 100 BCE) and others pleading for dates as early as 6000 BCE.[e]

The “Traditional date” originates in the period immediately following Alexander’s conquest of the Achaemenid Empire in 330 BCE. The Seleucid kings who gained power following Alexander’s death instituted an “Age of Alexander” as the new calendrical epoch. This did not appeal to the Zoroastrian priesthood who then attempted to establish an “Age of Zoroaster.” To do so, they needed to establish when Zoroaster had lived, which they accomplished by counting back the length of successive generations[6] until they concluded that Zoroaster must have lived “258 years before Alexander.” This estimate then re-appeared in the ninth- to twelfth-century texts of Zoroastrian tradition,[c] which in turn gave the date doctrinal legitimacy. In the early part of the twentieth century, this remained the accepted date (subject to the uncertainties of the ‘Age of Alexander’[d]) for a number of reputable scholars, among them Hasan Taqizadeh, a recognized authority on the various Iranian calendars and hence became the date cited by Henning and others.

By the late nineteenth century, scholars such as Bartholomea and Christensen noted problems with the “Traditional date,” namely in the linguistic difficulties that it presented. Since the Old Avestan language of Gathas (that are attributed to the prophet himself) is still very close to the Sanskrit of the Rigveda, it seemed implausible that the Gathas and Rigveda could be more than a few centuries apart, suggesting a date for the oldest surviving portions of the Avesta of roughly the 11th to 10th century BCE.

This 11th/10th century BCE date is now widely accepted among Iranists, who in recent decades found that the social customs described in the Gāthās roughly coincides with what is known of other pre-historical peoples of that period. Supported by this historical evidence, the “Traditional date” can be conclusively ruled out, and the discreditation can to some extent be supported by the texts themselves: The Gathas describe a society of bipartite (priests and herdsmen/farmers) nomadic pastoralists with tribal structures organized at most as small kingdoms. This contrasts sharply with the view of Zoroaster having lived in an empire, at which time society is attested to have had a tripartite structure (nobility/soldiers, priests, and farmers).

Although a slightly earlier date (a century or two) has been proposed on the grounds that the texts do not reflect the migration onto the Iranian Plateau, it is also possible that Zoroaster lived in one of the rural societies that remained where they were.

[edit] Place

Zoroaster; portrayed here in a popular Parsi Zoroastrian depiction. This iconographic tradition can be traced to the eighteenth century.Yasna 9 & 17 cite the Ditya River in Airyanem Vaējah (Middle Persian Ērān Wēj) as Zoroaster’s home and the scene of his first appearance. Nowhere in the Avesta (both Old and Younger portions) is there a mention of the Achaemenids or of any West Iranian tribes such as the Medes, Persians, or even Parthians.

However, in Yasna 59.18, the zaraθuštrotema, or supreme head of the Zoroastrian priesthood, is said to reside in ‘Ragha’. In the ninth to twelfth century Middle Persian texts of Zoroastrian tradition, this ‘Ragha’ – along with many other places – appear as locations in Western Iran. While Medea does not figure at all in the Avesta (the westernmost location noted in scripture is Arachosia), the Būndahišn, or “Primordial Creation,” (20.32 and 24.15) puts Ragha in Medea (medieval Rai). However, in Avestan, Ragha is simply a toponym meaning “plain, hillside.”[7].

Apart from these indications in Middle Persian sources which are open to interpretations, there are a number of other sources. The Greek and Latin sources are divided on the birth place of Zarathustra. There are many Greek accounts of Zarathustra, referred usually as Persian or Perso-Median Zoroaster. Moreover they have the suggestion that there has been more than one Zoroaster.[8] On the other hand in post-Islamic sources Shahrastani (1086-1153) an Iranian writer originally from Shahristān, present-day Turkmenistan, proposed that Zoroaster’s father was from Atropatene (also in Medea) and his mother was from Rai. Coming from a reputed scholar of religions, this was a serious blow for the various regions who all claimed that Zoroaster originated from their homelands, some of which then decided that Zoroaster must then have then been buried in their regions or composed his Gathas there or preached there.[9][10] Also Arabic sources of the same period and the same region of historical Persia consider Azerbaijan as the birth place of Zarathustra.[11]

By the late twentieth century the consensus amont some scholars had settled on an origin in Eastern Iran and/or Central Asia (to include present-day Afghanistan): Gnoli proposed Sistan (though in a much wider scope than the present-day province) as the homeland of Zoroastrianism; Frye voted for Bactria and Chorasmia;[12] Khlopin suggests the Tedzen Delta in present-day Turkmenistan.[13] Sarianidi considered the BMAC region as “the native land of the Zoroastrians and, probably, of Zoroaster himself.”[14] Boyce includes the steppes of the former Soviet republics.[15] The medieval “from Media” hypothesis is no longer taken seriously, and Zaehner has even suggested that this was a Magi-mediated issue to garner legitimacy, but this has been likewise rejected by Gershevitch and others.

The 2005 Encyclopedia Iranica article on the history of Zoroastrianism summarizes the issue with “while there is general agreement that he did not live in western Iran, attempts to locate him in specific regions of eastern Iran, including Central Asia, remain tentative.”[16]

The Gain from Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine, who died 200 years ago, inspired and witnessed the revolutions that gave birth to the United States and destroyed the French monarchy. A genuinely global figure, he anticipated modern ideas on human rights, atheism and rationalism. David Nash looks at his enduring impact.

Ivory Venus Figurine From The Swabian Jura Rewrites Prehistory
ScienceDaily (May 14, 2009) — The 2008 excavations at Hohle Fels Cave in the Swabian Jura of southwestern Germany recovered a female figurine carved from mammoth ivory from the basal Aurignacian deposit. This figurine, which is the earliest depiction of a human, and one of the oldest known examples of figurative art worldwide, was made at least 35,000 years ago. This discovery radically changes our views of the context and meaning of the earliest Paleolithic art. [Read more →]

Spinning Caesar’s murder
Putting the ideology – and the people – back into our understanding of Roman political lifeMary Beard
The murder of Julius Caesar was a messy business. [Read more →]

Study Reveals Source of Human Evolution, African Genetics [Read more →]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/science/28hobbit.html

April 28, 2009
A Tiny Hominid With No Place on the Family Tree
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
STONY BROOK, N.Y. – Six years after their discovery, the extinct little people nicknamed hobbits who once occupied the Indonesian island of Flores remain mystifying anomalies in human evolution, out of place in time and geography, their ancestry unknown. Recent research has only widened their challenge to conventional thinking about the origins, transformations and migrations of the early human family.

Indeed, the more scientists study the specimens and their implications, the more they are drawn to heretical speculation.

¶Were these primitive survivors of even earlier hominid migrations out of Africa, before Homo erectus migrated about 1.8 million years ago? Could some of the earliest African toolmakers, around 2.5 million years ago, have made their way across Asia?

¶Did some of these migrants evolve into new species in Asia, which moved back to Africa? Two-way traffic is not unheard of in other mammals.

¶Or could the hobbits be an example of reverse evolution? That would seem even more bizarre; there are no known cases in primate evolution of a wholesale reversion to some ancestor in its lineage.

The possibilities get curiouser and curiouser, said William L. Jungers of Stony Brook University, making hobbits “the black swan of paleontology – totally unpredicted and inexplicable.”

Everything about them seems incredible. They were very small, not much more than three feet tall, yet do not resemble any modern pygmies. They walked upright on short legs, but might have had a peculiar gait obviating long-distance running. The single skull that has been found is no bigger than a grapefruit, suggesting a brain less than one-third the size of a human’s, yet they made stone tools similar to those produced by other hominids with larger brains. They appeared to live isolated on an island as recently as 17,000 years ago, well after humans had made it to Australia.

Although the immediate ancestor of modern humans, Homo erectus, lived in Asia and the islands for hundreds of thousands of years, the hobbits were not simply scaled-down erectus. In fact, erectus and Homo sapiens appear to be more closely related to each other than either is to the hobbit, scientists have determined.

It is no wonder, then, that the announcement describing the skull and the several skeletons as remains of a previously unknown hominid species, Homo floresiensis, prompted heated debate. Critics contended that these were merely modern human dwarfs afflicted with genetic or pathological disorders.

Scientists who reviewed hobbit research at a symposium here last week said that a consensus had emerged among experts in support of the initial interpretation that H. floresiensis is a distinct hominid species much more primitive than H. sapiens. On display for the first time at the meeting was a cast of the skull and bones of a H. floresiensis, probably an adult female.

Several researchers showed images of hobbit brain casts in comparison with those of deformed human brains. They said this refuted what they called the “sick hobbit hypothesis.” They also reported telling shoulder and wrist differences between humans and the island inhabitants.

Even so, skeptics have not capitulated. They note that most of the participants at the symposium had worked closely with the Australian and Indonesian scientists who made the discovery in 2003 and complain that their objections have been largely ignored by the news media and organizations financing research on the hobbits.

Some prominent paleoanthropologists are reserving judgment, among them Richard Leakey, the noted hominid fossil hunter who is chairman of the Turkana Basin Institute at Stony Brook University. Like other undecided scientists, he cited the need to find more skeletons at other sites, especially a few more skulls.

Mr. Leakey conceded, however, that the recent research “greatly strengthened the possibility” that the Flores specimens represented a new species.

At the symposium, Michael J. Morwood, an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia who was one of the discoverers, said that further investigations of stone tools had determined that hominids arrived at Flores as early as 880,000 years ago and “it is reasonable to assume that those were ancestors of the hobbits.” But none of their bones have been uncovered, so they remain unidentified, and no modern human remains have been found there earlier than 11,000 years ago.

Excavations are continuing at Liang Bua, a wide-mouth cave in a hillside where the hobbit bones were found in deep sediments, but no more skulls or skeletons have turned up. Dr. Morwood said the search would be extended to other Flores sites and nearby islands.

Peter Brown, a paleontologist at the University of New England in Australia, said that his examination of the premolars and lower jaws of the specimens made it almost immediately “very, very clear that this was a hominid in the wrong place at the wrong time.” The first premolars in particular, he said, were larger than a human’s and had a crown and roots unlike those of H. sapiens or H. erectus.

Dr. Brown, a co-author of the original discovery report, said that no known disease or abnormality in humans could have “replicated this condition.”

At first, Dr. Brown and colleagues hypothesized that the hobbits were descendants of H. erectus that populated the region and had evolved their small stature because they lived in isolation on an island. Island dwarfing is a recognized phenomenon in which larger species diminish in size over time in response to limited resources.

The scientists soon backed off from that hypothesis. For one thing, dwarfing reduces stature, but not brain size. Moreover, researchers said, the hobbit bore little resemblance to an erectus.

In an analysis of the hobbit’s wrist bones, Matthew W. Tocheri of the Smithsonian Institution found that certain bones were wedge-shaped, similar to those in apes, and not squared-off, as in humans and Neanderthals. This suggested that its species diverged from the human lineage at least one million to two million years ago.

So if several lines of evidence now encourage agreement that H. floresiensis was a distinct and primitive hominid, the hobbit riddle can be compressed into a single question of far-reaching importance: where did these little people come from?

“Once you establish that this is a unique species,” said Frederick E. Grine, a paleoanthropologist at Stony Brook, “then these primitive features that it has suddenly take on a profound evolutionary significance.”

Scientists said in reports and interviews that they had only recently begun contemplating possible ancestries.

As a starting point, scientists rule out island dwarfing as a primary explanation. Dwarfs and pygmies are simply diminutive humans; they do not become more apelike, as the hobbits appear to be in some aspects. Besides, normal dwarfing would suggest that the hobbits presumably evolved from H. erectus, the only previous hominids identified in this part of Asia or anywhere outside Africa; the first one was discovered in Java in the late 19th century. But research has found few similarities between the hobbit skeleton and Asian H. erectus.

If the hobbit is a throwback to much earlier hominids, scientists said, reverse evolution would be the most far-fetched explanation. Dr. Jungers, a paleoanthropologist who organized the symposium, said there were no known examples of mammals becoming significantly reduced in size and anatomy as a consequence of reverting to an ancestral form.

“Is it possible?” he asked rhetorically. “If that is the case, it is unprecedented and a tremendous discovery.”

Several scientists think the answer to hobbit ancestry lies deeper in the hominid past. If this species is unlike H. erectus, it presumably descended from even earlier small-bodied migrants out of Africa that preceded erectus into Asia. Just the thought questions conventional wisdom.

Possible candidates include Homo habilis, the first and least known species of the Homo genus. The short, small-brained habilis might have emerged as early as 2.3 million years ago and lived to co-exist with the brainier, long-limbed H. erectus. At present, erectus fossils, found in the republic of Georgia and dated at 1.8 million to 1.7 million years ago, are the earliest well-established evidence for hominids outside Africa.

If hobbits resemble habilis in some respects, scientists said, it indicates that habilis or something like it possibly left Africa earlier and became the likely hobbit ancestor.

Another possible ancestor might even have been a pre-Homo species of the Australopithecus genus. The first evidence for stone toolmaking in Africa, at least 2.5 million years ago, is associated with australopithecines. Several scientists called attention to skeletal similarities between hobbits and A. afarensis, the species famously represented by the 3.2-million-year-old Lucy skeleton from Ethiopia.

The suggestion that the H. floresiensis ancestor might have reached Asia a million years before H. erectus left Africa was raised earlier this month at a meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

And then there is the idea, raised again at the symposium, of hominid migrations out of Africa and back. Dr. Jungers advised abandoning the old image of the long-limbed H. erectus striding out of Africa in the first wave of hominids making their way in the world.

“Why think they couldn’t have done it many times, even before erectus?” he said. “Other mammals have migrated in and out of Africa.”

The idea revived speculation that erectus itself might have evolved in Asia from an earlier migrant from Africa, and then found its way back to the land of its ancestors. Similarly, other hominids arriving in distant parts of Asia might have churned out new species, among them the hobbits.

Robert B. Eckhardt of Penn State University, an ardent hobbit skeptic, is unyielding in his opposition to the interpretation that the Flores skull belongs to a previously unrecognized species. He insists that it will prove to be from a modern human stricken with microcephaly or a similar developmental disorder that shrinks the head and brain.

“Convincing others is much more difficult than I thought it would be at the outset,” Dr. Eckhardt acknowledged in an e-mail message, “but increasingly it is becoming evident that what is at stake is not just some sample of specimens, but instead the central paradigm of an entire subfield.”

Susan G. Larson, an anatomist at the Stony Brook School of Medicine who analyzed the non-human properties of the hobbit shoulders, said in an interview that the investigations had entered “a period of wait and see.”

“Someday,” Dr. Larson said, “people may be saying, why was everyone so puzzled back then – it’s plain to see where the little people of Flores came from.”

From Science News
Mystery Of Horse Domestication Solved?
ScienceDaily (Apr. 24, 2009) — Wild horses were domesticated in the Ponto-Caspian steppe region (today Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Romania) in the 3rd millennium B.C. Despite the pivotal role horses have played in the history of human societies, the process of their domestication is not well understood.
In a new study published in the scientific journal Science, an analysis by German researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, Berlin, the German Archaeological Institute, the Humboldt University Berlin, the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, in cooperation with American and Spanish scientists, has unravelled the mystery about the domestication of the horse.

Based on ancient DNA spanning the time between the Late Pleistocene and the Middle Ages, targeting nuclear genes responsible for coat colorations allows to shed light on the timing and place of horse domestication. Furthermore the study demonstrates how rapid the number of colorations increased as one result of the domestication. As well, it shows very clearly that the huge variability of coloration in domestic horses which can be observed today is a result of selective breeding by ancient farmers.

Our modern human societies were founded on the Neolithic revolution, which was the transformation of wild plants and animals into domestic ones available for human nutrition. Within all domestic animals, no other species has had such a significant impact on the warfare, transportation and communication capabilities of human societies as the horse.

For many millennia, horses were linked to human history changing societies on a continent-wide scale, be it with Alexander the Great’s or Genghis Khan’s armies invading most of Asia and Eastern Europe or Francis Pizarro destroying the Inca Empire with about 30 mounted warriors. The horse was a costly and prestigious animal in all times, featured in gifts from one sovereign to another as a nobleman’s mark.
Journal reference:

Arne Ludwig, Melanie Pruvost, Monika Reissmann, Norbert Benecke, Gudrun A. Brockmann, Pedro Castaños, Michael Cieslak, Sebastian Lippold, Laura Llorente, Anna-Sapfo Malaspinas, Montgomery Slatkin, and Michael Hofreiter. Coat Color Variation at the Beginning of Horse Domestication. Science, 2009; 324 (5926): 485 DOI: 10.1126/science.1172750

Forschungsverbund Berlin e.V. (FVB) (2009, April 24). Mystery Of Horse Domestication Solved?. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 24, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/04/090423142541.htm
Adapted from materials provided by Forschungsverbund Berlin e.V. (FVB), via AlphaGalileo.

Selection from World History And The Eonic Effect, on the rise of modernity

Empires of the Silk Road
Interesting book on the Indo-European question, quite apart from its larger history of Central Eurasia.
This issue is important for the study of the eonic sequence, since the appearance of the Indo-Europeans prior to their intersection with the sequence in the Axial Age is essential for understanding the Greeks, Romans, and Indians.

The first complete history of Central Eurasia from ancient times to the present day, Empires of the Silk Road represents a fundamental rethinking of the origins, history, and significance of this major world region. Christopher Beckwith describes the rise and fall of the great Central Eurasian empires, including those of the Scythians, Attila the Hun, the Turks and Tibetans, and Genghis Khan and the Mongols. In addition, he explains why the heartland of Central Eurasia led the world economically, scientifically, and artistically for many centuries despite invasions by Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Chinese, and others. In retelling the story of the Old World from the perspective of Central Eurasia, Beckwith provides a new understanding of the internal and external dynamics of the Central Eurasian states and shows how their people repeatedly revolutionized Eurasian civilization.

Beckwith recounts the Indo-Europeans’ migration out of Central Eurasia, their mixture with local peoples, and the resulting development of the Graeco-Roman, Persian, Indian, and Chinese civilizations; he details the basis for the thriving economy of premodern Central Eurasia, the economy’s disintegration following the region’s partition by the Chinese and Russians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the damaging of Central Eurasian culture by Modernism; and he discusses the significance for world history of the partial reemergence of Central Eurasian nations after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Empires of the Silk Road places Central Eurasia within a world historical framework and demonstrates why the region is central to understanding the history of civilization.

Between ideology and science
By Shlomo Avineri

When “The Origin of Species” was published, Engels wrote Marx with quite a bit of satisfaction about the way it confronted traditional theological views. Marx, however, was much more skeptical, and wrote: “Darwin rediscovered his English society among animals and plants, with its division of labor, competition, the opening of new markets, ‘inventions’ and ‘battles for survival’… That is Hobbes’ version of all-out war …”

This shows that to Marx, Darwin’s theory was an “ideology,” just cloaking political and social worldviews in science, and was therefore far from pure “scientific truth,” which purports to be free of such views.

Marx also foresaw the danger to the social sciences in adopting Darwinism: Translating the latter’s worldview into the social sciences (i.e., “social Darwinism”) would legitimize capitalist competition, ostensibly based on the natural sciences, in which only the fittest and most efficient survive.

Moreover, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, adaptations of social Darwinism served as ostensibly scientific justification for racism and the rule of “superior” groups over “inferior” ones. Indeed, Aryan racism and the concept of the inferiority of the so-called Jewish race were based on such interpretations of social Darwinism, which also served spawned theories of eugenics, some of which saw horrific implementation by the Nazis.

Darwin, of course, is not responsible for how some of his disciples used his theories. However, precisely in the context of the celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of his birth – justified in and of themselves – the dark potential of his approach should be recalled. Furthermore, it should be remembered that it was Marx, of all people, who recognized the relationship between Darwinism and capitalism.

Why the eonic model beats out Darwinism (on human evolution)

The problem with Darwin’s theory of natural selection is that it over-focuses attention on the small. What of the possibility of invisible macro factors that stand beyond the action of the small-scale. Everything in the debate suggests something is being missed. But what is that? It is like gravitation in Newton’s time (no direct comparison is implied): something invisible and macro (in the sense of defying the point contact in the small of static or impulsive forces), a field, was required to make sense of the data, and Newton was able to proceed despite the charge that such fields where a violation of scientific method.