The Brain of Ebu Gogo

Posted on Sunday 6 March 2005 to unknown


This is a place holder because I simply have no time to write anything about this.

But then again why would you want my take on it? Go thither.

UPDATE: All Ebu Gogo. All the time.

Basically, the brain scan that was carried out on the Homo Floresiensis skull before being taken by Prof Jacob (but only published now) appears to have disproved the charge of microcephaly. This hasn't silenced the skeptics, however. Doctor Alan Thorne won't be happy until he has seen a "couple of dozen" samples of this species, so the debate sure doesn't seem likely to die down any time soon. He is arguing that the skull shares racial characteristics with local Melanesians and this makes the separate species argument seem highly improbable. A key point is that he is talking about a condition known as secondary microcephaly which is not a genetic condition but rather one that is caused by an infection during pregnancy.

Nevertheless, this is all starting to sound like a bit of a stretch. The view of the majority of scientists is that Ebu Gogo is a new species. Furthermore, as Carl Zimmer's article (linked above) has it, it may even be a different species to Homo Erectus which is a species that is known to have lived in Indonesia for at least 800,000 years. This new species may have more affinities with another and even more archaic ape-like species, raising the possibility that there may have been more than one species of archaic human wandering about in Asia at the time.

Also of interest, scientists have suspected for a while that archaic humans were living in Java as recently as 27,000 years ago.

In other news, it appears that some of the bones of Homo Floresiensis have been badly damaged while in the care of Prof Teuku Jacob. According to the Sydney Morning Herald:
Mike Morwood, leader of the Australian and Indonesian team that discovered Homo floresiensis on the island of Flores, yesterday said a pelvis had been severely damaged while being transported to and from the laboratory of the Indonesian palaeoanthropologist Teuku Jacob, of Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta.

A jawbone that is crucial to the discovery team's claim that more than one hobbit lived in the Flores cave had also been cracked and badly repaired while in the care of Professor Jacob, who returned most of the remains of the seven hobbits a week ago.

"It's sickening," Professor Morwood said. "Jacob was greedy and acted totally irresponsibly"

...

The discovery team was able to get a CT scan of the hobbit skull at a Jakarta hospital before it was taken, but it did not have time to strengthen the second lower jawbone, also found last year.

Professor Morwood said it appeared to have been broken when a mould was made in the Yogyakarta laboratory. Someone had then "rammed the two halves together at the wrong angle, stuck bone fragments in the cracks, and hidden the mess with a thick coating of glue".

The damaged pelvis would have provided crucial evidence, "now lost", for the shape and size of the hobbits and how they walked.

FURTHER UPDATE: John Hawks thinks that the microcephaly question remains far from settled and he also questions the parts of the recent study which makes certain claims about Ebu Gogo's cognitive abilities. If this really is a different species of human then one should be very careful about inferring brain functions by comparing brain-case depressions with those in modern humans. He does, however, support the idea that Ebu Gogo might be a different species from either Homo Erectus or Homo Sapiens. He has previously floated the possibility that they are a branch descended from australopithecines.