11/10/2004
Fossil Finds
I was startled when I picked up my November issue of National Geographic and on the cover in big red letters were the words “Was Darwin Wrong?”. My first thought was that there had been a coup and creationists had taken over the magazine. I was relieved to find on paging to the article that the answer to the question, in bigger golden-brownish letters, was “NO”, followed by the statement “The evidence for Evolution is overwhelming.” I’m in total agreement with that statement. Yet the article, by David Quammen, quotes a Gallup poll of over a thousand respondents in which virtually half (45 percent) agreed that God created us humans in “pretty much” our present forms about a mere 10,000 years ago.
If you’re one of those 45 percent, you won’t believe a word that follows. An AP report by Charles Sheehan posted November 9 on AOL News concerns a freshman geology student, Adam Striegel, at the University of Pittsburgh. I did my graduate work at Pitt and am always interested when a relative newcomer to a field makes a significant contribution. Adam was on a field trip along a fresh road cut near the Pittsburgh International airport when he picked up a rock and tossed it back on the ground. However, on his way back he decided to pick it up again and showed it to his instructor.
Charles Jones looked at the rock and made out the outlines of teeth and a skull. Striegel, had discovered a new species which, if all goes well, will be known in the future by a name that may start with the term “Striegeli ….” The creature possessing the skull was a 3 to 4-foot long salamander sort of critter that had teeth resembling those of a crocodile. The huge salamander lived about 300 million years ago. Paleontologists at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, just down the street from Pitt, were shocked that this well-preserved fossil was found just a few miles away.
Coincidentally, one of Carnegie’s paleontologists, Dave Berman, happens to have found one of the only two other known skulls of this giant salamander family. He found that skull in New Mexico. Berman and his team have chipped away at Striegel’s rock to reveal a skull a bit larger than the skull of a large cat. He’s hoping that future trips to the area will result in more finds that will permit them to determine what sort of other animal and plant life existed when Striegel’s salamander roamed the wilds of the future Pittsburgh suburbs.
Another fossil find far from Pittsburgh made the news a couple of weeks ago. The island of Flores is an Indonesian island lying north of Western Australia. What was found in Liang Bua Cave on Flores has stirred both the scientific and lay communities. A big debate over the past decades has concerned how and when we of the Homo sapiens family emerged as the sole human species occupying the Earth. More specifically, the debate was and still is concerned with such things as: Did the Neandertals just die out or did we kill or force them out of existence? Was there any interbreeding of us with the Neanderthals? When did they go extinct? The answer to the last question seems to be roughly 30,000 years ago.
Who knew that, perhaps as late as only 12,000 years ago, we shared this planet with another Homo species completely unknown to science until this year? Actually, it was September of 2003 when Michael Morwood, of the University of New England in Australia and his team of workers from Australia and Indonesia entered the Liang Bua Cave. I found details of their work in an article by Ann Gibbons in the October 29 issue of Science (the work was published in nature). The researchers were following a trail of stone tools that led them to the cave, in which they found a human tooth and the remains of a Stegodon. The Stegodon, now extinct, was a dwarf elephant about the size of a pony. The cave clearly warranted further attention and the team dug down about 20 feet. There they found a skull and partial skeleton of an adult human female.
Like the Stegodon, this female was diminutive in size and was not one of us, that is, she was not a Homo sapiens. Standing a mere 3 feet tall, she had a brain only half the size of Homo erectus, a normal sized early human that had spread quite widely from Africa to Asia and Indonesia. The scientists considered the possibility that this gal was deformed or a dwarf but found no evidence for that and, in addition, the bones of other individuals in the same area were also tiny. The results of various methods of dating the fossil showed that she lived around 18,000 years ago. Her skull is not that of Homo sapiens but does resemble a small version of the skull of Homo erectus.
The occupants of the cave have been deemed a new species by the researchers, who call it Homo floresiensis after the island’s name, Flores. How did H. floresiensis come about? The thinking is that the resemblance to H. erectus is not a coincidence. The speculation is that H. erectus came to the island and stayed there, unmolested by any other Homos. One of the features of island living is that the resources are often limited and the inhabitants evolve to make do with the limitations. Downsizing is apparently not uncommon in other island mammals. Witness the dwarf elephants found with H. floresiensis. Over the centuries or millennia, the diminutive people evolved into a different species of humans.
What was the fate of these hobbit-like humans? Morwood’s feeling is that they might have been around as late as only 12,000 years ago. His estimate is based on the fact that about that time the stone tools and also any evidence of the tiny elephants disappear from the fossil record. A possible cause for the demise of the small creatures is a deadly volcanic eruption, certainly not unheard of in that active region of the world. Modern humans came to the Indonesian islands and were living on them in a timeframe overlapping the time of the tiny people. Eventually, the moderns also arrived on Flores. Did they meet the little people? It’s intriguing that the islanders of today tell stories of little people, the stories passed down through the generations.
This brings up something our editor, Brian Trumbore, might explore on his next trip to Ireland. Irish lore is rich with tales of little people. Were/are those leprechauns real?
Allen F. Bortrum
|