Forensic expert reconstructs hobbit's face

Adam Khor

Wibbs wrote: »

Interesting StS. Maybe. Though the fact they selectively hunted birds for what appears to be their feathers and birds are a lot harder to catch than rabbits and the like, I'm not so sure. Their calorie needs, being higher than our own may plug into the bunny theory more, rather than an inability to catch such prey. You'd need an awful lot of rabbits to equate to the calorie result of say a buffalo.

Wouldn´t that be bison or auroch in this case?

Interesting article, StS, I was going to post it myself but u beat me to it :pac:

Squeaky the Squirrel

Return of the Neanderthals

In 2010, after scouring Neanderthal bones found in a Croatian cave for bits of viable genetic material, scientists released the first draft of our ancient cousin's genome. It rocked the field of anthropology for revealing, among other things, that some of these stocky, big-headed hominids had interbred with the ancestors of modern humans.

Not just the dogs and wolves at it. Prolly old news here.


Immortal Line of Cloned Mice Created

"Our results show that repeated iterative recloning is possible and suggest that, with adequately efficient techniques, it may be possible to reclone animals indefinitely,"

Squeaky the Squirrel

The Neanderthals May Have Died Out Because of...good eyesight.

The research team explored the idea that the ancestor of Neanderthals left Africa and had to adapt to the longer, darker nights and murkier days of Europe. The result was that Neanderthals evolved larger eyes and a much larger visual processing area at the back of their brains.

The humans that stayed in Africa, on the other hand, continued to enjoy bright and beautiful days and so had no need for such an adaption. Instead, these people, our ancestors, evolved their frontal lobes, associated with higher level thinking, before they spread across the globe.

Wibbs

it's an interesting idea alright. They certainly had much more grey matter at the back for processing vision and had the largest eyes of any human. The latitude notion even fits with moderns as today Europeans have the largest eyes on average. I don't think our visual cortex is any bigger though. In the Neandertal case I'd add that maybe they had such big eyes etc because they were more likely to be ambush hunting in forest, or even (personal notion alert) they were often hunting at dawn/dusk as a strategy. That might add another stress on them on top of our arrival if the forests were turning to grasslands where more long range hunting was then in play. Something they weren't suited to, but we were. That would also explain why "classic" Neandertals didn't seem to have throwing spears, though their ancestors homo heidelbergensis had. Maybe if we had shown up and it was heidelbergensis we encountered things may have turned out differently?

The only odd thing re their eyes is that they've been found in quite southern latitudes in the middle east and they kept these big eyes. In Israel we lived around each other in the same areas, cheek by jowl. That's where the genetics seem to show we got jiggy with each other*. Maybe this backs my mad notion that their big eyes were for dawn/dusk hunting? It might explain also why we could hang out together as we were using slightly different hunting strategies so didn't see each other as competitors.




*later in Europe it seems we didn't. However I suspect we did and maybe that line and the evidence for it died out in people of today. My name for it is the Saxon explanation. We know Anglo Saxons invaded Britain in big numbers in historical times. They certainly married into the locals, yet today a remarkably tiny amount of English people have Saxon DNA and it's all on the male side, no female lines survived. Now that's an entire people pretty much "lost" in just over a 1000 years. Over 30/40/50,000? That's a big genetic hole to fall into. Maybe if you sequenced an early modern European they'd show those Euro Neandertal/modern line(s). EG Otzi the Iceman has much more Neandertal DNA than we do today, simply because he was closer to the event, even if it was "only" 5000 years closer than us. Go back 20,000 years and I'll bet the farm the lines are going to be stronger again. Well I won the bet that oul Otzi would have more Neandertal so hopefully I'm on a roll.