Archive for October, 2004

Homo Floresiensis has been discovered | Matt Webb
http://interconnected.org/home/2004/10/27/homo_floresiensi_has
“Oh yes, other thing about H. floresiensis, the exciting bit: Even more intriguing is the fact that Flores’ inhabitants have incredibly detailed legends about the existence of little people on the island they call Ebu Gogo. The islanders describe Ebu Gogo as being about one metre tall, hairy and prone to ‘murmuring’ to each other in some form of language. They were also able to repeat what islanders said to them in a parrot-like fashion. ‘There have always been myths about small people – Ireland has its leprechauns and Australia has the Yowies. I suppose there’s some feeling that this is an oral history going back to the survival of these small people into recent times,’ said co-discoverer Peter Brown, an associate professor of archaeology at New England. […] The myths say Ebu Gogo were alive when Dutch explorers arrived a few hundred years ago and the very last legend featuring the mythical creatures dates to 100 years ago. But Henry Gee, senior editor at Nature magazine, goes further. He speculates that species like H.floresiensis might still exist, somewhere in the unexplored tropical forest of Indonesia.'”

From 18,000 years ago… | Tim Radford
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/sciences/story/0,12243,1337735,00.html
“The new creature, officially titled Homo floresiensis but nicknamed ‘the hobbit’ by some researchers, upsets the orthodox view of human evolution. It means that researchers will now start looking for unexpected human remains in other isolated regions of the world. It also confirms the belief that modern humans – the only survivors of the genus Homo – are an evolutionary exception. For most of the seven million years of the human story, there were a number of co-existing species of humans. ‘We now have the remains of at least seven hobbit-sized individuals at the cave site, so the 18,000-year-old skeleton cannot be some kind of freak that we just happened to stumble across first,’ said Bert Roberts, of the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, one of the authors. “

New Species Revealed: Tiny Cousins of Humans | Nicholas Wade
http://tinyurl.com/6rklw
“Once upon a time, but not so long ago, on a tropical island midway between Asia and Australia, there lived a race of little people, whose adults stood just three and a half feet high. Despite their stature, they were mighty hunters. They made stone tools with which they speared giant rats, clubbed sleeping dragons and hunted the packs of pygmy elephants that roamed their lost world.”

Human Gene Total Falls Below 25,000 | Nicholas Wade
http://tinyurl.com/5jkcq
“Coincidentally, French researchers are reporting in the same issue of Nature that they have decoded the genome of a biologically important fish, the spotted green pufferfish. They say it has 20,000 to 25,000 genes, the identical range now estimated for humans. How can it be that humans, seen by some as the apotheosis of creation, have the same numb er of genes? The question is the more pressing because genes are subject to a rigorous ‘use it or lose it’ rule. Those not vital to an organism are quickly rendered useless by mutations. Also, the human brain seems particularly dependent on genetic complexity, because about half of all human genes are active in brain tissue.”

How do you persist when your molecules don’t? | John McCrone
http://www.sci-con.org/articles/20040601.html
“Do you know the half-life of a microtubule, the protein filaments that form the internal scaffolding a cell? Just ten minutes. That’s an average of ten minutes between assembly and destruction. Now the brain is supposed to be some sort of computer. It is an intricate network of some 1,000 trillion synaptic connections, each of these synapses having been lovingly crafted by experience to have a particular shape, a particular neurochemistry. It is of course the information represented at these junctions that makes us who we are. But how the heck do these synapses retain a stable identity when the chemistry of cells is almost on the boil, with large molecules falling apart nearly as soon as they are made?”

The Hidden Genetic Program of Complex Organisms | John S. Mattick
http://tinyurl.com/6et5s
PDF File 518K