Mystery 'hobbits' not humans like us

[MetalDog]

Diminutive humans that died out on an Indonesian island some 15,000 years ago were not Homo sapiens but a different species, according to a study published Monday that dives into a fierce anthropological debate.

Fossils of Homo floresiensis -- dubbed "the hobbits" due to their tiny stature -- were discovered on the island of Flores in 2003.

Controversy has raged ever since as to whether they are an unknown branch of early humans or specimens of modern man deformed by disease.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/mystery-hobbits-not-humans-us-study-225945346.html

[LongBlade]

Well, duh. They could have read some J.R.R. Tolkien and learned that much.

[Steelgrave]

We know at least one of them made it to New York and joined the Guard.....   O0

[bbmike]

...Controversy has raged ever since as to whether they are an unknown branch of early humans or specimens of modern man deformed by disease.

The forgot to include the obvious!

[Gusington]

I am alive.

[Sir Slash]

They couldn't grow any larger. They didn't have any BACON to eat.

[JasonPratt]

Sooooo... this conclusion, that they weren't human like us, is based on phrenology, hm?  :D

Tasteless Holocaust joke aside: I didn't read anything in the article suggesting a difference greater than distinct breeds of dogs. But species classification can get awfully loose. Nor is it clear that the skull thickness variants are adaptive, and no matter how loose species classification can be, hanging a whole species differential on a non-adaptive characteristic would be... well... not neo-Darwinian gradualism, whatever else it might be.

And that's assuming a wide enough selection of skulls were tested for consistent variant plate thicknesses within their proposed set, compared to worldwide homo sapien standards, that conclusions might be inferred about stable characteristics of a breeding population. My impression from the article is that only one skull was tested this way. (And I'm assuming in favor of the paper that the platal thickness standards being compared to, are worldwide and not regionally local or something like that. But I've learned from past experience not to rule out a hidden problem along this line, with later research showing a phenotype in South America or wherever, perhaps even prevalent during a certain historical period, being practically identical after all.)

What the test did, I think, show with some weight, is that proposed explanations of disease lack important correlative evidence that ought to be there, abductively weighing against that hypothesis. Maybe against malnutrion hypotheses, too? I can't tell from only the Yahoo summary report.