Publication Date:
2007-09-22
Description:
Whether the Late Pleistocene hominin fossils from Flores, Indonesia, represent a new species, Homo floresiensis, or pathological modern humans has been debated. Analysis of three wrist bones from the holotype specimen (LB1) shows that it retains wrist morphology that is primitive for the African ape-human clade. In contrast, Neandertals and modern humans share derived wrist morphology that forms during embryogenesis, which diminishes the probability that pathology could result in the normal primitive state. This evidence indicates that LB1 is not a modern human with an undiagnosed pathology or growth defect; rather, it represents a species descended from a hominin ancestor that branched off before the origin of the clade that includes modern humans, Neandertals, and their last common ancestor.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Tocheri, Matthew W -- Orr, Caley M -- Larson, Susan G -- Sutikna, Thomas -- Jatmiko -- Saptomo, E Wahyu -- Due, Rokus Awe -- Djubiantono, Tony -- Morwood, Michael J -- Jungers, William L -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2007 Sep 21;317(5845):1743-5.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Human Origins Program, Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC 20013, USA. tocherim@si.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17885135" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
*Biological Evolution
;
Carpal Bones/anatomy & histology
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*Fossils
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Hominidae/*anatomy & histology/classification
;
Humans
;
Indonesia
;
Wrist/*anatomy & histology
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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