Hobbit-Man and Downs Syndrome

Foiled Again

Paleontology has a rich history of frauds and mistakes.  These are most often due to an overriding compulsion to "prove" evolutionism to be true.  The latest is the case of an alleged "proto-human being" who was supposed to be the remains of a Hobbit-like creature, discovered in 2004 on the island Flores in Indonesia.  Big media releases accompanied the startling find.

But now?  Well . . . now it turns our that the undersized proto-human was actually a human with Downs syndrome.  Rats.  There goes the PhD, the book, the movie, tenure, and perpetual celebrity rock stardom.  This, from TheBlaze:

Nearly a decade ago, researchers discovered the remains of what was thought to be a new human species and dubbed the “Hobbit” human for its short stature and small skull.  While the 2004 discovery on the Indonesian island Flores was hailed as “the most important find in human evolution for 100 years” at the time, more recent analysis debunks that Homo florensiensis was a distinct human species. A team of international researchers now think the 15,000-year-old bones represent someone who had Down syndrome.

“The skeletal sample from Liang Bua cave contains fragmentary remains of several individuals,” Robert Eckhardt, a developmental genetics and evolution professor at Pennsylvania State University, said in a statement. “[This skeleton specifically] has the only skull and thighbones in the entire sample.”  

The bones of the skeleton, which was named LB1, only put the person at 3.5 feet tall. That and measurements of its skull were initially what led scientists to consider it a possible new species. But Eckhardt now say that the skull “falls in the range predicted for a modern human with Down syndrome from the same geographic region.” The thigh bone, which was used to estimate the person’s height, also would be shorter in a person with Down syndrome, the researchers pointed out.  In this case, Eckhardt said that “unusual does not equal unique.”

“The originally reported traits are not so rare as to have required the invention of a new hominin species,” he added.  As opposed to the skeleton representing a “Hobbit”-like species, Ekhardt said they found the “less strained explanation is a developmental disorder.”  The findings were published this week in two papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Here is a brief sample of other "discoveries" of alleged transitioning apes-to-humans:

Neanderthal Man: 

In spite of all the imaginative pictures of Neanderthal man as a brutish cave dweller that have appeared in the Time-Life books, the evidence shows that these were truly human beings, displaying moral and social sensibilities and perhaps living in impoverished conditions, widely afflicted with rickets and osteomalacia: they may also have been given to promiscuity, resulting in widespread syphilis.  [Ian T. Taylor, In the Minds of men: Darwin and the New World Order (Toronto: TFE Publishing, 1984), p. 215]

Cro-Magnon Man (Caveman):

This is an exciting period for archaeohistory as many of the old preconceived notions of cavemen are giving way to a totally new picture in which it is recognized that these early ancestors were intelligent being living in communities and in buildings, who quite possibly only used the caves for ritualistic purposes.  (Ibid.. p. 221.)

Piltdown Man: a hoax.

In 1953 Joseph Weiner and Kenneth Oakley conducted a recently developed flourine test on the original Piltdown material and discovered the bones were in fact relatively recent.  The suspected hoax was finally exposed.  There was something of a national scandal, and the integrity of the trustees of the British Museum was questioned.  Eventually it all settled down to become an embarrassing moment in the history of science. [Ibid., p. 229]

These days the battery of scientific tests available mean that speculative claims can be more rigorously tested and rejected.  Hoaxes, or imaginative speculations would never last the distance that Piltdown Man did.  Such has been the case for the more recent "Hobbit-man".