The New York Times, June 20, 2016
A reader asks: Scientists seem to be calling members of a 3-foot-tall species whose fossils were recently found in Indonesia “hobbits” conversationally. When did this term come into existence? Before or after Tolkien? And how might the “real” hobbits have been similar to or different from the ones Tolkien created?
Carl Zimmer, who writes the Matter column for The Times’s Science section, considers the question.
Greetings from Austin!
I’m broiling under the Texan sun on a visit to the Society for the Study of Evolution’s annual meeting. Last night I gave the Stephen Jay Gould Prize lecture, about our changing picture of human evolution. I talked about the articles I’ve written about in recent newsletters, on exciting new fossils and insights from DNA. In the 1970s, Gould pushed his readers to appreciate human evolution as a bush, rather than a simplistic march of progress. With lots of new fossils found since then, the human evolutionary trees is even more ramified. And all the interbreeding revealed in ancient DNA over the past 100,000 years between humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other mysterious hominins has complicated our family tree even more. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, June 17, 2016”
The New York Times, June 16, 2016
The world’s crops face a vast army of enemies, from fungi to bacteria to parasitic animals. Farmers have deployed pesticides to protect their plants, but diseases continue to ruin a sizable portion of our food supply.
Some scientists are now investigating another potential defense, one already lurking beneath our feet. The complex microbial world in the soil may protect plants much like our immune system protects our bodies.
Scientists have known about so-called “suppressive soils” for decades. In 1931, a Canadian scientist named A. W. Henry discovered the spores of the common root rot, a fungus that strikes wheat crops, in a range of soil samples. But try as he might, he could almost never get the spores to grow.
Continue reading “Scientists Hope to Cultivate an Immune System for Crops”
Greetings–
Homo floresiensis is one of my favorite hominins. (What’s yours?) Back in 2004, scientists announced they had found a tiny human-like species on an Indonesian island. I fell into a blogging frenzy that lasted over two years: Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, June 10, 2016”
The New York Times, June 8, 2016
Scientists digging in the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores years ago found a tiny humanlike skull, then a pelvis, jaw and other bones, all between 60,000 and 100,000 years old.
The fossils, the scientists concluded, belonged to individuals who stood just three feet tall — an unknown species, related to modern humans, that they called Homo floresiensis or, more casually, the hobbits.
On Wednesday, researchers reported that they had discovered still older remains on the island, including teeth, a piece of a jaw and 149 stone tools dating back 700,000 years.
Continue reading “New Fossils Strengthen Case for ‘Hobbit’ Species”