# Little hominid may have been failed experiment



## littlemissattitude (Jul 3, 2004)

Found this on CNN:

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A tiny pre-human who lived more than 900,000 years ago in what is now Kenya may have been a "short experiment" in evolution that never quite made it, scientists said on Thursday.

The little skull clearly belongs to an adult and was found last summer at a site where much larger hominids classified as Homo erectus lived, said Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution and colleagues.

He or she died on a volcanic ridge, perhaps mauled by a lion or other carnivore, Potts said.

It is the smallest adult fossil found dating back to the time of Homo erectus, the species of pre-human that dominated between 500,000 and 1.7 million years ago, Potts' team writes in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
		
Click to expand...

See the entire article at: http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/07/02/science.humans.reut/index.html

I'll be interested to see the Science article, as this report is a little short on detail.  I'd especially like to have a bit more of a characterization of size than simply "tiny".  But, it sounds like another piece of evidence that pre-human species were abundant rather than only around one or two at a time. *


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## Brian G Turner (Jul 3, 2004)

First throught that comes to mind is that the skull could be from a homo erectus suffering from a rare genetic condition. I would actually class that as a more important hypothesis.

 But then again, I would, wouldn't I?


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## Brian G Turner (Jul 3, 2004)

Found a link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3857113.stm

  The fossilised skull of a hominid that lived 930,000 years ago has been found in Kenya, Science magazine reports.   The creature may have belonged to the species Homo erectus, says the team which found it, even though its skull is smaller than previously seen.   

  But the fossil has fuelled a debate over how we group these ancient humans. 

  One camp claims H. erectus came in many shapes and sizes, while the other says it contains several species - which are incorrectly lumped together. 

   Both camps think the new find supports their argument. The diminutive skull could either demonstrate how variable H. erectus was - or it could belong to an entirely different species, forcing scientists to rethink hominid classification.


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## littlemissattitude (Jul 3, 2004)

Good article, Brian. Thanks for the link. Although unless I missed something when I was reading it, it still doesn't really say how much smaller than the "average" _H. erectus_ it is. Now, I suppose that if all they have is the skull, it might be hard to tell overall, but there are formulas for approximating height and weight based on averages from other specimens.

You definitely have your lumpers and and your splitters, when it comes to paleoanthropology especially. I don't know, by the time we get to _H. erectus_, I'm a bit uncomfortable with the idea of a huge amount of sexual dimorphism, so I kind of tend to hope that it is either a kind of variation of another kind or another species. Your suggestion that it was some kind of genetic anomaly is another possibility.

Anyway, if this is very much smaller, to speculate that it is a female and a case of sexual dimorphism, in which the female is very much smaller than the male, it seems like it would have to be argued that all previous specimens of _H. erectus_ found were male.  Which is, I suppose, possible, but doesn't seem that likely to me.


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## littlemissattitude (Jul 14, 2004)

Finally, a little more detail about the size of this find, from the New Scientist:



> But the skull itself is around 30% smaller, which is likely to have corresponded to a similar difference in body size. The specimen helps fill a gap in the fossil record as very few _Homo erectus_ specimens of this age have been found in Africa so far.


That seems to be a fairly large difference.


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## Monty Scott (Nov 2, 2005)

The little lady probably suffered from Progeria.


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