Excellent points Metullus,
Let me see if I can address them without being able to quote or space paragraphs properly. 1. HF is not just another extinct homo. It's not akin to an extinct horse and unicorns. I mean, barring the highly improbable chance that we find them running around in some jungle corner now, they ARE another extinct homo.
Indeed, another extinct
homo along with
habilis/rudolfensis,
erectus,
ergaster, and
heidelbergensis to name a few off the top of my head. What does interest me is the idea that HF is descended from
erectus or perhaps
ergaster. My point is that one cannot, I think, extrapolate the existance of BF from the fact that we have discovered yet another extinct member of the family, any moreso than the discovery of another extinct relative of the horse increases the probabaility of unicorns existing. Maybe a better analogy is the saurapod/jungle dinosaur one I used in my last post.
However, before we found HF paleoanthropologists would debate endlessly (and still do) about where HS Neanderthalis fits in with modern human lineage.
I think the consensus today is that Neanderthal was an evolutionary dead-end and not an ancestor to Modern Humans (DNA testing has had a lot to do with estblishing the current consensus.) Whatever the case, HF is not likely to have much of an impact on that argument.
We find HF and suddenly we're dealing with a member of the genus which is so drastically different in comparison to other roughly contemporary members and, on top of that, has survived within a fart of modern times.
Which facts make HF very interesting indeed, but do not, I think, bear much on the BF debate.
Do you really think a comparison with a new species of horse and unicorns is applicable? I'm simply trying to say that a recently extinct little guy makes the possibility of a recently extinct big guy also considerable. Whether they're actually around now is irrelevant to what I'm saying.
But there have been recently extinct large
homo species: look at Neanderthal, 35K - 40K YBP. Are there there others - it is entirely possible. What has this to do with a 1000lb, bipedal apeman in Norhern California?
3. Challenges to our current thinking presented by HF- A) Variability of our genus. B) Brain capacity vs intelligence. C) Human linear evolution. D) Out-of-Africa vs Multiregional Speciation.
The variability of species within our genus is not, I think, unsettling: we have significant variation within our own species, and drastic variation with a genus is not unknown.
I know that
in general brain size is an indication of the intellegence of a species, other data not being available, and that the relatively small brain size of HF might give us pause if we are to assume that HF was highly intelligent. I do not know if that assumption is reasonable, though. I will withhold judgement.
The discovery of HF does not seem to have any impact upon either what we know or believe about human evolution or the various speciation models. Indeed, as HF appears to be an offshoot of
h. erectus it would fit into virtually all of the models.
