September 20, 2007 2:49

New Information on Hobbits

Not Hobbits, really, but "hobbits," a race of diminutive humans whose bones were uncovered in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004. Their miniature stature was explained by a phenomenon known as "island dwarfing," in which large mammals tend to get smaller when they live on isolated islands (modern examples include water buffalo and elephants—so that wasn't particularly exciting.

But the find was sensational, because while the remains were only about 13,000 years old, they had characteristics of Homo erectus—a distant human ancestor that was thought to have disappeared at least half a million years ago. Finding a long-extinct species that survived almost until moder times (and who knows if these bones were from the last survivors?) would completely overturn existing ideas about human evolution.

I wrote about the discovery in TIME when it first happened. But since then, a controversy has raged between those who support the original theory about what the hobbits were, and those who think they were really just ordinary homo sapiens who had some sort of deformities.

Now comes a report in Science that appears to strengthen the original theory: an international team of scientists, led by the Smithsonian Institution, has analyzed the wrist bones of the tiny creatures, and says that they look nothing like those of modern humans, or even of Neanderthals, but rather resemble the wristbones of African apes and our earliest human ancestors--earlier, even than Homo erectus.

It's an easy trap to fall into when looking at scientific evidence to want the more exciting, exotic interpretation to be true, and so I have to try and resist that impulse in myself. But...I kind of want this to be true, so I'll grasp at this particular straw until I'm proven wrong. For now, the idea that primitive human ancestors walked the Earth just yesterday (in the grand scheme of evolution), is still alive. I hope it stays that way.

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September 6, 2007 2:00

Why Honeybees are Vanishing

The mysterious phenomenon known as Bee Colony Collapse Disorder has been worrying scientists, beekeepers and growers for months now (I blogged on it last February). Without the domesticated bees that are trucked around the country to pollinate such crops as almonds, peaches, blueberries, cucumbers and squash (but not, fortunately, wheat or corn), supplies would plummet.

Theories about why huge numbers of hives have been abandoned, their inhabitants presumably dead, have included parasites and environmental toxins—but now Science magazine is weighing in with a suite of papers, based on genomic analysis, that points to a microbe called Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus. You can read about it in this special report. The authors of the papers are pretty convinced that the virus is a significant part of the problem, but probably not the only one. Parasites and pesticides almost certainly weakened the bees, allowing the virus to have maximum effect. Still, identifying the virus could be a big step toward reversing the big bee die-off.

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