going to take a bit of a break away from posting trip pictures, although there's really only yellowstone left, but there's a shitload of them.
i've work 36 hrs in the last 3 days, and no i'm no medical person, so i still have more hrs left in the week to work.
but anyway. a few people sent me this link. little pygmies on the island of Flores in Indonesia. if you know anything about Indonesia, its that island that kinda looks like the Greek lambda. in the past they have found stone tools over there that dated to about 700,000 years ago, but no human remains were associated with them. these finds are, however, only about 18,000 years old, which is still pretty significant, although its well within the range of modern humans, yet in the midst of the pleistocene (ice age).
i'm willing to bet that this find with re-invigor the old dispute about the demise of the large pleistocene fauna. did man kill them off, or was it just climatic changes that did it in. the reason why i believe this is simple. there have been other islands around the world (in northern siberia, and islands off of California) that contained mammoths who turned pygmy after water levels rose, and apparently having a larger population seemed to be the better path for survival than larger individuals, so the general populace on the islands shrank.
but here is the first time i believe the phenomena is associated with human activities. and during the co-habitation, the similar effect was had on the human inhabitants of the newly formed island. so scientists are forced to figure out if the stresses that forced these smaller species are somehow related, if less amounts of similarly used resources by both mammoths and humans spurred the shift to smaller stature, or if whatever allowed a shift to smaller mammoths then, in hand, forced smaller people. i'm not quite sure how that last proposition would work, but i guess a final solution would be to somehow figure out if this was all just an effect of inbreeding. the smaller the population and its diversity, the more likely crazy shit is to happen.
i've work 36 hrs in the last 3 days, and no i'm no medical person, so i still have more hrs left in the week to work.
but anyway. a few people sent me this link. little pygmies on the island of Flores in Indonesia. if you know anything about Indonesia, its that island that kinda looks like the Greek lambda. in the past they have found stone tools over there that dated to about 700,000 years ago, but no human remains were associated with them. these finds are, however, only about 18,000 years old, which is still pretty significant, although its well within the range of modern humans, yet in the midst of the pleistocene (ice age).
i'm willing to bet that this find with re-invigor the old dispute about the demise of the large pleistocene fauna. did man kill them off, or was it just climatic changes that did it in. the reason why i believe this is simple. there have been other islands around the world (in northern siberia, and islands off of California) that contained mammoths who turned pygmy after water levels rose, and apparently having a larger population seemed to be the better path for survival than larger individuals, so the general populace on the islands shrank.
but here is the first time i believe the phenomena is associated with human activities. and during the co-habitation, the similar effect was had on the human inhabitants of the newly formed island. so scientists are forced to figure out if the stresses that forced these smaller species are somehow related, if less amounts of similarly used resources by both mammoths and humans spurred the shift to smaller stature, or if whatever allowed a shift to smaller mammoths then, in hand, forced smaller people. i'm not quite sure how that last proposition would work, but i guess a final solution would be to somehow figure out if this was all just an effect of inbreeding. the smaller the population and its diversity, the more likely crazy shit is to happen.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home