Pics of Homo floresiensis site

Posted 16 March 2010 by Richard B. Hoppe

The Sacramento Bee has good pictures of the Lianga Bua, Indonesia, site where Homo floriesiensis remains have been found. As you will notice, they're not just scraping the floor of a nice shallow cave with trowels. Hat tip to James Kidder.

7 Comments

MememicBottleneck · 16 March 2010

The caption on one of the photos state these are fossils. Is 18K years enough time to fossilize a skeleton?

Alex H · 16 March 2010

Bones don't have to be mineralized in order to be fossils. The La Brea Tar Pit fossils, for example, are simply bones that were trapped in the asphalt.

Gary Hurd · 17 March 2010

There are some things in those photos that worry me. First, I didn't see any blowers. Any excavation I ever directed with units deeper than 3 meters had at least fans. Our deeper units had top blowers.

Second, the spoil pile was due for some more support.

I know that this seems trivial to those of you that never saw sidewalls fail. But, I never lost any of my crew.

ET · 17 March 2010

Why so excavating so deeply after "only" 18,000 years?

raven · 17 March 2010

Sacbee: Her scientific name is Homo floresiensis, her nickname is "the hobbit," and the hunt is on to prove that she and the dozen other hobbits since discovered are not a quirk of nature but members of a distinct hominid species.

Wasn't aware that they had discovered a dozen other hobbits. The Sacbee article doesn't state how much of those other 12 were found. A few teeth or a few skulls? Anyone know?

RBH · 17 March 2010

raven said:
Sacbee: Her scientific name is Homo floresiensis, her nickname is "the hobbit," and the hunt is on to prove that she and the dozen other hobbits since discovered are not a quirk of nature but members of a distinct hominid species.
Wasn't aware that they had discovered a dozen other hobbits. The Sacbee article doesn't state how much of those other 12 were found. A few teeth or a few skulls? Anyone know?

According to Wikipedia, partial skeletons of nine individuals have been found. That's also what Scientific American says. Those numbers are as of 2005; I don't know if more have been found.

Gary Hurd · 17 March 2010

ET said: Why so excavating so deeply after "only" 18,000 years?

Rock shelters are basically "open faced caves." They develop soils at various rates depending on the orientation and mineral matrix. The greatest amount of sediment added to the floor is roof-fall. The next is wind blown fines, and biologically added material. Humans are the most prolific biological contributor to caves they have occupied. We H. saps dump tons of stuff all over the place.