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posted by mrpg on Wednesday August 08 2018, @03:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the human−− dept.

Submitted via IRC for takyon

Living on an island can have strange effects. On Cyprus, hippos dwindled to the size of sea lions. On Flores in Indonesia, extinct elephants weighed no more than a large hog, but rats grew as big as cats. All are examples of the so-called island effect, which holds that when food and predators are scarce, big animals shrink and little ones grow. But no one was sure whether the same rule explains the most famous example of dwarfing on Flores, the odd extinct hominin called the hobbit, which lived 60,000 to 100,000 years ago and stood about a meter tall.

Now, genetic evidence from modern pygmies on Flores—who are unrelated to the hobbit—confirms that humans, too, are subject to so-called island dwarfing. An international team reports this week in Science that Flores pygmies differ from their closest relatives on New Guinea and in East Asia in carrying more gene variants that promote short stature. The genetic differences testify to recent evolution—the island rule at work. And they imply that the same force gave the hobbit its short stature, the authors say.

Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/island-living-can-shrink-humans


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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday August 08 2018, @05:32PM (3 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday August 08 2018, @05:32PM (#718872) Journal

    I was going to say Polynesians...though I was really thinking only of Hawaiians. (And actually, just the Royal line, as those are the only ones I've seen pictures of.)

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  • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday August 09 2018, @07:31AM (2 children)

    by Reziac (2489) on Thursday August 09 2018, @07:31AM (#719284) Homepage

    A number of NFL players are Polynesian (Samoan, Tongan, etc). BIG suckers. Can only think of one who wasn't the size of a moose.

    I'm thinkin' there's another factor at work, maybe you get pygmies when protein and fat sources are sub-par. Might be a better correlation with absence-of-pigs than with islands.

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    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday August 09 2018, @05:40PM (1 child)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 09 2018, @05:40PM (#719494) Journal

      Sorry, that doesn't work. Pygmy elephants didn't shrink in size because of "not enough meat", and historically the Polynesians were short on meat protein. It's probably more correlated with them spending a lot of time in the ocean at below body temperature. That would also explain the thicker layer of subcutaneous fat that they tend to have.

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      • (Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday August 09 2018, @06:47PM

        by Reziac (2489) on Thursday August 09 2018, @06:47PM (#719536) Homepage

        Doesn't explain the small size of many aquatic animals, tho...

        Fact is there's probably a ton of factors and teasing out which ones applied at some point in the past ... well, at best we wind up with spotty generalizations, which may all be incorrect, or only apply when unknown factor X is present, etc.

        But for big herbivores like hippos and elephants -- probably it's just selection (for lower food requirements, given these large herbivores tend to eat themselves out of house and home) accelerated by inbreeding. Small size tends to be recessive, so once a closed gene pool has the small trait set, you generally don't get larger again (barring a new mutation).

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