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Ancient Tools May Shed Light On the Mysterious 'Hobbit' (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: The "hobbit" had neighbors. Back in 2004, researchers announced the discovery of this tiny, ancient human, which apparently hunted dwarf elephants with stone tools on the Indonesian island of Flores 18,000 years ago. Its discoverers called the 1-meter-tall creature Homo floresiensis, but skeptics wondered whether it was just a stunted modern human. In the years since, researchers have debunked many of the "sick hobbit" hypotheses. Yet scientists have continued to wonder where the species came from.
Now, an international team originally led by the hobbit discoverer reports stone tools, dated to 118,000 to 194,000 years ago, from another Indonesian island, Sulawesi, likely made by another archaic human—or possibly by other hobbits. "It shows that on another island we have evidence of a second archaic early human," says paleoanthropologist Russell Ciochon of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who was not involved with the work. The discovery makes the original hobbit claim appear more plausible, he says, by suggesting that human ancestors may have island-hopped more often than had been thought.
Now, an international team originally led by the hobbit discoverer reports stone tools, dated to 118,000 to 194,000 years ago, from another Indonesian island, Sulawesi, likely made by another archaic human—or possibly by other hobbits. "It shows that on another island we have evidence of a second archaic early human," says paleoanthropologist Russell Ciochon of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who was not involved with the work. The discovery makes the original hobbit claim appear more plausible, he says, by suggesting that human ancestors may have island-hopped more often than had been thought.
usually a short story...
We were advanced enough to be island hopping 200k years ago? That fact was not mentioned in school ever.
Suborbital [spaceflight] is the special olympics of spaceflight. - Rei
We have the pygmy tribes in which the average male is 1.5m tall and upward human extremes of 2.3m, but the variation in size really only becomes extraordinarily diverse at the Super Family level.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It's "halfling", not "hobbit". Wouldn't want to rouse sleeping drag... er... lawyers.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Some tools, based on their function, would indicate the hand size of the user and the hand size should be proportional to the overall body size.
There are a lot of islands in that area, many still sparsely populated by "regular" humans. It's possible some of these "hobbits" are still around.
It would be one of the greatest scientific discoveries if say living homo erectus were found. It's kind of like finding live bigfoot, but on the small.
Table-ized A.I.
Joey: Ross, if homo floresiensis actually were HOMO floresiensis, is that why they're extinct?
Ross: Joey, homo floresiensis are people!
Joey: Hey, I'm not judging!
There's a story of large group of transcendental meditation people spending 6 weeks in DC which caused a real life decrease in crime in 1993.
http://www.istpp.org/crime_pre...
Science, in general, seems to enjoy chasing its own tail, so for every story suggesting that thought shapes reality, for every Einstein quote 'reality is an illusion', and for every tidbit of evidence suggesting there's a holographic nature to reality....
I'm of the belief the recent "Hobbit" and Halfling oriented movies with Lord Of the Rings had a butterfly effect in reality that manifested in a real life skeleton...
And if you're familiar with backdating.
The skeleton's carbon dating was backdated 'in the holographic reality' to a time where those who enjoy chasing their tail can continue doing so.
They found what appears to be fossilized fragments of a single density 8 inch floppy disk containing previously unknown, unversioned copies of BDS-C and ZMAC.