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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.
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
Size is an adaptation to the amount of food available to each individual of a population.
It is also a good way to shed heat in the humid tropics, where sweating doesn't work very well. The hominids currently populating SE Asia are generally relatively quite small too.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
Dogs have far far less variation than humans.
Humans have had a million years of evolution, and have even split off into many different species along the way (like these floresiensis guys). Dogs only have 30K. Relative to the differences found in the human race they are pretty much all clones of eachother.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Smallfoot.
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