Anthropologists are not often giddy with excitement, but the unearthing of the skeleton of a meter-tall female who hunted pygmy elephants and giant rats 18,000 years ago has them whooping with delight the finding of another piece of the puzzle of the origin of the species.
The finding on a remote eastern Indonesian island has stunned anthropologists like no other in recent memory and could rewrite the history of human evolution.
PHOTO: AFP/COURTESY OF ARTIST PETER SCHOUTEN/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC
Affectionately called Hobbit, Homo floresiensis was found on the floor of a limestone cave on the island of Flores by Australian scientists working with their Indonesian counterparts.
"This is one of the most astonishing discoveries I've seen in my lifetime," bubbled Tim Flannery, South Australia Museum director.
"To imagine that just 12,000 years ago you could have gone to the island of Flores and seen these tiny little creatures less than 1 meter high and weighing 16 kilograms living there is just amazing," he said.
The discover smashes the long-cherished scientific belief that our species, Homo sapiens, systematically crowded out other upright-walking human cousins beginning 160,000 years ago and that we've had Earth to ourselves for tens of thousands of years.
Instead, it suggests recent evolution was more complex than previously thought. And it demonstrates that Africa, the acknowledged cradle of humanity, does not hold all the answers to persistent questions of how -- and where -- we came to be.
Scientists called the dwarf skeleton "the most extreme" figure to be included in the extended human family. Certainly, she is the shortest.
She is the best example of a trove of fragmented bones that account for as many as seven of these primitive individuals that lived on Flores. The mostly intact female skeleton was found in September last year. Details of the discovery appear in yesterday's issue of the journal Nature.
The specimens' ages range from 95,000 to 12,000 years old, meaning they lived until the threshold of recorded human history and perhaps crossed paths with the ancestors of today's islanders.
"The find is startling," said Robert Foley of Cambridge University. "It's breathtaking to think that another species of hominin existed so recently."
What puzzles scientists is that Homo floresiensis was able to do so much with so little brain power.
Mike Morwood, the University of New England anthropology professor who co-led the Flores team, reckoned that with a brain of just 380cm3 the hairy little people of Flores "would have been flat out chewing grass and nuts."
But they were accomplishing much more than that. Morwood believes the proto humans sailed to the island. He points to the evidence that they made primitive tools, hunted pygmy elephants called stegodons and cooked their meat and that of giant rats.
"Language is a given," Morwood said, reasoning that hunting would require at least a primitive form of communication because their elephant prey were up to 500kg and more than a match for one hunter.
He sees Flores as something of a "lost world" isolated from evolutionary currents. It's a view that leads others to suggest that other islands in Indonesia might harvest other primitive human species.
"My suspicion is that there will be many more examples of pygmy humans," Flannery said.
Homo floresiensis is the smallest human ever found. And, since the discovery of Neanderthal remains in Europe 200 years ago, Homo floresiensis is the first new species.
We don't know yet what happened to the little people of Flores but one possibility is that they were wiped out during a volcanic eruption. Flannery believes the likely answer is that the pygmy people were despatched by a later line of Homo erectus, the Homo sapiens.
A coalition of civil rights groups on Tuesday asked a New York State judge to order one of its largest suburban counties to stop its deployment of nearly 600 license plate readers, calling it a warrantless and “indiscriminate surveillance system” that violates the state constitution. The class action lawsuit also alleged that Westchester County never got proper authorization to launch the program, which has amassed a database of 1.6 billion plate scans that has been shared with more than 50 outside law enforcement agencies. The complaint said the network “records the long-term travel patterns, daily habits, and intimate information of millions of
Pope Leo XIV on Wednesday blessed a giant new tower at Barcelona’s famed Sagrada Familia Basilica after celebrating mass inside what is now the world’s tallest church. A fireworks and light show illuminated the exterior of the temple at the end of the ceremony, bathing the unfinished basilica in shifting colours that highlighted its towering spires. A choir of 600 singers performed at the service which lasted around 90 minutes and was attended by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez as well as King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia. The stained-glass windows in various colours shone brightly in between the tree-like
Scientists have discovered communities of marine life — including jellyfish, tubeworms and brittle stars — thriving on a whale graveyard. The graveyards form when whale carcasses fall to the sea floor, becoming a sustaining snack for nearby critters. This one, which is up to 7km below the surface of the southeastern Indian Ocean, spans the largest area, and is so far the deepest found. A whale’s sheer size and the unique chemistry of its bones are the keys to forming these unique underwater neighborhoods, said Song Xikun (宋希坤), a biologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering
Voters in Switzerland yesterday cast their ballots on an initiative championed by the top right-wing party to cap the Alpine country’s population at 10 million. As of press time last night, early results showed that Swiss voters were leaning against it. The populist Swiss People’s Party, which has the most seats in parliament, has stirred up and fostered anti-migration sentiment over the years, notably about an influx of workers from the neighboring EU. Critics called the bid a self-inflicted wound, saying the boom in migration over the past generation has brought foreign labor and skills to sectors such as healthcare, finance, pharmaceuticals
RSS