[Marxism] Bones of hobbit-size species are found on Indonesian island

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Marxmailers may recall that recently I speculated here that the _Lord of the
Rings_ may have been some kind of "memory" of a time when there were more
than one hominid species alive at the same time.

Maybe I had an intuition about this find

:>)

Charles "Mary Leakey" Brown

^^^^^^^


Tiny humans are big discovery

Bones of hobbit-size species are found on Indonesian island October 28, 2004





FREE PRESS NEWS SERVICES





WASHINGTON -- Once upon a time, but not so long ago, on a tropical island
midway between Asia and Australia, there lived a race of little people,
whose adults stood 3 feet high. Despite their stature, they were mighty
hunters. They made stone tools to spear giant rats, clubbed sleeping dragons
and hunted the packs of pygmy elephants that roamed their lost world.



Strangest of all, this is no fable. Skeletons of these miniature people have
been excavated from a cave on Flores, an island 370 miles east of Bali,
Indonesia, by a team of Australian and Indonesian archaeologists. Reporting
their find in today's issue of Nature, they assign the people to a new human
species, Homo floresiensis.



The new finding is "among the most outstanding discoveries in
paleoanthropology for half a century," said two anthropologists not
associated with the study, Marta Mirazon Lahr and Robert Foley of the
University of Cambridge, in a commentary in the same issue.



The little Floresians were not a pygmy form of modern humans. They were a
downsized version of Homo erectus, the eastern cousin of the Neanderthals of
Europe, who disappeared 33,000 years ago. The discovery means that archaic
humans, who left Africa 1.5 million years earlier than modern people,
survived longer than previously thought.



The island of Flores is very isolated and, before modern times, was
inhabited only by a select group of animals that managed to reach it. These
then became subject to unusual evolutionary forces that propelled some
toward giantism and reduced others in size.



Scientists, who unearthed the skeletons ranging in age from 12,000 to 95,000
years old, nicknamed the best specimen Hobbit, after the short characters in
"The Lord of the Rings." She stood 3 feet tall with a brain the size of a
grapefruit. Yet Hobbit, who is about 18,000 years old, was smart enough to
use tools, boats and probably language, and likely hunted pygmy elephants.



The discovery made about 13 months ago means that about 50,000 years ago,
there were four species of humans roaming the Earth at the same time: Homo
sapiens (that's us), Homo erectus, Neanderthals and this new relative,
called Homo Floresiensis (also called Flores Man).



Hobbit and her contemporaries weighed about 55 pounds, had slightly longer
arms than modern humans, had thicker eyebrow ridges than we do, sharply
sloping foreheads and not much of a chin, said codiscoverer Richard (Bert)
Roberts of Australia's University of Wollongong. In the cave, scientists
found evidence of fire and sophisticated stone tools used for the communal
hunting of pygmy elephants, which are about the size of a water buffalo.



"The Hobbit was nobody's fool," Roberts said. "Given that Homo Floresiensis
is the smallest human species ever discovered, they outpunch every known
human intellectually pound for pound."



Scientists suspect Homo Floresiensis was wiped out in a massive volcanic
eruption 12,000 years ago that also killed off the island's pygmy elephants,
said codiscoverer Peter Brown of the University of New England.



In the past, scientists had known that other species of animals got smaller
on remote islands -- when resources are scarce, it's better to be smaller --
but couldn't show that that applied to humans.











































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