How a hobbit is rewriting the history of the human race

The Guardian (UK) ^ | Sunday, February 21, 2010 | Robin McKie

[SunkenCiv]

The bones of a race of tiny primitive people, who used stone tools to hunt pony-sized elephants and battle huge Komodo dragons, were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004... These remains came from a species that turned out to be only three feet tall and had the brain the size of an orange. Yet it used quite sophisticated stone tools. And that was a real puzzle. How on earth could such individuals have made complex implements and survived for aeons on this remote part of the Malay archipelago?

Some simply dismissed the bones as the remains of deformed modern humans with diseases that had caused them to shrink: to them, they were just pathological oddities, it was alleged. Most researchers disagreed, however. The hobbits were the descendants of a race of far larger, ancient humans who had thrived around a million years ago. These people, known as Homo erectus, had become stranded on the island and then had shrunk in an evolutionary response to the island's limited resources...

According to a growing number of scientists, Homo floresiensis is probably a direct descendant of some of the first apemen to evolve on the African savannah three million years ago. These primitive hominids somehow travelled half a world from their probable birthplace in the Rift Valley to make their homes among the orangutans, giant turtles and rare birds of Indonesia before eventually reaching Flores... analysis of Lucy's skeleton shows it has great similarities with the bones of H. floresiensis, although her species died out millions of years ago while the hobbits hung on in Flores until about 17,000 years ago.

[SunkenCiv]

A painting of what researchers believe Homo floresiensis may have looked like. Illustration: Peter Schouten

[SunkenCiv]

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[count-your-change]

“These people, known as Homo erectus, had become stranded on the island and then had shrunk in an evolutionary response to the island's limited resources... “

Another just so story.

Then how to explain pygmies and the tallest people of Africa?

[SuziQ]

Doesn’t anything like Bilbo or Frodo to me!

[Slyfox]

[SunkenCiv]

It means that genes pool up in isolation (geographical or social), and also means that the rules are the same for all.

[Inyo-Mono]

Good article thanks for posting!

[Inyo-Mono]

The possibility that a very primitive member of the genus Homo left Africa, roughly two million years ago, and that a descendant population persisted until only several thousand years ago, is one of the more provocative hypotheses to have emerged in anthropology during the past few years," David Strait of the University of Albany told Scientific American recently. This view is backed by Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London. "We are still grappling with what this discovery has done for our thinking and our conventional scenarios."

So maybe all those stories of little hairy people from remote areas all over the World may not be so far fetched after all.

[maro]

The family of man is bigger than we think, and sapiens was not the only intelligent species.

[Bernard Marx]

These primitive hominids somehow travelled half a world from their probable birthplace in the Rift Valley to make their homes among the orangutans, giant turtles and rare birds of Indonesia before eventually reaching Flores

I'm not buying it. It's remotely possible but I've never accepted the "out of Africa" theory as the total answer to hominid evolution. I have a hunch someday evidence will be found for parallel evolution in Asia.

[BlueDragon]

Little foots?