Orion1
Mar29-05, 09:01 PM
Last year archaeologists digging in a cave on a tiny island in Indonesia made an incredible discovery. They found the skull and part of the skeleton of a woman who lived 18,000 years ago. She was only three feet tall -- about as big as your 3-year-old sister.
The 3-foot-tall adult female skeleton found in a cave is believed 18,000 years old. It 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.
And even though she was 30 years old when she died, her head was only the size of a grapefruit, and her brain was only one-third as big as ours. Even so, the archaeologists saw that the woman and her people had made spear points and sharp pieces of stone good enough to hunt animals as large as Komodo dragons. The archaeologists even found the remains of miniature elephants in the cave.
Scientists have named the extinct species Homo floresiensis.
And the really strange thing is that because the Hobbit's fossils are about 18,000 years old, scientists know that she lived -- at least for a while -- at the same time as modern humans. Until the Hobbit's discovery on Indonesia's Flores Island, scientists thought the last human ancestors were the Neanderthals, the Ice Age "cave men." The Neanderthals died out around 30,000 years ago.
So there's a fight between the scientists who discovered her and think she is a new species and other scientists who think she's a modern human with a deformity that caused her small brain. The second group think full-size modern humans killed the tiny elephants and made the tools, while the Hobbit just lived in the cave.
Reference:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58460-2005Mar22.html
The 3-foot-tall adult female skeleton found in a cave is believed 18,000 years old. It 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.
And even though she was 30 years old when she died, her head was only the size of a grapefruit, and her brain was only one-third as big as ours. Even so, the archaeologists saw that the woman and her people had made spear points and sharp pieces of stone good enough to hunt animals as large as Komodo dragons. The archaeologists even found the remains of miniature elephants in the cave.
Scientists have named the extinct species Homo floresiensis.
And the really strange thing is that because the Hobbit's fossils are about 18,000 years old, scientists know that she lived -- at least for a while -- at the same time as modern humans. Until the Hobbit's discovery on Indonesia's Flores Island, scientists thought the last human ancestors were the Neanderthals, the Ice Age "cave men." The Neanderthals died out around 30,000 years ago.
So there's a fight between the scientists who discovered her and think she is a new species and other scientists who think she's a modern human with a deformity that caused her small brain. The second group think full-size modern humans killed the tiny elephants and made the tools, while the Hobbit just lived in the cave.
Reference:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58460-2005Mar22.html