Hobbit Sized Human Civilization Uncovered

[nodrew]

Just another weird scientific discovery Interesting none-the-less though.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=198867&page=1

[Fierce Critter]

Interesting. I wonder if their size had anything to do with why they didn't make it through the evolutionary chain to exist today.

[nodrew]

Actually the article says they seem to be limited to that one island and were possibly wiped out by a volcano.

[Onyx]

Wow. I wonder if their bodies were proportional or if they looked a bit like a midget?

very interesting!

[Fierce Critter]

Actually the article says they seem to be limited to that one island and were possibly wiped out by a volcano.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Ahh. That's my selective reading problem again... thanks for the clarification.

[nodrew]

Well, based on the article, there wasn't a whole lot of clarification, except where they talk about the size of the brain, which was apparently almost 1/6th of the size of ours. This was the reason for such small skulls. I would guess by this that their bodies were fairly proportional, unlike dwarfs that we see today.

But I'm just guessing

[Marblez]

I was actually going to post about this...damn you drew!

On NPR they said that if they were to wear a hat, they would blend well with humans today (except for the size).

[Marblez]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4127713

Though hobbit-sized, the Liang Bua skeleton was perfectly well proportioned, and may represent the descendants of a population of Homo erectus that became isolated on Flores during the past few hundred thousand years.

[Class-Punk]

[Troy Spiral (13)]

From a .. lets call it scientific / anthropology "wow" factor is and still is a big deal. Most other finds in the last say 30 years are (reasonably) predictable, in that they fit closely with our model of anthropology/human evolution (even this isn't that far out) but does) a lot of twists to it.

Homo floresiensis resembles some of our most primitive ancestors — but lived as recently as 13,000 years ago

Its long been assumed that any of our ancestors died out long before 13,000 years ago. In geologic time, that's like, yesterday.

The fact that they were tiny is interesting only in that we now have examples of "human" dwarfism, (tons of other species have this characteristic in isolated populations) I guess its a big deal, but I guess personally I just assumed it , discovered or not, since it so common in other animals.

[Troy Spiral (13)]

I'm all for necroposting. Rarely is any topic "fully covered", especially "real" topics like this one. Although sometimes if the topic post is poorly written just re-posting the same subject in a more clear way is the best deal.