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 just three and a half feet high. Despite their stature, they were mighty hunters. They made stone tools with which they speared giant rats, clubbed sleeping dragons and hunted the packs of pygmy elephants that roamed their lost world.
...
The little Floresians lived on the island until at least 13,000 years ago, and possibly to historic times. But they 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. Their discovery means that archaic humans, who left Africa 1.5 million years earlier than modern people, survived far longer into recent times than was previously supposed.
Homo Floresiensis my foot! Homo Bagginses would have been a much better name.
Were these guys human or human-like? Did they share common ancestry with the rest of the humans on the planet then? Are they a different brance on the family tree, or just a different tree?
One of the neatest things about this to me is they lived relatively recently, geologically speaking, long after our ancestors supposedly had outlived all other species of human.
I heard about Giant Rats and Dwarf Elephants at about the same time, and wondered which were bigger, the rats of the elephants. Now I have to figure the hobbits into the equation.
Islands are great evolutionary accelerators and preservers.
"It might be a bit better to tune to one of my fiddle's open strings, like A, rather than asking me for an F#." - Martin Milner
