Hobbit-Like Human Ancestor Found in Asia

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trumpet_is_cool
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Hobbit-Like Human Ancestor Found in Asia

Post: # 4493Post trumpet_is_cool »

Might be interesting...
"H. floresiensis presents an intriguing problem in evolutionary biology," Brown said.
Here`s the Link : http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... ensis.html
Vesko
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Post: # 4495Post Vesko »

Thank you! Definitely interesting! I have read some other official information that the being could quite possibly be closer to a monkey. I read the news last year but did not report it here for that reason, although I should have because it is a significant discovery that could have large implications and because our forum can make it easier to consider both sides of the coin -- something absolutely necessary unless we want to be misled.

Read the article "Experts split over human Hobbit remains", http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1230899.htm, October 29, 2004.

Some excerpts making a point about monkeys (be sure to read the full article):
The newly discovered Hobbit-like humans were not intelligent enough to have made the tools found with them, says an expert in human evolution. And they behaved more like chimpanzees.

Professor Colin Groves of the Australian National University said so after studying pictures of the tools excavated with the newly-discovered hominid Homo floresiensis.
[...]
But his main concern was the size and sophistication of the tools. He said as the tools were up to 12 centimetres long they would have been too big for the metre-high Hobbits to have made and used, as the researchers had suggested.

"It is very worrying that these tiny little things with their tiny little cranial capacities were making and hafting [attaching a handle to] large complex flaked stone artefacts," Groves told ABC Science Online.

He said the tools were comparable in size to the tools made by H. sapiens found in Australia and other parts of Southeast Asia.

"Little people you'd expect would make little tools," he said.
[...]
He said the Hobbits also had other features that suggested they would have behaved more like chimpanzees than humans.
[...]
Groves also challenged the idea that H. floresiensis was a dwarf descendent of H. erectus, as suggested by the Australian-Indonesian team.

He said the brain size of H. floresiensis was too small. Instead he said it was probably descended from an ancestor somewhere between Australopithecus and Homo.
[...]
Leader of the team that made the Hobbit discovery, Associate Professor Michael Morwood, from the University of New England, said he also first thought the sophisticated tools had been made by modern humans.

"I just thought they're just so sophisticated; we've got blade technology, we've got a range of flaking techniques. This must be modern humans," he told ABC Science Online.

But he said there was no evidence of modern humans throughout the Hobbit site, dating from 95,000 to 13,000 years ago.

"The earliest evidence we've got for modern humans at that site is 11,000 and there is absolutely no evidence for overlap between the two species."
[...]
But Groves was not convinced by the argument that Hobbits made the tools just because no remains of modern humans were found.

"There's all sorts of reasons why you don't find things," he said. H. sapiens could have lived and have been buried elsewhere.

He suggested that the tools may have been made by H. sapiens who could well have been around in Flores at the time, en route to Australia, where they have been for at least 50,000 years. H. sapiens could have made the tools and hunted Stegodons and even Hobbits themselves, he said.
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