More “Hobbit” Mysteries!

From The New Scientist:

The tale of Homo floresiensis – aka the hobbit – is beginning to read less like a Tolkien epic than an Agatha Christie whodunit.

Two studies add a new twist to the plot. One claims that the skeleton’s ape-like feet push back its ancestry near the dawn of Homo. Another argues that the hobbit is a later offshoot of Homo erectus, dwarfed by aeons of island isolation.

“Either answer is pretty damn exciting,” says William Jungers, a palaeoanthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York, who led the analysis of the foot. “It’s telling us something pretty amazing about human evolution.”

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Hobbits Mystify Scientists

Bones of the tiny hominid Homo floresiensis nicknamed "hobbits" by scientists.

From the New York Times:

STONY BROOK, N.Y. — Six years after their discovery, the extinct little people nicknamed hobbits who once occupied the Indonesian island of Flores remain mystifying anomalies in human evolution, out of place in time and geography, their ancestry unknown. Recent research has only widened their challenge to conventional thinking about the origins, transformations and migrations of the early human family.

Indeed, the more scientists study the specimens and their implications, the more they are drawn to heretical speculation.

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