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Journalism of Courage
Scientists in Australia have found a new species of hobbit-sized humans who lived about 18,000 years ago on an Indonesian island, in a discovery that adds another piece to the complex puzzle of human evolution.
The partial skeleton of Homo floresiensis, found in a cave on Flores island, is of an adult female a metre tall, had a chimpanzee-sized brain and was substantially different from modern humans.
It shared the isolated island to the East of Java with miniature elephants and Komodo dragons. The creature walked upright, probably evolved into its dwarf size because of environmental conditions and coexisted with modern humans in the region for thousands of years.
‘‘It is an extraordinarily important find,’’ Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London said on Wednesday. ‘‘It challenges the whole idea of what makes us human.’’
Peter Brown of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, and his colleagues reported their finding in Nature.
