Prashant
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06:36:49 pm on October 27, 2004 | # |
If this isn’t the biggest news in anthropology circles I don’t know what else is. Here is what they are saying about it.
The discoverer, Peter Brown:
Finding these hominins on an isolated island in Asia, and with elements of modern human behaviour in tool-making and hunting, is truly remarkable and could not have been predicted by previous discoveries.
It sounds too incredible to be true, but this is not a hoax. A species of tiny human has been discovered, which lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores just 18,000 years ago.
Get to know that little skull. Scientists are going to be talking about it for centuries.
A long-lost cousin has been discovered, Homo floresiensis, or Flores Man. It’s especially dramatic for a number of reasons. It’s relatively recent, with the youngest specimen only 18,000 years old, but it is most closely related to Homo erectus.
Although Homo floresiensis is not known to be a part of the Homo sapiens evolutionary chain, discoveries like these have a far higher chance of explaining what makes us human than any mythology/religion can ever come close to. I say this really out of my personal belief in scientific enquiry.
You can read more about the scientific specifics of this discovery at the above sites and in the actual publications, Nature 431, 1055 - 1061 (28 October 2004) and Nature 431, 1087 - 1091 (28 October 2004).