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Newest humans - Hobbit fossils
Ebu Gogo - Homo floresiensis
The remains of a tiny, new species of human, Homo floresiensis that lived as recently as 13,000 years ago were discovered on an Indonesian island. The 18,000-year-old specimen, is known as Liang Bua 1 or LB1. Indonesian villagers living near the fossil find know the species as ebu gogo, "the grandmother who eats anything. Accelerator mass spectrometry dating showed LB1's remains to be 18,000 years old. Fossil remains found range from 94,000 to 12,000 years old. The oldest remains from the site are 78,000 and 94,000 years old. The most complete skeleton, a female, is about 1 meter tall, weighed about 25 kilograms and was around 30 years old at the time death. Their small brain was no bigger than a grapefruit. Homo floresiensis (left) had a cranial capacity of approximately 380 cubic centimeters (small even by chimpanzee standards). The modern human average is 1,350 cubic centimeters.
H. floresiensis skull alongside a human skull.
H. floresiensis survived well beyond the last Neanderthals, which are thought to have disappeared from Europe and western Asian about 28,000 years ago. Its adult body and brain proportions are comparable to those of the much older australopithecines, such as Lucy. H. floresiensis probably descended from H. erectus. Homo erectus, could have arrived on Flores about one million years ago and evolved this tiny physique in the isolation provided by the island. H. sapiens arrived in eastern Asia by 35,000 years ago, so three human species may have co-existed in this region not so long ago. They survived alongside Homo sapiens for at least 30,000 years!
LB1's face is similar to members of the genus Homo, with thickened bone in the cranial vault and the shape of the brain case being unlike Australopithecus. Their are proportionally slightly longer arms than a human's and eyebrow ridges are thicker. They have a sharply sloping forehead, and no chin.Stone tools were in use on Flores at 840,000 years ago, but from the cave with the LB1 fossil has no tools.
It is suspected that the Flores people used fire in hearths for
cooking and hunted the 1,000 kilogram stegodon,
a primitive dwarf elephant found on the island. Their diet included
fish, frogs, snakes, tortoises, birds, and rodents.
Inhabitants of Flores have legends about the existence of
little people on the island they call Ebu Gogo. Ebu Gogo beings are
described as being about one metre tall, hairy and to communicate by
"murmuring" to each other. Geologic evidence suggests that a massive
volcanic eruption 12,000 years ago brought about the extinction of the
tiny humans and the dwarfed elephants.
Links
<> http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996588http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa004&articleID=
00082F87-7D35-117E-BD3583414B7F0000&pageNumber=1&catID=4
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3948165.stm
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/10/27/national1210EDT0540.DTL
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2004/10/27/national1210EDT0540.DTL
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/1027_041027_homo_floresiensis.html#main
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=Homo+floresiensis&btnG=Search+News
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