Scientists have discovered a tiny species of ancient human that lived 18,000 years ago on an isolated island east of the Java Sea – a prehistoric hunter in a lost world of giant lizards and miniature elephants.
These little people stood about 3 feet tall and had heads the size of grapefruit. They co-existed with modern humans for thousands of years yet appear to be more closely akin to a long-extinct human ancestor.
Researchers suspect the earlier ancestor may have migrated to the island and evolved into a smaller dwarf species as it adapted to the island’s limited resources. This phenomenon, known as the “island rule,” is common in the animal world but had never been seen before in human evolution.
“Not even in primates,” said paleoanthropologist Peter Brown of Australia’s University of New England, a member of the multinational team reporting on the find today in the journal Nature. “But even though we have evidence of intelligence (in the new species), they were clearly subject to isolation and dwarfing.”
Colleagues marveled at the find as an evolutionary aberration – an archaic human that survived to a time in the fossil record when Neanderthals – which had been thought to be the last pre-modern species to share the planet with modern humans – had probably been extinct for more than 10,000 years.
“This is a great fossil find that speaks mounds about evolutionary experiments and the variation they caused,” said paleoanthropologist Ken Mowbray, of the American Museum of Natural History. “We have to step back and re-evaluate everything we have. It’s really cool.”
The research team discovered the new species in a limestone cave on Flores Island, in the Indonesian archipelago east of Java. They described the remains – a fairly complete skull, the jawbone and much of the skeleton – as those of a 30-year-old woman. The team named her Homo floresiensis.
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