Saturday, March 20, 2010

Is the "hobbit" debate over?

The "pro" side in the debate over whether the diminutive "hobbits" from the island of Flores were a species separate from Homo sapiens seems to be winning. New research indicated the ancestors of the Flores people had been there as long as a million years. A million years of isolation means there was no chance they were H. sapiens. What species did those ancestors belong to? Homo erectus? Something even older? It's one of the great scientific mysteries of our time.

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