Scientists have made the startling discovery of a lost world of small archaic humans only a meter tall (3 feet) , who hunted dwarf elephants and Komodo dragons on an Indonesian island as recently as 18,000 years ago. The researchers uncovered the skull and skeleton of an adult human female with a brain the size of a grapefruit and a body the size of a Hobbit. This diminutive new species lived on the tropical island of Flores , dubbed Homo floresiensis.
Something didn't add up for the scientist though, Now, many of the same scientists who made the discovery have revised their estimate of the fossils age, based on an exhaustive new analysis of the cave’s geology. Instead of living 18,000 years ago, as they originally reported, the hobbit lived between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago some 10,000 years before H. sapiens arrived in the region . The original date of 18,000 years ago would have put the "Hobbit" living hand in hand with homo sapiens.
To get the new dates of 60,000 and 100,000 years old the scientist went about it with a new method. Instead of carbon dating the bones found the scientist carbon dated the sediment around it. Dating on the gravelly sediment layer containing the fossils suggested it was deposited between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago. Just above it is a layer of volcanic ash that was dated to about 60,000 years ago. This suggests that the fossils themselves couldn’t possibly be younger than 60,000 years old, disproving the 18,000 year old date.
With this new data, it is not thought that homo sapiens to have spread to Southeast Asian islands and into Australia 50,000 years ago. The teams report of the much older sediments as well as the fossils themselves suggest the fossils could have not belong to homo sapiens. There is evidence of homo sapiens in the cave 11,000 years ago, whether homo floresiensis survived long enough to interact with modern humans is the question to ask now.
Shrunken head. A new human species (right-hand skull) is much smaller than its putative ancestor, Homo erectus.
It is fascinating that there is yet another species of human discovered. It seems that new findings are coming up all the time which makes me wonder how many other ancestors humans have that we do not know about yet. The more we find, the more complete the fossil record will be. While it will never be complete, it is growing and growing and I am interested to see what they find next!
ReplyDelete