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Meet our long-lost cousins
SHE stands a metre tall, has a brain the size of a chimpanzee and her knuckles reach down to her knees - meet homo floresiensis, pin-up girl of the scientific world.The newly discovered species of human, dubbed "the Hobbit", is being hailed as the most significant scientific find of the past century and was unearthed by NSW archaeologists. Named after the Indonesian island of Flores where she was found, the female is thought to have been 30 years old when she died of natural causes. Scientists have pieced together an image - with the male of the species pictured right - of a hairless, dark-skinned dwarf with a comparatively small head, countersunk eyes, flat nose, big teeth and mouth jutting forward with virtually no chin. But what has scientists at the University of New England, Armidale, so excited is that the species lived as recently as 13,000 years ago - long after homo sapiens began walking the planet. "It's a totally different human species which lived side-by-side with us for 40,000 years at least," Associate Professor Mike Morwood, an archeologist on the dig, said. "It means two different types of human existed at the same time. To say we're excited's an understatement. "Never in our wildest dreams did we think we'd find such a complete specimen. We were expecting tests to show the date of the bones to be around 100,000 years old. "When it came back at 18,000, we thought it was a mistake. But it's right." Further excavations in the Liang Bua cave site in July and August have unearthed remains 13,000 years "young". Associate Professor Peter Brown, also of UNE, added: "Finding a spaceship would have been less of a surprise. This sort of species was supposed to have been extinct for a long time. "Then we find a brand new species on Flores - yesterday, in archaeological terms. "We don't know how they got there because Flores is very isolated. We discovered stone tools and evidence of rock formations, suggesting the species used fire. "Although the brain size tells us they weren't as bright as us, it's clear information was processed in the same way." The team believes homo floresiensis was wiped out by a volcanic eruption about 12,000 years ago. "If it hadn't been for that eruption, this species would still be on the planet today," the University of Wollongong's Professor Bert Roberts said. The team told Nature magazine Flores until recently was "a kind of Lost World". Posted by: tipper 2004-10-27 |
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