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Published online 6 May 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.448
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'Hobbit' was a dwarf with large feet
Studies suggest Flores man was a distinct species.
From head to toe, the bones of a metre-tall species dating from somewhere between 17,000 and 95,000 years ago continue to reveal the potential complexities of human evolution.
Two articles published in Nature today focus on Homo floresiensis — one describes how its brain could have dwarfed to its unusually small size1, the other how its large feet, similar to those of chimps, would have allowed it to walk efficiently but probably not to run well on two legs2.
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they got bones that are not that old. Anyone's gonna sequence the DNA? if it works with neanderthal bones, mammoth hairs...
Does reduced brain size necessarily imply reduced mental abilities? Is there any suggestion that dwarf hippos and other species subject to island dwarfism suffer in this way? Surely cortical area rather than overall volume is what we want to be looking at...
Besides the making of stone tools, hunting pygmy elephants, and dodge nasty lizards, there is also the issue of how they even got to the island. Even at glacial maximum with significantly lowered sea level the island was separated from any other land by deep water. Are we to assume that the earliest H. erectus or that any H. habilis could make rafts?