The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins by Tom Higham

Author:Tom Higham [Higham, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science, Natural History, Life Sciences, Evolution, Social Science, Archaeology
ISBN: 9780300263091
Google: coM3EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021-08-24T00:24:17.911523+00:00

12. The Hobbits

In 2004 a new hominin was discovered. Technically it was found ‘in the dirt’, but not in the vestigial DNA remaining in sediment. Actual physical remains of this one were found in a cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia. Like the Denisovans later, this created huge interest around the world and provided the first hints for palaeoanthropologists that there was much more complexity in the human family than we had ever appreciated.

Henry Gee is an editor at the leading scientific journal Nature, and he regularly receives new papers for review.* When asked which paper, of the more than 15,000 he has received in his thirty-odd years there, was the most jaw-dropping and impactful, his response is immediate: ‘the Hobbit paper’. Absolutely no hesitation. The day that the two Nature papers on the Hobbits of Flores appeared in print, 28 October 2004, was a landmark date – a day when the human family became bigger, though in the case of the Hobbits, perhaps we should say a little bit bigger.

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