The World Before Us by Tom Higham

Author:Tom Higham [Higham, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241989067
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-03-24T23:00:00+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.fn1 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.

Figure 31 Sites and locations featured in this chapter. The sea levels from 30,000 to 80,000 years ago fluctuated between 50m and 120m below current levels. In this illustration the −120m contour is shown to give an idea of the maximum size of the additional landmass of Sunda and Sahul. Wallace’s Line is that modified by T. H. Huxley.

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