//beconfused

Oh boy, I knew these hobbits from Lord of the Rings existed. And if you’re thinking hobbits are from the European countries, it may be closer to you than you expect. It’s just in my neighboring country.

Ancient hobbit-sized human species discovered

In an astonishing discovery that could rewrite the history of human evolution, scientists say they have found the skeleton of a new human species, a dwarf, marooned for eons in a tropical Lost World while modern humans rapidly colonized the rest of the planet.

The finding on a remote Indonesian island has stunned anthropologists like no other in recent memory. It is a fundamentally new creature that bears more of a resemblance to fictional, barefooted hobbits than modern humans.

The 3-foot-tall (90-centimeter-tall) adult female skeleton found in a cave is believed 18,000 years old. It smashes the long-cherished scientific belief that our species, Homo sapiens, systematically crowded out other upright-walking human cousins beginning 160,000 years ago and that weâ??ve had Earth to ourselves for tens of thousands of years.

Scientists have named the extinct species Homo floresiensis, or Flores Man, and details appear in Thursdayâ??s issue of the journal Nature.

Flores Man made stone tools, lit fires and organized group hunts for meat. Bones of fish, birds and rodents found near the skeleton were charred, suggesting they were cooked.

All this suggests Flores Man lived communally and communicated effectively, perhaps even verbally.

Source: MSNBC.com

Tags: history, indonesia, odd world, science