The Guardian has a long piece about the hobbits of Flores, and how they may have split from from the lineage which led to H. sapiens further back in time than had previously been assumed. In other words, where the hobbits had been theorized to have been a local adaptation of H. erectus, now the model is that they are the descendants of habilis or some other earlier hominin. In classic British style the article seems somewhat sensationalized to me, not to mention using terms that seem quaintly archaic, like “apemen.” I stopped paying attention to the hobbit stories after it seemed obvious that paleoanthropologists couldn’t agree on what they were. In other words, I’ve put it into a class similar to ALH 84001. What do readers think?
Note: Wasn’t too impressed with Mike Morwood’s book A New Human.
