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More on the Hobbits: Discovery Challenges Finding of a Separate Human Species
More bones of unusually small-bodied people who lived long ago have been found on another Pacific island, and some scientists say this calls into question claims that the first such specimens, from Indonesia, represent a separate human species.
In a report released Monday, Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, described finding the skulls and bones of at least 25 individuals in two caves in Palau, in the Western Caroline Islands of Micronesia. The people apparently lived there 1,400 to 3,000 years ago.
Palau is more than 1,000 miles north of the Indonesian island of Flores, where in 2003 scientists discovered bones of several individuals who were only a little more than three feet tall and one surviving skull indicating a brain the size of a chimpanzee’s.
Australian and Indonesian scientists who made the discovery said those “little people” had lived on Flores until 13,000 years ago and were sufficiently distinct from modern humans to be a separate species, Homo floresiensis. That started a heated debate in which critics contended that those people were only dwarfed or malformed Homo sapiens.
