Word: erectus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Another of Morwood and Brown?s theories-that their hobbits evolved directly from Homo erectus, which was thought to have died out a half-million or so years ago-which the critics lambasted, is now looking less likely. But their new idea is even more audacious: the hobbits, they suggest, may come directly from the Australopithecus family, which went extinct something like 2 million years ago. Their detailed argument for this notion has yet to be published, and critics are still very cautious even about embracing the idea that the hobbits represent a new species at all. But while...
...Pygmy?a short but otherwise normal version of Homo sapiens you still find in equatorial Africa and pockets of Southeast Asia?but a member of an entirely new species whom its discoverers named Homo floresiensis. This species, say the scientists, probably branched off from Homo erectus, the commonly accepted ancestor of Homo sapiens. The news meant that the two different human species H. sapiens and H. floresiensis had been living parallel lives on earth at the same time. (The existence of H. sapiens dates back 250,000 years.) The story made headlines worldwide?TIME covered it last November, and National...
...brain is too small. "Brains do not shrink proportionally to bodies in a species but remain relatively large," says Martin. "That's why the heads of small dogs, for example, are proportionally large for their bodies compared with larger dogs. To get a brain this size, H. erectus would have to have shrunk to about 3% of its previous 60-kg size. That's about the size of a house cat's." Martin says one thing would persuade him?more physical evidence: "Show me eight more similar skulls from the site and I'll shut...
Uncovering a new species was the last thing the scientists expected when they began excavating in Liang Bua. They were on the trail of H. erectus, which arose in Africa but had spread all the way to Southeast Asia by 1.8 million years ago (the celebrated Java Man was the first to be discovered). Previous excavations in central Flores had already uncovered primitive stone tools, dating to about 800,000 years ago, mixed in with fossils of an extinct species of dwarf elephant known as Stegodon...
From the start, says Morwood, "it was pretty obvious that this was not a modern human. It had a big brow and a massive nutcracker jaw," some of the telltale characteristics of H. erectus. But, he says, "it's very unlike the Homo erectus you get in Java." In fact, he believes the Hobbit most closely resembles specimens found in the Republic of Georgia that date back 1.7 million years. "It's obvious," Morwood says, "that human evolution has been much more complex than we'd realized...