Word: hobbit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...tribe of tiny humans, only about 3 ft. tall, did indeed live in the caves of Flores. Digging into the sediments on the floor of a cave called Liang Bua, the team found bones from seven individuals, including the nearly intact skeleton of an adult female they nicknamed the Hobbit. And while there's no proof that the little people survived later than about 13,000 years ago, it's not beyond the realm of possibility...
...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...
...even more obvious when you consider the Hobbit's diminutive size. The creature clearly wasn't an ape. It resembled the famous Lucy in stature and brain size, but the shape of the skull is very different; besides, Lucy is more than 3 million years older. The tiny brain also rules out the theory that this was a type of Pygmy, midget or dwarf, whose brains are all comparable in scale to those of full-size adults. But evolution does provide an explanation, known to biologists as the Island Rule: when isolated on small islands in the absence...
...tourist attractions. Every morning was the first decision of the day: did we want croissants and a nice single-stall with a self-warming seat or donuts with a full row of toilets and automatic faucets? Often, we’d choose both: Isaac ate second meals like a hobbit, which doubled our food budget. I fretted about the money, yet went to bed smiling...
...Alias, Abrams sells the ludicrous setup with excellent casting (including Party of Five's Matthew Fox and The Lord of the Rings hobbit Dominic Monaghan), inventive details and sharp comic relief. A desert island is a hermetic setting--not much room for fun Quentin Tarantino cameos there. So Abrams loads up on intriguing characters (a fugitive, an Iraqi Republican Guard veteran and so forth), gives them surprising secrets and continually subverts our ideas of who's good, who's bad and who can be trusted. Above all, Abrams understands that if you make your story a little farfetched...