Word: islanded
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...read Charlotte Simmons without picking nits. There was a time when Wolfe was a pioneer, reporting back to straight America from the exotic island of radical youth culture in books like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, but nowadays American culture and youth culture are basically the same thing, and it's Wolfe who looks a little behind the times. He leans heavily on catchphrases from such movies as Swingers ("You're money, baby") to give his dialogue a contemporary vibe. There are missteps: What self- respecting black hoopster would...
Local folktales on the Indonesian island of Flores, some 350 miles west of Bali, tell of a race of shy little people--South Seas leprechauns who inhabited the limestone caves that dot the island, accepting gourds full of food that the Floresians would set out for them. It wasn't until Dutch traders arrived in the 1500s, according to the legends, that the diminutive race finally disappeared...
...went the other way: not only was its body small but, again unlike Pygmy or midget H. sapiens, its brain was only about the size of a grapefruit--smaller than that of a chimpanzee. "To think," says Nature senior editor Henry Gee, "that these creatures were evolving on their island while there were perfectly modern humans all around the place--it's astonishing...
...that caves would be the best places in which to find undisturbed fossils, team leaders Michael Morwood of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, and R.P. Soejono from the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta decided to dig in Liang Bua, in the western part of the island. Limited excavations there had revealed evidence of human habitation...
...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 of big predators, large mammals tend to evolve toward smaller sizes. That's because they don't need to fight off attackers and because smaller individuals can get by better on limited resources. (Paradoxically, small animals on islands tend to grow larger...