Word: liang
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...DIED. FAINA FANG-LIANG CHIANG, 88, Siberian-born widow of former Taiwanese President Chiang Ching-kuo; in Taipei. The shy Russian met her future husband, son of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, at a Soviet machinery plant at age 16. She married into the political dynasty in 1935. As First Lady from 1978 to 1988, Chiang avoided the public spotlight and lacked the glamour of her predecessor, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, but won respect for her modest lifestyle and dedication to her four children. Recalled Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian, "She had the values of a traditional Chinese woman...
...world of paleoanthropology last week, a team of Australian and Indonesian scientists announced in Nature that they had discovered that a 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...
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...
Reasoning 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...
Despite their minuscule brains, the Hobbit and her kin were evidently smart enough to use fire, make tools and hunt, challenging existing notions of the relationship of brain size to intelligence. The scientists found bones of Stegodon, Komodo dragons and an assortment of rodents and other animals in the Liang Bua sediments, some of them charred by what may have been cooking fires...