Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Headlines! Hobbits descended from Habilis!

Well, maybe. I thought I was reasonably alert to , but this idea has been going around for awhile. A recent article in the UK newspaper The Guardian takes its sweet time (don't journalist classes teach the writing of leads anymore?) getting to the point, and when I did a search for more I kept getting year-old links, so maybe everybody knew about this but me; but H. Floresiensis, probably the coolest fossil ever found anywhere, resembles H. Habilis and australopithecine fossils that have not been found outside of Africa more than it does H. erectus, heidelbergensis, and other species that we already knew had left the Mother Continent. Which would be pretty freaky.

I notice that some of the people quoted in the Guardian article are trying to come up with scenarios where Big Bad Destructive H. Sapiens (oooh, we're so butch) could have been responsible for the hobbit extinction, rather than the more obvious "volcanic eruption" scenario. Humans aren't that special and we need to get over ourselves, guys.

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