Selain Mike Morwood dari New England University, peneliti Indonesia yang
ikut ambil bagian adalah dari Pusat Penelitian Purbakala Indoenia,
Soejono.
Iman
========
Oki, menarik posting-nya, saya yakin ini akan memerlukan konfirmasi
penelitian lanjutan. Masa ilmuwan Indonesia tidak ada yang ikut, kok di
artikelnya disebut ada ilmuwan Indonesia dan Australia, hanya tak
disebutkan namanya yang Indonesia.
"Musakti, Oki" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
(Koq nggak kedengaran ada ilmuwan Indonesia yang ikut di tim ini ya...?)
Menarik, disini disebutkan bahwa salah satu survival strategy untuk
mengatasi kondisi yang minim resources adalah dengan 'mengecilkan diri'.
Oki
- - - - - - - - -
Found - the newest members of the human family
By Deborah Smith
October 29, 2004
A previously unknown species of miniature human barely a metre tall, who
hunted pygmy elephants and giant rats, lived on Australia's doorstep
until at least 13,000 years ago.
Australian and Indonesian scientists have unearthed a near-complete
skeleton of a female member of the species, nicknamed Hobbit, in a cave
on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, 600 kilometres east of Bali.
The archaic humans co-existed for tens of thousands of years with our
own species and might have died out only 500 years ago. Archaeologist
and team member Mike Morwood, from the University of New England, said
they were about the size of a modern three-year-old.
"They weighed around 25 kilograms and had a brain smaller than most
chimpanzees," Professor Morwood said. "Even so, they used fire and made
sophisticated stone tools. Despite tiny brains, these little humans
almost certainly had language."
The discovery of the species, published today in the journal Nature, is
being hailed as one of the most important in a century in the study of
human origins. Until now, it had been thought our only recent cousins
were the Neanderthals in Europe, who died out about 30,000 years ago.
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"The find is startling," said another team member, Dr Robert Foley, of
the University of Cambridge. "It is breathtaking to think that such a
different species of hominin existed so recently."
Named Homo floresiensis, it is the smallest species of human ever found.
It is the first that overlapped recently with our species to have been
discovered since Neanderthal remains were found in the 1800s.
The island the small humans lived on, Flores, was a "lost world"
inhabited by creatures as strange as they were - giant rats and giant
lizards, komodo dragons, and primitive dwarf elephants that were extinct
elsewhere.
Bones including the skull, jaw, pelvis and leg of a 30-year-old woman
were uncovered last year in Liang Bua cave on Flores and dated to about
18,000 years old.
More recently, the team has uncovered her arm bones as well remains from
six other little people, who lived in the cave from about 95,000 years
ago to 13,000 years ago. The existence of the species will prompt a
"major rethink" of how humans evolved, according to another on the team,
Peter Brown, of the University of New England.
"The most remarkable thing is that someone with that sort of small brain
size was behaving in many ways like a modern human in terms of hunting
and the stone tools they used," he said.
Professor Morwood said the little people were thought to have evolved
from larger archaic humans, Homo erectus, who managed to sail across to
Flores from Java about 800,000 years ago.
They evolved into dwarfs, like the elephants on the island, because
small creatures had a better chance of survival on a remote island where
there was little food and no major predators.
Homo erectus spread from Africa to Asia more than a million years ago,
but were eventually replaced by our species, Homo sapiens, who left
Africa about 120,000 years ago, according to the leading theory of human
movement.
The little Homo floresiensis species survived on Flores long after Homo
sapiens had moved into the region and begun to colonise Australia and
New Guinea 50,000 years ago.
Bert Roberts, of the University of Wollongong, whose team carried out
the dating, said there were a lot of detailed folk tales on Flores about
little people.
"These stories suggest there may be more than a grain of truth to the
idea that they were still living on Flores up until the Dutch arrived in
the 1500s," Professor Roberts said. "The stories suggest they lived in
caves. The villagers would leave gourds with food out for them to eat,
but legend has it these were the guests from hell. They'd eat
everything, including the gourds."
It is 110 years since the last human species was discovered in
South-East Asia - the 700,000-year-old Homo erectus Java man specimen.
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