(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
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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.