'Hobbit' Skeleton Could Rewrite Prehistory
The discovery of a skeleton of a woman barely one meter tall who hunted pygmy elephants and giant rats 18,000 years ago could rewrite the origins of humanity, scientists in Australia said Thursday.
The perfectly preserved skeleton, about as big as a modern 3-year-old and with a grapefruit-sized skull, was found in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, about 600 kilometers east of Bali.
The female, nicknamed the Flores Hobbit, has been identified as a completely new member of the human race in the latest edition of the journal Nature.
Evolution ran a different course on Flores. Besides the tiny people, elephants the size of ponies and rats as big as dogs roamed the island and were probably hunted by Homo floresiensis.
The primitive humans may themselves have been hunted by giant lizards -- even bigger versions of the huge Komodo dragons that still roam the island and which have been known to eat humans.
I got the article from Google News and there were several other publications running the story. It sounds like a lot of people really believe this, but I'm thinking it could totally be a hoax. It's just too "Gulliver's Travels" for me.