Small Girls with Sharp Rocks

When we speak of the Hobbit, let us not forget her tools. Last year, scientists reported discovering fossils of a three-foot-tall hominid that they named Homo floresiensis, and which I can't keep myself from calling the Hobbit. Its bones turned up in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, dating from 97,000 to 12,000 years ago. The scientists argued that the Hobbit represented an ancient lineage of hominids, perhaps descending from Homo erectus, a human-sized species that existed in Asia 1.8 million years ago, or perhaps belonging to even an older lineage, known as australopithecines. Critics argued that the Hobbit was probably a fellow Homo sapiens. They generally focused their attention on Homo floresiensis's skull. Only one skull has yet been found, from an adult female. It's an odd skull at that, one that would have housed a strangely shaped brain a third the size of a normal adult ...