Hobbit People

I went to a lecture on friday where William Jungers, the professor in the picture above discussed his research on the "hobbit people" of Flores, Indonesia, who fossils were just recently discovered. His analysis of the structure of the bones shows that they are much more similar to apes than modern humans. What this means is that the history of our ancestors must be rewritten: the predominant view right now among anthropologists is that homo-erectus was our first ancestor to leave africa. This discovery suggests that much earlier ancestors, similar to apes (lucy is a famous example) were able to colonize Asia. It will be interesting to see if any new lineages of ape are discovered in the future.