Just one more reason I LOVE homeschooling!!! My kids (and I) were fascinated by this article in the latest Scientific American.
I'm afraid they don't put the whole article online (8 pages long with some fantastic photos) so I'd be happy to zap you a copy of the article if you don't subscribe to the magazine. I know we would have talked about this even if they were in school (I'm a huge science buff) but it's just so cool that we get to learn and discover together. These are current findings...not several year old textbooks like in school. It was so great to go to our timeline and put in these several new theories among the facts that we do know.
Anyway....we always enjoy this magazine but I find it especially neat when new findings throw old theories back up in the air and we get to talk about them. Love discovering with my kids and just hope that some of the questions raised are answered in my lifetime....so fun to be able to be on this journey with them!!!
:-) Rachel
Tripp (9), Avi. (5), Torin (3)
The finding jolted the paleoanthropological community. Not only was H. floresiensis being held up as the first example of a human following the so-called island rule, but it also seemed to reverse a trend toward ever larger brain size over the course of human evolution. Furthermore, the same deposits in which the small-bodied, small-brained individuals were found also yielded stone tools for hunting and butchering animals, as well as remainders of fires for cooking them—rather advanced behaviors for a creature with a brain the size of a chimpanzee's. And astonishingly, LB1 lived just 18,000 years ago—thousands of years after our other late-surviving relatives, the Neandertals and H. erectus, disappeared [see "The Littlest Human," by Kate Wong; Scientific American, February 2005].
I'm afraid they don't put the whole article online (8 pages long with some fantastic photos) so I'd be happy to zap you a copy of the article if you don't subscribe to the magazine. I know we would have talked about this even if they were in school (I'm a huge science buff) but it's just so cool that we get to learn and discover together. These are current findings...not several year old textbooks like in school. It was so great to go to our timeline and put in these several new theories among the facts that we do know.
Anyway....we always enjoy this magazine but I find it especially neat when new findings throw old theories back up in the air and we get to talk about them. Love discovering with my kids and just hope that some of the questions raised are answered in my lifetime....so fun to be able to be on this journey with them!!!
:-) Rachel
Tripp (9), Avi. (5), Torin (3)
Rethinking the Hobbits of Indonesia; November 2009; Scientific American Magazine; by Kate Wong; 8 Page(s)
In 2004 a team of Australian and Indonesian scientists who had been excavating a cave called Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores announced that they had unearthed something extraordinary: a partial skeleton of an adult human female who would have stood just over a meter tall and who had a brain a third as large as our own. The specimen, known to scientists as LB1, quickly received a fanciful nickname—the hobbit, after writer J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional creatures. The team proposed that LB1 and the other fragmentary remains they recovered represent a previously unknown human species, Homo floresiensis. Their best guess was that H. floresiensis was a descendant of H. erectus—the first species known to have colonized outside of Africa. The creature evolved its small size, they surmised, as a response to the limited resources available on its island home— a phenomenon that had previously been documented in other mammals, but never humans.The finding jolted the paleoanthropological community. Not only was H. floresiensis being held up as the first example of a human following the so-called island rule, but it also seemed to reverse a trend toward ever larger brain size over the course of human evolution. Furthermore, the same deposits in which the small-bodied, small-brained individuals were found also yielded stone tools for hunting and butchering animals, as well as remainders of fires for cooking them—rather advanced behaviors for a creature with a brain the size of a chimpanzee's. And astonishingly, LB1 lived just 18,000 years ago—thousands of years after our other late-surviving relatives, the Neandertals and H. erectus, disappeared [see "The Littlest Human," by Kate Wong; Scientific American, February 2005].
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