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Life

Review 2004: Rise of the little people

By Laura Deeley

22 December 2004

SOMETIMES we like to think we are unique. Sometimes we like to think we are special just because we outlasted the competition. Sometimes we like to forget what it means to be human. Then something comes along to prick our presumption.

This October it was a diminutive hominid skeleton discovered in a damp limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. Dismissed at first as a child and then as a hoax, but since shown unequivocally to be neither, Homo floresiensis or Ebu, as she has become known, is the most important anthropological find for 150 years. This tiny-brained…

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