Stones of Contention: Tiny Homo species tied to ancient tool tradition
By Bruce Bower
New discoveries have shifted a prehistoric, island controversy from bones to stones. Simple stone tools accompanied the fossils of Homo floresiensis, the half-size human cousin that inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores around 74,000 to 12,000 years ago, but some scientists argued that those tools had been made by Homo sapiens. Now, much older tools discovered on Flores suggest that H. floresiensis individuals carried on cultural practices initiated by their island ancestors.
Stone artifacts much like those previously found among H. floresiensis fossils in Flores’ Liang Bua cave have emerged at another site on the island. The new finds date to between 840,000 and 700,000 years ago, reports a team led by Adam Brumm of the Australian National University in Canberra.