00:00Scientists found bones so small they thought they belonged to a child, but the teeth revealed
00:04something stranger. They belonged to an adult human species. The species was Homo floresiensis,
00:11though many people know it by its nickname, the Hobbit. The discovery came from Liangboa Cave on
00:17the Indonesian island of Flores. This adult stood just over one meter tall, with a tiny body, a small
00:23skull, short legs, large flat feet, and a brain much smaller than ours. Yet it was not classified
00:30as an unusual modern human. It was a separate, extinct human species, and its world was just as
00:37strange. These tiny humans lived on an island filled with giant rats, Komodo dragons, and extinct
00:43elephant relatives called Stegadon, a place where evolution seemed to work by different rules.
00:49Stone tools show humans were on Flores for a very long time, and older fossils from another site
00:55suggest this small-bodied lineage may go back hundreds of thousands of years.
00:59Exactly where Homo floresiensis came from is still debated. Some scientists think its ancestors
01:05shrank over time because of island evolution. Others think it may have descended from an already
01:11small ancient human group. The last known traces appear around 50,000 years ago, close to the time
01:17modern humans were spreading through the region. Nobody knows for certain why they vanished,
01:22or whether modern humans ever saw them. But the discovery changed the way scientists see human
01:27evolution. It showed that our family tree was not simple. On one island not that long ago,
01:33another kind of human was living in a world we are still trying to understand.
01:36that mind.
01:37o
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