Hobbit people brainer than first thought - Breaking News - National - Breaking News

I find this a funny human conceit. We are very unprepared to believe in the skills of earlier people.

Scientists were unwilling to consider that Homo Erectus might have been basically human even by our standards until the Flores discovery forced scientists to acknowledge that Homo Erectus made rafts or boats nearly a million years ago; that discovery forced us to acknowledge that Erectus could probably talk and think in a way quite familiar to us (after all, their brains were nearly the same size as ours.) Prior to that, one scientist argued that if we encountered Erectus today, we'd probably put them in a zoo.

Some scientists thought the Ebu Gogo/Hobbit people could not possibly have made the tools they were found with - only modern humans could have made them, we were told. That was until stone tools from seven hundred thousand years earlier, flaked in the same style, were found.

Hobbit people brainer than first thought - Breaking News - National - Breaking News

It is the same kind of conceit we have about the pyramids and stonehenge. Surely bronze age and neolithic people could not have made such things - had to be aliens or Elvis. But the simple fact is, they did!