Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Flores probably ambushed and devoured prey, including stegodonts and
brought carcasses of Komodo dragons into Liang Bua, which suggests
that they may have hunted them during the cooler and hotter parts of
the day, when the giant lizards were less active. Morwood speculates
that the hunting of stegodonts and Komodo dragons may have been
a cooperative activity that involved language. In any event, Komodo
dragons would have been
Homo floresiensis
's worst enemy. I suspect it
took considerable intelligence for hobbits to coexist with them on the
same small island
—not to mention the cognitive skills needed to make
the dragons a regular part of their diet.
paleopolitics — indonesian style
It took Morwood twice as long to discover
Homo floresiensis
as it had for
Eugène Dubois to find
Pithecanthropus erectus
after he arrived in western
eight years after Morwood, while overlooking the Timor Sea off the
northwest coast of Australia, conceived of a project to study hominin
origins in that country and Indonesia (figure 11). Following a good deal
of drudgery, international networking, and chasing of permits, he and
a cadre of colleagues stepped into Liang Bua for the first time in 1999.
Having already carried out archaeological fieldwork in the Soa Basin of
Flores, Morwood began excavating in the cave in 2001 with a team of
five researchers and 12 local workers under the auspices of Raden Pandji
Soejono, who had dug there years earlier and was regarded as the “father
dont remains (the first ever from an Indonesian cave), stone tools, and
a small hominin lower arm bone (a radius) that had a puzzling bend to
it. These finds demonstrated the enormous potential of Indonesia for a
long-term interdisciplinary investigation.
As Morwood pictured it, such an enterprise would require years of
fieldwork in various sites, including Liang Bua, in addition to the help
