Some excerpts from http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=585&e=4&u=/nm/20040701/sc_nm/science_humans_dc:
A tiny pre-human who lived more than 900,000 years ago in what is now Kenya may have been a "short experiment" in evolution that never quite made it, scientists said on Thursday.
...
It is the smallest adult fossil found dating back to the time of Homo erectus, the species of pre-human that dominated between 500,000 and 1.7 million years ago, Potts' team writes in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
Potts believes the fossil find shows that early humans lived in little groups that became separate and distinct for a while, and then came together every few thousand years or so, swapping genes and then parting ways again.
...
Homo erectus remains have been found in parts of Africa, southern Europe and Asia. These hominids made tools and lived in groups, but anthropologists are trying to figure out whether there were separate species or sub-species among the group.
...
He has compared the skulls of fossils found from other hominids that lived around the same time, including Homo antecessor from Atapuerca in Spain or Homo cepranensis, from Ceprano, Italy.
"I find the variability in the skulls (and parts of skulls) impossible to divide neatly into separate lineages that stay consistently identifiable over any length of time, like Homo erectus in Asia does," Potts said.
I think this shows a lot of the maturity in the study of evolution. We have gone from searching for missing links to trying to correlate them with other links.
Quath
A tiny pre-human who lived more than 900,000 years ago in what is now Kenya may have been a "short experiment" in evolution that never quite made it, scientists said on Thursday.
...
It is the smallest adult fossil found dating back to the time of Homo erectus, the species of pre-human that dominated between 500,000 and 1.7 million years ago, Potts' team writes in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
Potts believes the fossil find shows that early humans lived in little groups that became separate and distinct for a while, and then came together every few thousand years or so, swapping genes and then parting ways again.
...
Homo erectus remains have been found in parts of Africa, southern Europe and Asia. These hominids made tools and lived in groups, but anthropologists are trying to figure out whether there were separate species or sub-species among the group.
...
He has compared the skulls of fossils found from other hominids that lived around the same time, including Homo antecessor from Atapuerca in Spain or Homo cepranensis, from Ceprano, Italy.
"I find the variability in the skulls (and parts of skulls) impossible to divide neatly into separate lineages that stay consistently identifiable over any length of time, like Homo erectus in Asia does," Potts said.
I think this shows a lot of the maturity in the study of evolution. We have gone from searching for missing links to trying to correlate them with other links.
Quath