Mankind got sites a mio years old

'Hobbit' Island Shows Signs of Ancient Civilization

(March 17) -- In 2005, archaeologist Adam Brumm was in the midst of a dig on the sweltering Indonesian island of Flores when he decided to embark on a midday walk. While the rest of the crew was napping to stay out of the heat, Brumm, from Australia's University of Wollongong, came across a large, deep gully and ventured down. "I found some stone tools lying around on the surface," he recalled. But these weren't just any tools. Brumm suspected they were very, very old. "I quickly realized the significance and brought the rest of the team back."

Now, after painstakingly excavating a section of the gully over several years, Brumm and his colleagues reveal in a new paper in the journal Nature that the site is indeed important. Their findings suggest that ancient humans occupied the island as long as 1 million years ago, or 120,000 years earlier than previously believed. The species that used these simple tools could be the ancestors of the famous so-called "hobbits of Flores," the tiny, small-brained species discovered there in 2003 and named after the little folk of the "Lord of the Rings" books.

The work has also overturned the going theory on what happened to certain species of animal life on the island and sparked new questions about when premodern humans actually reached Flores.