Greetings--
Homo floresiensis is one of my favorite hominins. (What's yours?) Back in 2004, scientists announced they had found a tiny human-like species on an Indonesian island. I fell into a blogging frenzy that lasted over two years:
10/26/04: Island of the Lost Hominids
11/26/04: Hobbit Limbo?
2/24/05: Return of the Prodigal Bones
3/3/05: The Hobbit's Brain
4/29/05: Hobbits Alive?
6/15/05: Return to Hobbit Limbo
10/11/05: Hobbits Again
10/14/05: Whose Brain Is It Anyway?
5/18/06: Jakob the Hobbit?
6/9/06: Small Girls With Sharp Rocks
6/21/06: Hobbits: Healthy, Happy, Human?
8/21/06: Return of the Microcephalic Hobbit
10/9/06: Homo floresiensis: Two Years Out
1/29/07: My Fossil Wish List: Homo sulawesiensis
Things quieted down after that, although the mystery remained. Now, twelve years later, scientists have found what appearS to be a second set of H. floresiensis fossils at another site on the island, dating back far further back in time. Here's my column for the New York Times on the new find and what it may tell us about these marvelous cousins.
(Photo by Tim Evanson, via Creative Commons)
NEXT WEEK! June 17: Austin, Texas. Public Lecture for the Stephen Jay Gould Award. Details here
June 23-25: Durham North Carolina: International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, Plenary Lecture. Here's the meeting site.
June 29: Boston: Festival of Genomics, Plenary Lecture, "Tales from the genome beat: how journalists explore (& sometimes get lost in) our DNA." Details here.
July 31: Plenary lecture at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America in Savannah. The talk is entitled, "Plants Are Weird: Epigenetics, Journalism, and the Alien Beauty of Botany"
September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details to come
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.
Best wishes, Carl
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