On the island of Flores in Indonesia, villagers have long told tales of a diminutive, upright-walking creature with a lopsided gait, a voracious appetite, and soft, murmuring speech.

They call it ebu gogo, "the grandmother who eats anything." Scientists¿ best guess was that macaque monkeys inspired the ebu gogo lore. But last October, an alluring alternative came to light. A team of Australian and Indonesian researchers excavating a cave on Flores unveiled the remains of a lilliputian human--one that stood barely a meter tall--whose kind lived as recently as 13,000 years ago.

This article was originally published with the title The Littlest Human.

1 Comments

1. 1. nrcbtm1 03:12 PM 1/2/13

   Are archeologists investigating whether accounts by some Hawaiian sources that their mythic Leprechaun-like Menehune were actual, not mythic creatures, who arrived in the Hawaiian islands about 1000 years before the first Polynesians?
   
   When the Tahitian invasion occurred about 1100 A.D., this theory goes, the Menehune were subdued by the physically larger Tahitians. Hawaiian legend is that it was the Menehune who constructed the landmark pre-historic fish ponds of the islands before the first wave of Polynesian Hawaiians arrived.

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