Other Crap

Scientists discover an ancient race of 'Little People'. Believe it or not, we had pre-modern human ancestors smaller than Tom Cruise. I learned a lot from this article. Anthropologists discuss something called The Wallace Line, which distinguishes the evolutionary path of species on islands which have never been connected to a continent, as opposed to islands which have broken off from the mainland over time. Isolated Pacific islands to the East of the Wallace Line have a species rule based upon the size of a rabbit - given an absence of predators, island creatures smaller than rabbits tend to breed upward in size, while creatures larger then rabbits breed downward. Rabbits, presumably, stay the same. The net effect is that all species approach the same size. The new mini-human finding is important because it is the first known case of humans or primates conforming to the rabbit rule.