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.
The little skull clearly belongs to an adult and was found last summer at a site where much larger hominids classified as Homo erectus lived, said Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution and colleagues.
He or she died on a volcanic ridge, perhaps mauled by a lion or other carnivore, Potts said.
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.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/07/02/science.humans.reut/index.html