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These wouldn't be technological. Perhaps
saddest aspect of whole story is slow loss of technology it implies. Ebu Gogo seems to have been a descendent of Homo erectus, also known as Java man, who reached island about 840,000 years ago. This was almost certainly something that required boats, which seem a pretty human-level technology.
But because Flores is so far from anywhere that only boat-users or very strong swimmers - like elephants - can reach it, mammals there seem to have shrunk to cope with lack of food. The tiny hominids hunted a race of dwarf elephants, and ate for preference their babies, whose charred bones have been found in cave. So they had fire once. They had tools, too; and presumably language. But their brains had shrunk to a quarter of size of ours.
The Ebu Gogo recorded by villagers had forgotten what language was for; they used no tools, and ate their food raw. At some stage, perhaps, their brains had shrunk so much that they were no longer truly human. The moral seems hard to escape. What makes us human is not our moral qualities. Ultimately, it's a question of getting enough to eat to grow brains that are big enough for morality - and, indeed, genocide. * Andrew Brown is author of The Darwin Wars: The Scientific War for Soul of Man and In Beginning Was Worm: Finding Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite. He also maintains a weblog, Helmintholog (http://www.thewormbook.com/helmintholog/).” (1)
The day after I posted above I found that science now proves mamals were not only living far longer ago than we thought but they were evolved enough to be eating small dinosaurs. This makes it possible to speculate about an even older cultured mammal on earth as well as probability that earlier hominids were more evolved than we thought.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/01/13/MNGGUAPI5M1.DTL
World-Mysteries.com guest expert Enchanted Spirit Press columnist Author of Diverse Druids
