These were Australopithecus (or Paranthropus) robustus and an early species of Homo, possibly Homo erectus.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Bones hint at first use of fire
Comparisons with other sites show that Homo erectus survived successive warm and cold periods in northern Asia.
Only in a brief postscript do we learn that pithecanthropus now goes by the more familiar name homo erectus.
ECONOMIST: How man has learned, through history, about his habitat
The researchers had thought the Hobbit's island-hopping ancestor was Homo erectus, which is known to have lived on nearby Java.
BBC: NEWS | Science/Nature | Team widens search for 'Hobbits'
"The authors make a compelling case that H. floresiensis could be descended from an early Homo erectus population, " she said.
Homo floresiensis, as most researchers other than Dr Jacob had always suspected, seems to be a locally evolved descendant of Homo erectus.
Older alleged sites of human fires are more susceptible to other interpretations, but they do exist, including ones that go back to the beginning of Homo erectus.
Previous findings of the same tool style date to only about 1.4 million years ago, suggesting that Homo Erectus developed these innovations much earlier than previously indicated.
Over six months the team also built Nariokotome boy, a member of the species Homo erectus, and one of our earliest prehistoric ancestors - an Australopithecus afarensis named Lucy.
In the 1920s Homo erectus distorted himself a bit, and took to swinging round church towers or chandeliers as the Phantom of the Opera and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The common ancestor is, however, too recent for the new species to be a remnant of the first human excursion from Africa, the one that led to Java man and Peking man, now known as Homo erectus.
Florence's brain turns out to be similar in its pattern of lobes to that of Homo erectus, a species already known from Indonesia, and quite unlike that of Homo sapiens including the smaller than average brains of central-African pygmies.
Some researchers think Homo erectus evolved in East Africa, where many of the oldest fossils have been found, but the discovery in the 1990s of equally old Homo erectus fossils in the country of Georgia has led others to suggest an Asian origin.
The Peking Man fossils are a vital component of the Out of Africa 1 migration theory, which proposes that Homo erectus first appeared in Africa around two million years ago before spreading north and east (modern humans, Homo sapiens, would follow much later and supplant all other Homo species).
And the humanlike creatures known as australopithecines are thought to have had a similar developmental trajectory to chimpanzees - faster than later hominin species such as Homo habilis and erectus.
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