Current Assessment of the Rex Gilroy
Hominid Skull Collection

A Pygmy Homo Race. Enter

The Mt. Perry, Queensland Pygmy Homo Skull. Enter

The Mary River Heads, Queensland Pygmy Homo Skull. Enter

Notes.

While current opinions and dating of these three skull-types are liable to change in the course of time as further evidence comes to light, it seems certain that a pygmy race of surprisingly 'modern' features was present over a wide area of this landmass by as early as around 3 million years ago, and that it was still present in later Pleistocene times at least 400,000 years BP, perhaps later.

What are the origins of this race? Were they a smaller offshoot of an ancestral form of Homo erectus that had already developed 'modern' features well before the appearance of the primitive 'archaic' Homo erectus?

Or, alternatively, do they represent an as yet unknown and quite separate smaller form of ancestral human, that evolved as an offshoot from the same branch to which the erectines belong? If either proposition is true, their eventual disappearance also remains a mystery.

Could they have been overtaken by their taller Homo erectus neighbours who were to dominate pre-Aboriginal Australia?

Only future fossil discoveries may one day reveal the answer to this puzzle.

One fact that emerges from the interpretation of these finds seems inescapable; and that is that a pygmy-size race of ancestral modern humans was already present in Australia in the Late Pliocene Period, around 3 million years ago.

In this context the Essington NSW skull-type tends to throw into question the long-established dogma of "out of Africa" for the origins of modern humans!

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