A solid mix of lighter articles for this month with an emphasis on history:

• The news of the discovery of the remains of a Hobbit-like hominid species on the island of Flores made waves around the world some years back. Newer discoveries not only confirm this but even reveal that the species may go back much further than previously suspected. It is now thought that they must have arrived on the island more than a million years ago, enough time for them to have evolved along a separate branch and to have shrunk down in size from the prevalent Homo erectus. This also ties in to recent research which suggests that all animals tend to develop dwarfism if they are forced to live on an island with limited space.
• Next is this announcement that rice farming goes back much further than previously known. This article talks about how the discovery of rice plant material that have been domesticated dating from over 9,000 years ago have been found in the Lower Yangtze Valley in China.
• Then there’s this article about new excavations at the port of Piraeus in Greece. It provides fresh information about the size of the Athenian navy  some 2,500 years ago which seems to be larger than previously thought. Apparently the sheds housing the fleets have an area of more than 110,000 square meters.
• Moving on from ancient Greece to ancient Egypt, this article describes the application of modern metallurgical analysis techniques to the iron dagger found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. They confirm earlier suspicions that the dagger is made of iron of meteoritic origin and that the ancient Egyptians placed great value on iron recovered from fallen meteors.
• Finally here’s an article that explains the concept of the gene drive. It’s a new genetic editing tool that all but ensures that the changes that are made to an organism will be passed on to all subsequent offspring. This effectively ensures that virtually all members of the altered species will eventually have the edited genes. This is understandably very powerful and one use that has been mooted is to use to eradicate all mosquitoes.