Science. Reads like science fiction. Reminds me of same.

I would have been less surprised if someone had uncovered an alien.

Says Peter Brown, a palaeoanthropologist and one of the authors in the paper.

Giant rats, dwarf humans, and waist-high pygmy elephants. Darwin would have been proud.

Fallout (giant rats), Hominids (alternate anthropological history), Speaker for the Dead, Startide Rising & Uplift War (hidden species), Think Like a Dinosaur (smart dinos), the adventures of Miles Naismith Vorkosigan (smart cretin) come to mind. And whoa they released a port of Fallout 1 & 2 for OS X in 2002.