Diminutive humans who died out on an Indonesian island some 15,000 years ago were not Homo sapiens but a different species, according to a study that dives into a fierce anthropological debate.
Fossils of Homo floresiensis, dubbed “the hobbits” due to their tiny stature, were discovered on the island of Flores in 2003.
Controversy has raged ever since as to whether they were an unknown branch of early humans or specimens of modern man deformed by disease.
The study, based on an analysis of the skull bones, shows once and for all that the pint-sized people were not Homo sapiens, according to the researchers.
Until now, academic studies have pointed in one direction or another and scientific discourse has sometimes tipped over into acrimony.
One school of thought holds that so-called Flores Man descended from the larger Homo erectus and became smaller over hundreds of generations.
The proposed process for this is called “insular dwarfing”.
Animals, after migrating across land bridges during periods of low sea level, wind up marooned on islands as oceans rise and their size progressively diminishes if the supply of food declines.
An adult hobbit stood one metre tall and weighed about 25 kilograms.
Similarly, Flores Island was also home to a miniature race of extinct, elephant-like creatures called Stegodon.
But other researchers argue that Homo floresiensis was in fact a modern human whose tiny size and small brain, no bigger than a grapefruit, was caused by a genetic disorder.
One suspect was dwarf cretinism, sometimes brought on by a lack of iodine. Another potential culprit was microcephaly, which shrivels not just the brain but its bony envelope.
Weighing in with a new approach, published in the Journal of Human Evolution, a pair of scientists in France used high-tech tools to re-examine the layers of the “hobbit” skull.
More precisely, they looked at the remains of Liang Bua 1 (nicknamed LB1), whose cranium is the most intact of nine known specimens.
Mystery not quite solved-
“So far, we have been basing our conclusions on images where you don’t really see very much,” said lead author Antoine Balzeau, a scientist at France’s Natural History Museum. Joining forces with Philippe Charlier, a palaeopathologist at Paris-Descartes University specialising in solving ancient medical mysteries, the researchers secured high-resolution images recently generated in Japan to compute maps of bone thickness variation.
“There is a lot of information contained in bone layers of the skull,” Mr Balzeau said.
The results, he said, were unambiguous: “There were no characteristics from our species” — that is, Homo sapiens.
And while they found evidence of minor maladies, there was nothing corresponding to the major genetic diseases other researchers had pointed to.
But if one part of the mystery may be solved, another remains intact.
For while the scientists could not exclude the possibility that the “hobbit” was a scaled-down version of Homo erectus, which arrived on the neighbouring island of Java some million years ago, nor could they be sure that it was not a species it its own right.
“For the moment, we can’t say one way or the other,” Mr Balzeau said.
Lynn W
Interesting article. I wonder if they will ever really come to a universal agreement on this.
Steven B
Just my opinion, but I feel that the same will be found for our hairy forest “friend” – a new and different species from us and, possibly, apes. Just my opinion and, until, one is coughed up to be classified, that is all it can be – an opinion.
Richard C
I think By admitting it’s a completely different species that walks upright, they’ve indirectly admitted the possibility of BIGFOOT/SASQUATCH existing.
Joyce E
Thanks for the post. Interesting article.
Bryan G
I am a Muskogee Creek Indian, and our tribe has stories of ‘Little People’. As with Sasquatch, you can find stories of ‘Little People’ in almost every tribe in North America.
Could there have been a small creature that existed in North America similar to the ‘Hobbit’, if so… does it still exist?
cyndie r
What kind of animal is he holding and why is he holding it like that?
Steven B
It appears to be some kind of large rodent. He is carrying it like that as the artist was depicting a scene where the creature had just caught din-din and was taking it home.
Nathan E
No real surprise here. Anyone who has seen the remains in question (or their reconstruction) would have realized that the “Hobbit Man” was not a H. Sapiens but another species entirely. The Pygmies of the Congo rain forest are true Homo Sapiens that have become shorter as a means of dealing with the equatorial climate. There is every reason to believe an earlier version of Homo could have done the same, and survived in isolation until the arrival of modern Aboriginal humans in the area.
PATRICK
Me thinks academia will never accept.
jean paul
Dr. Timothy Darrow and “The cannibals in the Jungle”.
A very interesting documentary to say the least
michael n
Steven b, haha, I can picture the tribe artist: ok now put your club in the other hand……good. Now hold still. I just recently was researching the little people thing in north america. There are plenty of stories that suggest they may still be here. If an 8 ft.tall creature is that hard to detect in the forest just think about little people running around completely adept at living in or amongst the trees. Nearly impossible to find.