Little dancer
On a tropical island now part of Indonesia, archaeologists have made a remarkable discovery: a bone fragment from an archaic adult hominid that was about 1.15 meters tall.
The discovery and identification of this arm bone, detailed in new study in Nature communicationreveal important and surprising clues about the evolution of Homo floresiensisan ancient relative of modern humans nicknamed the ‘hobbit’ because of his small stature.
When archaeologist first reported evidence of Homo floresiensis in 2004 it was a media sensation: physical evidence of a then-unknown and now extinct cousin that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores as recently as 18,000 years ago.
Archaeologists have theorized that these hobbits originally descended from even smaller hominids who underwent the process of island dwarfism. When an animal is on an island or remote piece of land, they become genetically isolated and adapt to become smaller due to less food or fewer predators.
Researchers have determined that this new discovery, which appears to be an adult arm bone, is nine to 16 percent smaller than previously discovered remains of Homo floresiensisAnd this recently discovered bone is about 700,000 years old, showing that ancestors of Homo floresiensis appear to have gotten smaller over time.
Old bones
The remains pose a fascinating “what if” question about humanity’s family tree.
“We think it was predestined (for humans) to become smart,” said Yousuke Kaifu, an anthropologist at the University of Tokyo and co-author of the study. told Nature“Flores tells us that there are other ways for people to be.”
Evidence shows that the ancestors of Homo floresiensis arrived on the island a million years agopossibly by a storm. These ancestors were possibly the longest Homo erectuswhich were comparable in length to modern humans.
Over time, these isolated creatures shrank in size, as this new discovery shows, before going extinct tens of thousands of years ago. Any further finds on Flores Island will hopefully help solve the puzzle of Homo floresiensis’s evolution.
Beyond the discovery itself, the research should emphasize that the state of being a hominin is in constant flux. The ancestors of Homo floresiensis underwent a remarkable change over hundreds of thousands of years. What will we, modern humans, look like in the distant future?
More about archaeology: Scientists find structure that predates Homo Sapiens
