The Mata Menge humerus fragment, left, shown to scale with the humerus of another Homo floresiensis specimen from Liang Bua.Credit...Yousuke Kaifu
The New York Times has a new Carl Zimmer column about the "Hobbits" of Indonesia. New research into Homo floresiensis, a species of ancient humans sometimes referred to as "hobbits", has uncovered toddler-size teeth and arm bones that date to about 700,000 years ago. H. floresiensis was first discovered 20 years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores. The study appeared in the journal Nature.
Based on those bones, the researchers estimated that Homo floresiensis stood 106 centimeters tall — about three and a half feet. More remarkable than its short stature was its minuscule brain, about one-third the size of a modern human’s. Analyzing the cave floor, scientists determined the Homo floresiensis bones were somewhere between 100,000 and 60,000 years old.
The sensational discovery left scientists struggling to fit Homo floresiensis into the family tree of humans and their extinct relatives, a group known as hominins. The oldest known hominins were short, small-brained apes. But by two million years ago, they had largely been replaced by taller hominins with much bigger brains.
Some scientists hypothesized that the bones came from humans with growth disorders. But many researchers rejected that explanation, because the anatomy of people with those growth disorders today doesn’t closely match that of the fossils.
