Scientists have discovered additional bone fragments of a small and unusual hominin species that once lived on Flores Island, Indonesia. These findings bolster the hypothesis that the tiny skeleton found last year in Flores belongs to a new species in the scientific community.
The species, named Homo floresiensis, stood no taller than 1 meter and lived around 18,000 years ago. Recently, researchers have uncovered bone fragments from at least nine more “tiny” individuals.
The new discoveries include previously unidentified parts of the old skeleton (designated LB1, after the Liang Bua cave where the specimen was excavated) and a variety of new bones, such as a jaw, skull fragments, a vertebra, arm bones, leg bones, and fingers.
Michael Morwood, the team leader from the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, stated that these specimens have contributed to a more comprehensive picture of LB1, providing additional evidence regarding the fire-making and hunting habits of this diminutive species.
The research team expressed that they are now more convinced than ever that Homo floresiensis represents a distinct species, rather than a deformed individual of Homo sapiens, as some skeptical experts had suggested.
“The findings further reinforce that LB1 is not an aberrant or diseased being, but rather represents an ancient population,” the research team wrote.
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| Portrait of the tiny Homo floresiensis, standing just 1 meter tall and featuring many primitive traits. |
Michael Morwood and his colleagues also speculate that Homo floresiensis, with a brain size of 380 cm3, is the result of insular dwarfism or local adaptation, a phenomenon previously documented. This phenomenon refers to species that, due to isolation and limited food resources, have evolved to become smaller or larger than their ancestral forms. In the case of Homo floresiensis, researchers suggest they originated from Homo erectus—an extinct ancient hominin that settled on Flores Island approximately 800,000 years ago.
Daniel Lieberman from Harvard University in the United States noted that future discoveries on this island will clarify the matter.
“If the insular dwarfism hypothesis is accurate, then the earliest inhabitants of Flores must have been larger than the fossils found in the Liang Bua cave, and if dwarfing occurred gradually, we might encounter fossils of intermediate size between Homo floresiensis and their ancestors.”
