Ancient 'hobbits' a new species after all

Updated May 07, 2009 19:43:00

Audio: Studies from head to toe show Indonesian 'hobbit' is a new type of human (AM)


Anthropologists have been arguing about the identity and origins of Homo floresiensis - dubbed "the hobbit" due to its small size - since it was unearthed by an Australian-led research team.

Measuring about a metre tall and weighing in at 30 kilograms, the tiny, tool-making hunters may have roamed the island for which they were named as recently as 8,000 years ago. The fossils are about 18,000 years old.

Many scientists have said H. floresiensis were prehistoric humans descended from Homo erectus, stunted by natural selection over millennia through a process called insular dwarfing.

Others countered that even this evolutionary shrinking, well known in island-bound animals, could not account for the hobbit's chimp-sized grey matter of barely more than 400 cubic centimetres, a third the size of a modern human brain.



Two new studies in the British journal Nature go a long way toward settling this debate, even as they raise new quandaries that are sure to stoke further controversy.

A team led by William Jungers of the Stony Brook University in New York tackled the problem from the other end by analysing the hobbit's foot.




So unless the Flores hobbits became more primitive over time - a more-than-unlikely scenario - they must have branched off the human line at an even earlier date.

For Dr Jungers and colleagues, this suggests "that the ancestor of H floresiensis was not Homo erectus but instead some other, more primitive, hominin whose dispersal into southeast Asia is still undocumented," the researchers conclude.




That's where hippos come into the picture.


They were surprised to find that insular dwarfing - driven by the need to adapt to an island environment - shrank their brains far more than had previously been thought possible.

"Whatever the explanation for the tiny brain of H floresiensis relative to its body size, our evidence suggests that insular dwarfing could have played a role in its evolution," they conclude.



In either case, however, it now seems unlikely that they were cretins, in any sense of the word.


Topics: evolution, human-interest, science-and-technology, research, indonesia, australia

First posted May 07, 2009 06:40:00