Ancient ‘hobbit’ humans a new species after all: Study

Diminutive humans whose remains were found on the remote Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 truly are a new species, and not pygmies whose brains had shrivelled with disease, researchers reported.

Anthropologists have argued, sometimes bitterly, since the discovery of Homo floresiensis — dubbed “the hobbit” due to its size — as to the identity and origins of these distant cave-dwelling cousins. Measuring about a metre (three feet) and weighing in at 30 kilos (65 pounds), 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. And how could such a being have been smart enough to craft its own stone tools?

The only plausible explanation, they insisted, was that the handful of specimens found suffered from a genetic disorder resulting in an abnormally small skull or — a more recent finding — that they suffered from “dwarf cretinism” caused by deficient thyroids.

AFP