An international team of archaeologists and other researchers on the Indonesian island of Flores discovered new fossils of a rare species of early humans. Homo floresiensis it is compared by scientists to Hobbits from JRR Tolkien’s King of Wings series due to their small size. Three 700,000-year-old bones shed light on evolution Homo floresiensisor ‘Hobbits’ by Flores.
These newly discovered fossils are detailed in a study published on August 6 in the journal Nature Communication and include the first bones from under the head of one of these hominins.
[Related: Lucy, our ancient human ancestor, was super buff.]
Animals of unusual size
A small human species has a scientific understanding in Indonesia, as it is known for non-human animals of unusual size. Relatives of small-bodied elephants called The stegodons, giant rats weighing 15 kilograms, giant crocodiles and many more once roamed the biodiversity.
Evidence of these early humans was first discovered in 2003, in the Liang Bua cave by a team led by archaeologist Mike Morwood. Archaeological evidence shows that humans were only 3.4 meters tall, had small brains, and lived as recently as 50,000 years ago. At this time, A wise man it was long established in southern Australia.
However, there is still considerable debate about how small these Southeast Asian hominins were, as well as their origins. Others have thought of that Homo floresiensis he was a small descendant of the first Asian people A standing man. Another theory is that they are the remnants of an earlier hominin species from Africa. A standing man. If so, it could also be a descendant of A man with hands or the infamous and powerful “Lucy” (Australopithecus afarensis).
When did they get so young?
The remains of this new research were found not far from Liang Bua cave, Mata Menge. This open area is 46 kilometers east of the cave in the densely populated tropical grasslands of the So’a Basin. In the past, archaeologists have found several hominin remains there, including a fragment of a jaw and six teeth from a sandstone that was deposited by a stream about 700,000 years ago.
[Related: Neanderthals may have been early risers.]
The new fossils also predate the Liang Bua hominins by about 650,000 years. They belong to at least three people who likely had slightly smaller jaws and teeth than the original Homo floresiensis for example, suggesting that the Flores hominin had a smaller body size early on.
However, there was still an important piece of the puzzle that was missing during the previous excavations at Meta Menge. The postcranial material—the bones from under the head—from this species was not to be covered. Without these, it could not be confirmed that these hominins were at least as small as, if not smaller than Homo floresiensis.
Some important bones
Importantly, the team in this study found the first postcranial object which is Homo floresiensis. They discovered the upper part of an adult’s bone—or the lower part of the upper arm bone.
Digital microscopy of the fossil shows that the small humerus belonged to an adult. The team was able to use the length of the bone to calculate the length of the body, and believed it to be about 3.2-feet tall. This is about two inches shorter than the estimated body height of a 60,000-year-old human. Homo floresiensis skeleton found in Liang Bua cave (about 3.4-feet tall).
“This 700,000-year-old adult’s humerus is no shorter than that of Homo floresiensis, is the smallest upper arm bone known from the global hominin fossil record,” said Adam Brumm, co-author and paleontologist at the University of Griffith in Australia, he said in a statement. “This very rare specimen confirms our hypothesis that the ancestors of the Homo floresiensis they were very small in size; however, it now appears from the small fragments of this leg bone that the early ancestors of the ‘Hobbit’ were smaller than we previously thought.
The two teeth from Mata Menge are also small in size. One of them also has the same structural characteristics that are very similar to the first A standing man from the island of Java. However, this similarity does not support the hypothesis that Homo floresiensis evolved from the earliest and most primitive hominin species.
More fossil record digging is needed to piece together the larger story of this small group of human relatives.
“The evolutionary history of the Flores hominin remains largely unknown,” said Brumm. However, the new fossils strongly suggest that the ‘Hobbit’ story began when a group of early Asian hominins were known as. A standing man it somehow got separated from this remote Indonesian island, maybe a million years ago, and it became much smaller over time”.
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