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Brilio.net/en - A mysterious creature was discovered in 2013 on the Indonesian island of Flores. It was a tiny human-resembling species and was given the scientific name Homo floresiensis, but its better known by its famous nickname: the hobbit.
Nothing quite like them had been observed earlier in two million years of human evolution. As if summoned from J.R.R. Tolkiens realm, the creatures had many similarities with hobbit character in the Lord of The Rings saga.
The fully grown creature was only about 1.1 meter-tall, and weighed about 25 kilograms. Even the skull was tiny; the hobbits brain would have been no larger than a modern chimpanzees.
The hobbit may have lived on Flores for about 100,000 years before its mysterious disappearance about 15,000 tp 18,000 years ago. Theyre never be seen again since then, yet they were the most recent other human species that walked the Earth at the same time as us.
Whether they are humans, or creatures resembling humans, is still up for debate among paleoanthropologists. Some say they were simply modern human who suffered from dwarfism. Others have been thought that the hobbits size (and tiny skull in particular) was the result of a genetic disorder such as microcephaly or Down's syndrome.
The isolated habitat on the island of Flores, which was disconnected with the rest of the world, could be a factor that caused the hobbit to evolve to such a small size. The island was also home to a dwarf elephant ancestor, for example.
However, these ideas are heavily debated and leading to a variety of methods that have been used to analyze the shape and size of the hobbit fossils. The problem is, according to Antoine Balzeau of Frances Natural History Museum, most of these affirmations only focus on aspects of the skull that represent normal variation among humans.
"You cannot argue that one feature is the definitive clue of the (species) if it's normal for many other fossils," Balzeau said, accodring to BBC Earth.
The other issue, according to him, is that many scientists studied the hobbit based on casts or low resolution scans, which dont really preserve important details of the anatomics. He considers that the hobbit remains, wanted to reveals the facts out of controversies around their identity.
With Philippe Charlier of Paris Descartes University, France, he studied the high-resolution images of the only complete cranium of the group various points of thickness and composition of the bone. Even small changes or variation can give clues as to which human species the hobbit most closely resembles.
The resolution of the scans they used was about 25 times higher than that used in previous research. The result is, the hobbit is not a dwarf version or a diseased member of our species, Homo sapiens. Its something much more exotic.
The hobbit didnt have chin. As we know, the very presence of a chin is a defining trait of our species. No other hominins possessed one.
However, the hobbit had another similarity with Homo erectus (another species of ancient human), says Balzeau. This fits with the idea that the hobbit evolved from a population of this ancient human species.
That being said, the specimen remains strange. "Its eyes are very small and its shape is slightly different from H. erectus," he adds.
Source:BBC
(brl/tis)
