Arm bone suggests Homo floresiensis was forced to undergo dramatic reduction in body size after being marooned on Flores
The remains of a member of the smallest ancient human species on record, who stood at just 1m tall, have been discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores.
Since the discovery of the first “hobbit” fossils, dating from 60,000 years ago, the miniature human’s evolutionary origins have been fiercely disputed.have questioned whether floresiensis was even a unique species or simply a tribe of modern humans afflicted by a congenital stunting disease, while others proposed they were related to a more primitive ape-like species that was small to begin with.
“This 700,000-year-old adult humerus is not just shorter than that of Homo floresiensis, it is the smallest upper arm bone known from the hominin fossil record worldwide,” said Prof Adam Brumm from Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Humanand a co-author of the paper. “This very rare specimen confirms our hypothesis that the ancestors of Homo floresiensis were extremely small in body size.
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