Scientists continue to study the bones of the mysterious dwarfs found on an island in the Indian Ocean
With renewed vigor, the dispute flared up: who should be considered the strange people, whose bones were discovered in 2004 by architects during excavations on the island of Flores (Indonesia)? Then scientists stumbled upon the skeleton of an adult 37-year-old woman, whose height did not exceed 60 centimeters (!). The age of the "gnome" was determined by the preserved teeth. Fragments of the bodies of other tiny people were also found there.
The mysterious remains have sparked a lot of controversy. Some scientists believed that these were ordinary people. They simply suffered from some kind of disease that slows down their growth. Others, on the contrary, argued that 10-15 thousand years ago, when mammoths were still roaming the Earth, a tribe of dwarfs lived next to our ancestors - a different kind of people. They have already been nicknamed hobbits.
Experts have studied the wrist bones of the "hobbits". And with the help of 3D technologies, they proved that they are very different from the same bones of modern humans, including dwarfs and midgets. But they resemble the bones of the wrist of an ancient African monkey. Therefore, Matthew Tocheri from the National Museum of Natural History (USA) and his colleagues from Australia and Indonesia came to the conclusion that the hobbits are representatives of the lateral branch of man. They originated in Africa. And leaving it, they began to settle around the world. This happened long before we Homo sapiens and our Neanderthal cousins came along.
The brain of the "hobbits" is about three times smaller than that of humans. However, they still knew how to handle stones - in a cave on the island of Flores, archaeologists discovered many stone tools.
And here's a new study. Keran McNulty from the University of Minnesota (USA) carried out a comparative three-dimensional analysis of the anthropometric indicators of modern man, Neanderthal man and all the intermediate stages of ancient man known today.
Determined the ratio of the length of the legs and arms to the body, step size and other parameters. It turned out that the proportions of the Indonesian hobbit almost perfectly coincides with the ape man discovered in 1999 in the vicinity of the Georgian city of Dmanisi.
Then - 9 years ago - the "Georgian man" pretty much surprised scientists with very long arms. And their structure was such that in a relaxed state the palm was turned outward.
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The “primitive Georgian” sprout was also small - about one and a half meters, weighed under 50 kilograms. Some scholars consider him the first European. But it turns out that the "Georgian man", whose age is more than 1.5 million years, is anthropologically connected with a hobbit who lived relatively recently from the Flores island. But why? For researchers, this is still a big mystery.