Analysis of the remains of a representative of a mysterious species, nicknamed the hobbit, showed that this creature is not the ancestor of modern humans. Nevertheless, the question of who he really is remains open.
In 2003, on the Indonesian island of Flores, the bones of a tiny mysterious creature from the tribe of a hominini (an early-stage human) were found.
He was given the scientific name Homo floresiensis or "Man of Flores."
But this fossil dwarf is better known by an easy-to-remember nickname - he was nicknamed the hobbit.
Not a single creature like the "hobbit" has been previously discovered in the history of human evolution (about two million years).
Fossil loneliness
The growth of an adult, for example, was only about 1 meter 10 centimeters, and the weight should not have exceeded 25 kilograms.
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And, even more unusual, he had a very tiny skull - it is unlikely that the "hobbit" brain was larger than that of a modern chimpanzee.
Most likely, "hobbits" inhabited the island of Flores for 100 thousand years. And they disappeared forever about 15-18 thousand years ago.
Thus, this is the creature closest to man, which lived on Earth simultaneously with representatives of our species.
The question of whether this creature is some kind of separate biological species remains a serious subject of dispute among paleontologists.
Some argue that it was simply a modern man with some form of dwarfism, i.e. dwarfism.
Other scientists have even suggested that the size of the "hobbit" - and especially its microscopic brain - is due to a genetic disorder such as microcephaly or Down syndrome.
The isolation from the rest of the world on the island of Flores, the isolation of the habitat is, perhaps, another factor that could determine the peculiarities of its evolution, as a result of which the creature became so small.
On the same island, for example, the dwarf ancestors of elephants also lived.
And he is not at all sick
These ideas are hotly debated, and experts have resorted to countless different methods in order to investigate the shape and size of the "hobbit" remains.
The problem, says paleontologist Antoine Balso of the French National Museum of Natural History, is that many of these judgments focus on skull characteristics that are normal for hominini.
“It cannot be argued that any one feature is the main clue if it turns out to be natural for the fossil remains of representatives of many other species,” says Balso.
Another caveat is that many of the scientists who studied the "hobbit" relied on casts and scans in low resolution, which were unable to preserve important anatomical details.
Balso considers the remains found on Flores Island to be the most important fossils found in recent years, and therefore wants to get to the bottom of the debate about their origins.
Together with Philippe Charlet of the Descartes University in Paris, he studied high-resolution images of a single intact skull from the group - the skull of Liang Bua 1 (LB1) - in order to determine the thickness and structure of the bone.
Even small changes or variations can be a clue to which members of the human race the "hobbit" bears the most resemblance.
The images they used were about 25 times the resolution of the images they used for previous studies.
Scientists also looked at the inside of the skull to understand how its various components are connected together.
“None of the features identified helped explain the strange shape of this specimen,” says Balso.
“The shape of his skull is definitely not the shape of the skull that modern humans have … even a person with pathologies,” he stresses.
Taken together, the results of his scientific work, which will soon be published in the Journal of Human Evolution, suggest that none of the characteristics of this skull correspond to any of the populations of modern humans.
In other words, the "hobbit" is not a small and sick representative of our species, Homo sapiens. He is a much more exotic creature.
The most important feature of the "hobbit" should also be called the absence of a chin.
But as we wrote earlier, the presence of a chin is a distinctive feature of our species. No other hominini have it.
Who are you, Mr. Hobbit?
In the context of the widespread debate surrounding the "hobbit", there have already been so many "definitive answers" to the question of who he was, ironically, biological anthropologist Simon Underdown of Oxford Brooks University in the United Kingdom.
Yes, the "hobbit" looks more like Homo erectus than any other hominini, Balso says. This is consistent with the idea that the "hobbit" was the result of the evolution of this species of ancient people.
Be that as it may, the strangeness of the found specimen cannot be taken away. “He had very small eyes, and in appearance he was slightly different from Homo erectus,” emphasizes Balso.
Some experts even argue that Homo floresiensis is too primitive to be considered part of our genus Homo.
Some of the features of its skeleton are more similar to those that we can see in representatives of a more primitive group of humanoid apes called Australopithecus.
This makes the "hobbit" a close relative of the fossilized remains of the famous Lucy, the most famous of all Australopithecus.
“Many of those who believe that this is a modern person are doctors. Therefore, they make a diagnosis based on common characteristics that match the symptoms of specific diseases or pathologies,”says Balso.
If we found a modern person who has the same characteristics as the "hobbit", then this comparison could be valid.
But as far as we know, such people do not exist.
However, Robert Eckhardt, professor of developmental genetics and evolutionary morphology at Pennsylvania State University, USA, holds the view that the LB1 creature (Liang Bua 1) was a modern human suffering from genetic diseases.
“New scientific studies do not show that the thickness of the skull bones in LB1 was such that it can be distinguished into a separate species,” says Eckhard. There is no evidence that the remaining 11 or 12 individuals were [in this sense] abnormal.
Moreover, if only one complete "hobbit" skull has survived, we cannot know what the skulls of others looked like.
Thus, identifying a single species from a single skull becomes problematic, he adds.
The debate about who the "hobbit" really is will undoubtedly continue, in part because there are many different approaches to studying the problem.
Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London says studies designed to date the mysterious creature's lifetime can shed new light on the mystery of its origin. But at the moment we do not know to which genus the "hobbit" should be attributed.
