"Hobbit" or Homo floresiensis
Anthropologists have long had a fierce debate over the remains of miniature people who lived about 15 thousand years ago on an Indonesian island. According to a recently completed study, these people do not belong to the species Homo sapiens.
Fossil remains of the Floresian man, or Homo floresiensis, nicknamed "the hobbit" for its small size, were found on Flores Island back in 2003.
Controversy immediately arose as to whether the "hobbits" were an unknown branch of early humans or a variation of modern humans deformed by genetic disease.
Researchers, having analyzed the bones of the skull, unequivocally claim that miniature people do not belong to the species Homo sapiens.
Up to this point, academic scientific work has pointed in one direction, then in another, and the scientific discussion sometimes turned into an exchange of barbs.
The followers of one school believe that the Floresian man is a representative of the dwarf species Homo erectus, which has decreased over hundreds of generations in conditions of island isolation.
For example, on the same island of Flores, the remains of stegodons were found - miniature creatures resembling an elephant.
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So an adult hobbit was about a meter tall and weighed about 25 kilograms.
Another group of scientists believes that Homo floresiensis is a relative of modern humans, and its tiny size and small, not larger than a grapefruit, brain is the result of a genetic disorder.
One of the reasons was called "dwarf cretinism" arising from a lack of iodine in a woman during pregnancy in combination with other negative environmental factors. Another possible cause could be microcephaly, as a result of which not only the brain decreases, but also its bony membrane.
A piece of light on these theories was shed by the work of two scientists from France, published in the Journal of Human Evolution. They took a new approach by examining high-resolution images of the bones of the "hobbit's" skull.
More specifically, they studied the remains of the LB1 specimen, whose skull is the best preserved.
The first skeleton found turned out to be a bipedal primate, just over a meter tall and weighing about 30 kg. The age of the remains dates back to between 38 and 18 thousand years.
The mystery is only partially solved
“Until now, we have been based on images of not very high quality,” says the author of the work Antoine Balzot of the French Museum of Natural History.
Balzo worked with Philippe Charlier, a paleopathologist at the University of Paris Descartes, who specialized in solving medical mysteries. Scientists have carefully analyzed high-resolution images from Japan taken to develop maps of changes in bone thickness.
There is a lot of information in the layers of the bones of the skull, Balzo said.
“The results are clear,” says Balzo. "The characteristics do not match our species, that is, Homo sapiens."
And while they found signs of minor diseases, they did not find anything similar to the serious genetic diseases that other researchers have pointed out.
Now that one part of the puzzle has been solved, the other is still a mystery.
So far, scientists cannot determine for sure whether the "hobbits" are a reduced species of Homo erectus, who migrated from the neighboring island of Java about a million years ago, or if this is a separate branch of evolution.
“At the moment we cannot give a definite answer,” admitted Balzo.
