The miniature hominins that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores about 15 thousand years ago were refused to be considered relatives of Homo sapiens. A study by French scientists provides new evidence of the uniqueness of the Flores hobbits. The work has been prepared for publication in the Journal of Human Evolution, and is briefly reported by The Telegraph.
Immediately after the discovery of the remains in the Liang Bua cave in 2003, disputes erupted among anthropologists whether the creature weighing 25 kilograms was an ordinary person (suffering from Down syndrome or Laron's dwarfism) or it was a representative of an unknown species of Homo.
Antoine Balzeau of the French Museum of Natural History and paleopathologist Philippe Charlier took a new approach to analyzing the skull of a hobbit. They obtained ultra-high resolution images of his bone layers and calculated its thickness. According to scientists, the structure of the skull of Homo floresiensis lacks the main features characteristic of Homo sapiens. In addition, there is nothing in the examined remains that would indicate hereditary genetic diseases associated with dwarfism in humans.
Scientists emphasize that even if their conclusions are recognized as true, the origin of the hobbits will remain unclear. These could be both Homo erectus's, which have diminished over hundreds of years of island life, and the descendants of a branch of the genus Homo unknown to science.
In 2014, an article was published in the authoritative journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the authors of which argued that the brain size and height of a Flores person is within the normal range for an Austronesian with Down syndrome. This article caused a scandal in the scientific community: anthropologists and paleontologists claimed that it was published bypassing normal peer review procedures and does not stand up to objective criticism.