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Among the hominin fossils found at the
Mata Menge site on the Indonesian island of Flores was part of a lower jaw.
Kinez Riza/Nature
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Hobbit. That is the nickname given for a 3-foot-tall human relative that once lived in what is now known as Indonesia. New discovery suggests that its island life is what created this dainty creature.
Homo
florensiensis also
known as Hobbits were first discovered by anthropologists in 2004 on the island
of Flores.
They were chimp-size, with tiny brains
and long arms, but has the knowledge to use stone tools and have teeth much
like ours. They have lived about 60,000 years ago. But the big question is—Who are they?
One idea was that their larger human
ancestors from Africa, Homo erectus,
ended up on this island, then shrank because of the island life. Some theories
say that animals on island evolve to become smaller. But there was still no
hard evidence of “island dwarfism” applied to human ancestors.
According to Aida Gomez-Robles, an
anthropologist at George Washington University, some scientists believed
Hobbits to be just modern humans with some abnormality, like microcephaly, that
changed their head shape and made them smaller.
Scientists have now found more tiny,
Hobbit-like bones on Flores. Some teeth and part of a lower jaw. Shockingly,
the bones date back 700,000 years — way older than the first Hobbits and
predating modern humans by hundreds of thousands of years.
Gerrit van den Bergh from Wollongong
University in Australia says clearly, this was a long-standing population of
very different human relatives. He also suggested that ancient human ancestors,
probably Homo erectus, traveled from
Africa to Asia, perhaps carried by a tsunami.
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This aerial image taken in October
2015 shows the Mata Menge site on Flores where bones dating back 700,000 years
were found.
Kinez Riza/Nature
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He came up with that theory after that
tsunami that happened in Indonesia in 2004, where a week after the event,
several people were picked up out from the sea and floating 600 kilometers from
the coast, clinging to a tree.
According to van den Bergh, once the
Hobbits reached Flores, island dwarfism set in. Scientists also found elephant fossils
on the island which also suffered the same condition.
Despite their small brains, the
Hobbits were still smart enough to make stone tools. But according to Adam
Brumm from Griffith University in Australia, they didn't seem to get any smarter at all. Their own ‘technology’ stayed the same for hundreds and
hundreds of thousands of years and did not evolve at all. Showing that their
kind live long, yet did not prosper.
Source: NPR Brad Shaw Foundation
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