Just over a million years ago, some of the Homo erectus The descendants of the Sunda people, who had already colonized the island of Java in Indonesia, continued their journey eastwards through the Sunda archipelago, perhaps on natural rafts, until they reached Flores. There, they became isolated and, due to an evolutionary phenomenon that sometimes occurs on islands, they began to shrink. Around 300,000 years after their arrival, very little in evolutionary times, the descendants of the Sunda peoples began to shrink. erectuswhich were about the same height as us, had become dwarfs, a metre tall, with small brains, but the same ability as their elders to make tools. These tiny relatives of humans, the smallest ever discovered, are the ancestors of the Homo floresiensisthe so-called hobbits, whose fossils, some 60,000 years old, were found on Flores in 2004.
When those first bones appeared in the Liang Bua cave, anthropologists were divided between those who thought they had found a new species, those who believed they were tiny modern humans, and even those who saw in the remains a sick individual. The discussion began to clear up in 2016, when a group of researchers led by Yosuke Kaifu, from the National Science Museum in Tokyo, published the discovery of more remains similar to those of the hobbit in Mata Menge, a cave 70 kilometers from Liang Bua. They were jaw fragments and six teeth from three individuals about 700,000 years old and smaller even than those of the most recent hobbits, but it seemed clear that they were remains of their ancestors. The similarity with the anatomy of the hobbits erectus suggested that all floresiensisancient and recent, came from members of this species of explorers who lost stature on the island.
The same Kaifu group publishes this Tuesday in the magazine Nature Communications the analysis of more bone fragments that reinforce the story about the origin of the species. Along with more teeth, the researchers unearthed a fragment of a humerus that allows them to estimate the height of its owner at about 100 centimeters, six less than that calculated for the floresiensis later. In addition, for the authors of the article, the similarity of the teeth and jaw of the inhabitants of Mata Menge with the remains of Homo erectus unearthed in Java allows us to establish a link with them and rule out that the ancestors of the Flores humans were older hominids, such as Homo habilis or Australopithecus, which have not been found outside of Africa.
Aida Gómez-Robles, a researcher at University College London, points out that the new article “confirms what had already been published in 2016, that they were even smaller [que los humanos de Flores más modernos] and that there is a continuity with Homo erectus”. Regarding the estimation of the size of those individuals based on the remains of the humerus, which allow the authors of the article to affirm that it is the smallest known ancestor of humans, Gómez-Robles believes that, with this fossil, “the capacity for comparison is very limited” and the estimate “is very loose.” “But it is indisputable that it was a very small hominid and the molars, if compared with the known fossils, are the smallest by far,” he concludes.
Although the origin of the Homo floresiensis Although it may seem to be clearing up, there are still unsolved mysteries. One of them is their disappearance, some 50,000 years ago. Until then, they had survived using tools not very different from those of their ancestors, for hundreds of thousands of years, living alongside giant storks, pygmy elephants or Komodo dragons, which disappear from the fossil record along with hobbits. Of the usual suspects, modern humans, who had arrived in Australia 50,000 years ago and caused the extinction of many endemic species, no remains are found on Flores until 11,000 years ago, but that does not mean they were not there. The answers remain in the subsoil of Indonesia, perhaps in the caves of Liang Bua or Mata Menge, where much remains remain to be excavated.
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