© Bobin's Peter Schouten AMHomo floresiensis or 'Hobbit' illustration.
Diminutive humans who died out on an Indonesian island some 15,000 years ago were not Homo sapiens but a different species, according to a study that dives into a fierce anthropological debate.Fossils of
Homo floresiensis, dubbed "the hobbits" due to their tiny stature, were discovered on the island of Flores in 2003.
Controversy has raged ever since as to whether they were an unknown branch of early humans or specimens of modern man deformed by disease.
The study, based on an analysis of the skull bones, shows once and for all that the pint-sized people were not
Homo sapiens, according to the researchers.
Until now, academic studies have pointed in one direction or another and scientific discourse has sometimes tipped over into acrimony.
One school of thought holds that so-called Flores Man descended from the larger
Homo erectus and became smaller over hundreds of generations.
The proposed process for this is called "insular dwarfing". Animals, after migrating across land bridges during periods of low sea level, wind up marooned on islands as oceans rise and their size progressively diminishes if the supply of food declines.
An adult hobbit stood one metre tall and weighed about 25 kilograms.
Similarly, Flores Island was also home to a miniature race of extinct, elephant-like creatures called Stegodon.
But other researchers argue that
Homo floresiensis was in fact a modern human whose tiny size and small brain, no bigger than a grapefruit, was caused by a genetic disorder.
One suspect was dwarf cretinism, sometimes brought on by a lack of iodine. Another potential culprit was microcephaly, which shrivels not just the brain but its bony envelope. Weighing in with a new approach, published in the
Journal of Human Evolution, a pair of scientists in France used high-tech tools to re-examine the layers of the "hobbit" skull.
More precisely, they looked at the remains of
Liang Bua 1 (nicknamed LB1), whose cranium is the most intact of nine known specimens.
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