'Tiny people' in Indonesia are not new species

A recent study rejected the hypothesis that the fossil fossil found in Indonesia in 2004 was a new species. After studying stunting in many animals, they conjecture that Homo floresiensis is just a modern person living in harsh conditions.

Floresiensis Homo people may look like this.( Photo: BBC )

The remains of a small woman were found in a cave in Flores, Indonesia. Named H. floresiensis by the names of its founders, "she" quickly became known as "Hobbit". In its first publication in 2004, some anthropologists argued that this was a new breed. According to them, the skeleton is characterized by a modern person with a small head - a phenomenon that is quite common in isolated human populations and is accompanied by a reduction in brain functions.

Peter Brown and Mike Morwood from New England University, Australia, hypothesized that Homo floresiensis, with a 380 cm3 brain, is the product of a known phenomenon of dwarf or localized islands. This phenomenon refers to isolated species, under the pressure of limited food sources, that have evolved into smaller or larger species than their original ancestors. In the case of Homo floresiensis, the researchers thought that this 1-meter-tall human body came from Homo erectus (a long-ago extinct ancient breed, who had settled on Flores island some 800,000 years ago), in a small direction. go.

But at 380 cm3, some argue that the skull capacity of a Hobbit is too small to be considered a dwarf Homo erectus. And now there is more research to support this view.

Ann MacLarnon, from Roehampton University, England, who has been monitoring dwarfism in a variety of mammal species from dogs to elephants, has made a new observation: " If dwarfed, the process of shrinking the size of the species' brain will be slow. much more than body size ".

" Brain size is the key to identifying an animal ," she said. For example, there is almost no difference in brain size between the smallest modern people (like the 1.4 meter high Bambuti in Congo) and the highest (the Masai 2 meter high in east Africa).

Her team calculated that a dwarf Homo erectus with a brain of 400 cm3 would weigh about 2 kilograms. " That is only one-tenth of the weight of the Flore ." The only way to explain this difference is to shrink the skull. And because this disease is linked to the gene, it will inherit according to the family.

" The most reasonable possibility is that they are dwarves - modern Homo sapiens and small heads. They have developed spiritually ," said Robert Martin, the team leader.

" Although it was only in the hands of a skull, the other bones we found proved that the girl was an ordinary member in an isolated dwarf population ," Morwood said.

T. An