Journal reference: Anatomical Record (DOI: 10.1002/ar.a.Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 08:00:49 Associated-names Kempsall, Paddy Boxid IA40058411 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier “We need a second skull to see what the variation is.” Only then will we know if the hobbit was one of a kind, or a typical resident of Stone Age Flores. Resolving the argument will require new material, says Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London, UK. Believers, however, think the metre-tall fossil and the fragmentary remains of seven other individuals reveal a hitherto unexpected branch of the human tree. Sceptics have sided with Martin, convinced that a hominid with a chimp-sized brain lacked the intelligence to live a Stone Age human lifestyle. “The brain is a combination of features I’ve never seen in any other primate,” she says.Īdditional studies of the fossil are unlikely to bridge the chasm. In another study, Dean Falk at Florida State University, US, found that the skull lacks pathological features that separate 10 modern microcepheliacs from normal Homo sapiens. The Pleistocene epoch ended about 12,000 years ago. “There’s no sign of anything but Homo floresiensis on Flores at the end of the Pleistocene,” he told New Scientist. Groves concluded the fossil was a separate species which had evolved on Flores from an unknown earlier hominid, perhaps an australopithecine, and gradually took on a dwarf form on the island. Yet just weeks earlier, Colin Groves at the Australian National University in Canberra, published a study in the Journal of Human Evolution (vol 51, p 360), which stated that the Flores skull does not have the shape of a microcephaliac. He argues that stone tools found at the site were made by normal Homo sapiens, not a separate species of hominids with 400-cubic-centimetre brains. The existence of a species of small-brained dwarf humans just 18,000 years ago on Flores is a mere fantasy, Martin says.
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