2024-08-07 10:03:40
August 6 in a study published in the journal Nature Communications 700,000-year-old fossilized remains are said to have belonged to Homo floresiensis – an extinct species of extremely small people that once lived on the island of Flores, south of mainland Indonesia.
The new research may shed light on when H. floresiensis first became so small.
“Having a big body, a big brain, and becoming intelligent is not necessarily our destiny,” says Yosuke Kaifu, lead author of the study and a professor at the University of Tokyo Museum. “Depending on the natural environment, the ways of evolution were different not only for animals in general, but also for humans.”
Until now, it was believed that H. floresiensis was on average a meter tall. But these new studies show that this species that is Standing man branch, was on average 6 cm lower. H. erectus is an extinct human lineage that lived 2 million years ago. 250,000 years old and had a similar physique to modern humans.
Until this study, the least known H. floresiensis the bones were found in Liang Bua, a cave on the island of Flores south of Manta Menge, where the new remains were found.
In their analysis, the researchers studied the newly found fossils, including teeth and part of an arm bone. They found that the humerus may be “the smallest adult human bone ever found,” according to the report.
Investigators quickly concluded that the bones did not belong to a child.
“Adult bones leave more traces of metabolism (we call it bone remodeling) than children’s bones,” says Y. Kaifu. – While observing the cut bone sample with a microscope, we detected a strong signal of such traces in Mata Menge’s humerus.”
“The fossils of Mata Menge, which we report here, showed that it was extremely small Homo floresiensis body size evolved during the first 300,000 years of their history on the island, and then small body size persisted for more than 600,000 years. Why this happened is another complicated question,” says the scientist.
On the one hand, the evolution of smaller body size may simply have been a matter of island natural selection. For example, island elephants sometimes became smaller over time. It is possible that “you don’t need to be big on the islands because there are no lions and tigers,” says Y. Kaifu.
Being big, meanwhile, has noticeable disadvantages: you need to eat more, and it takes longer to grow. Ancient humans on an isolated island may have become smaller because of this pressure, Kaifu says.
“We tend to think that humans are special among animals,” says the researcher. “However, Flores’ data shows that we humans, like other animals, are also governed by natural selection and can evolve in unexpected directions.”
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2024-08-07 10:03:40