QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA—According to a Cosmos Magazine report, a tiny, fossilized humerus uncovered at the Mata Menge site on the Indonesian island of Flores has been dated to 700,000 years ago. This arm bone came from an individual thought to have been a Homo floresiensis adult who was smaller in stature than the 60,000-year-old individuals whose remains were discovered on the island in Liang Bua cave in 2003. Two hominin teeth were also uncovered at Mata Menge. One of them resembles the shape of early Homo erectus teeth that have been unearthed on the Indonesian island of Java. “The evolutionary history of the Flores hominins is still largely unknown,” said Adam Brumm of Griffith University. “However, the new fossils strongly suggest that the ‘Hobbit’ story did indeed begin when a group of the early Asian hominins known as Homo erectus somehow became isolated on this remote Indonesian island, perhaps one million years ago, and underwent a dramatic body size reduction over time,” he explained. This process, called island dwarfism, can occur when large-bodied mammals become isolated on islands with few resources. Smaller bodies tend to evolve over time in this situation, Brumm said, because they require less food to survive. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Nature Communications. To read about immense stones erected across the Indonesian archipelago, go to “Java’s Megalithic Mountain.”
