Best foot forward: Assembly of the foot of the type specimens (LB1) of Homo floresiensis.
Credit: Djuna Ivereigh/ARKENAS.
SYDNEY: A study of the feet of the 'hobbit' Homo floresiensis adds to evidence that it is a real species and not a diseased or dwarfed modern human – the findings also hint it isn't even a close relative.
The remarkable discovery in 2004 of bones from a one-metre-tall hominin, on the Indonesian island of Flores, sparked a scientific furore. The bones date from around 18,000 years ago, and many believed them to represent a new dwarf species of human, H. floresiensis, which may even have persisted until 8,000 years ago.
Dwarf cretins
Others argued that the only known skull was from a modern human pygmy or someone whose brain was dwarfed by diseases such as cretinism or microcephaly, giving rise to an abnormally tiny skull.
Two new studies found in the British journal Nature today, go a long way toward settling this debate, even as they raise new quandaries that are sure to stoke further controversy.
William Jungers, an anthropologist from Stony Brook University in New York, U.S., led a team of researchers who analysed the reconstructed foot of the fossil. They compared the relative length, proportions and the shape of individual bones to a large sample of foot bones from humans and apes.
They found that, rather than being a shrunken version of a modern human foot, the bones of the fossil exhibited a fascinating mixture of primitive and modern features. In some ways it is very human. The big toe is aligned with the others and the joints make it possible to extend the toes as the body's full weight falls on the foot, attributes not found in great apes.
Primitive hominin
But, in other respects, the foot would have been startlingly primitive: far longer than its modern human equivalent, and equipped with a very small big toe, long, curved lateral toes, and a weight-bearing structure closer to a chimpanzee's.
"The foot evidence adds to the growing and overwhelming evidence that this is not a modern person, but rather a new species", Jungers told Cosmos Online. "These findings make it clear that there was more than one way to be a successful hominin."
Recent archaeological evidence from Kenya shows that the modern foot evolved more than 1.5 million years ago, most likely in Homo erectus. So unless the Flores hobbits became more primitive over time, they must have branched off the human line at an even earlier date.
This suggests "that the ancestor of H. floresiensis was not Homo erectus but instead some other, more primitive, hominin whose dispersal into Southeast Asia is still undocumented," the researchers concluded in their paper.
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so why Homo?
Surely all this evidence, which backs up the original cranial and dental comparisons, implies that the Hobbit should not have been called Homo floresiensis, but rather Australopithecus floresiensis, or some other genus name?
Homo?
The cranial features are consistant with being in the Homo genus, but the bones of the wrist, and now the foot, indicate a more primitive hominid. The collection of featuers are different from any previous finds, so don't know if this is a good fit for Australopithicus either.
In having such an odd combination of features it is sort of like Piltdown Man - a discovery in England that later proved to be a hoax.
dig deeper
There is one way that the dwarf erectus versus australopithecine debate can be settled - Dig deeper in the cave. If there are earlier skeletal remains down there, then we should see evidence of steady dwarfism. Or not.