MessageToEagle.com – The origin of the Hobbits has caused a lot of controversy among scientists. Were the Hobbits humans? Were they another species similar to humans or entirely different? These are questions that currently cause a heated anthropological debate.
A new study now reveals that the Hobbits were not humans like us.
These unknown beings, today referred to as the Hobbits were only 1m-tall (3ft) and it is believed they lived on Flores Island until at least 12,000 years ago. Then again, stone tools discovered elsewhere on Flores in 2010, suggest that potential ancestors of H. floresiensis could have been on the island a million years ago.
Scientists considered the species to be a very primitive form of human.
The brain of a female Hobbit was about the size of a chimpanzee, yet there is evidence that she used stone tools.
Controversy has raged ever since as to whether they are an unknown branch of early humans or specimens of modern man deformed by disease.
New study suggest the Hobbits were not human
The new study, based on an analysis of the skull bones, shows once and for all that the pint-sized people were not Homo sapiens, according to the researchers.
Until now, academic studies have pointing in one direction or another—and scientific discourse has sometimes tipped over into acrimony.
One group of scientists said that so-called Flores Man descended from the larger Homo erectus and became smaller over hundreds of generations.
The proposed process for this is called “insular dwarfing”—animals, after migrating across land bridges during periods of low sea level, wind up marooned on islands as oceans rise and their size progressively diminishes if the supply of food declines.
An adult hobbit stood a meter (three feet) tall, and weighed about 25 kilos (55 pounds).
Similarly, Flores Island was also home to a miniature race of extinct, elephant-like creatures called Stegodon.
See also:
Controversial Theory Suggests “Hobbits” Were Not Human
New Light On The Mysterious Hobbits – Discovered Teeth Suggest Hobbits Were A Separate Species
Four Other Humans Species Lived Alongside Modern Humans – New Study Suggests
Other researchers argued that H. floresiensis was in fact a modern human whose tiny size and small brain—no bigger than a grapefruit—was caused by a genetic disorder.
One suspect was dwarf cretinism, sometimes brought on by a lack of iodine. Another potential culprit was microcephaly, which shrivels not just the brain and its boney envelope.
Weighing in with a new approach, published in the Journal of Human Evolution, a pair of scientists in France used high-tech tools to re-examine the layers of the “hobbit” skull of a Hobbit known as Liang Bua 1 (nicknamed LB1), whose cranium is the most intact of nine known specimens.
Has the mystery of the Hobbits finally been solved?
“So far, we have been basing our conclusions on images where you don’t really see very much,” said lead author Antoine Balzeau, a scientist at France’s Natural History Museum.
“There is a lot of information contained in bone layers of the skull,” Balzeau told AFP.
The results, he said, were unambiguous: “There were no characteristics from our species”—that is, Homo sapiens.
And while they found evidence of minor maladies, there was nothing corresponding to the major genetic diseases other researchers had pointed to.
But if one part of the mystery may be solved, another remains intact.
For while the scientists could not exclude the possibility that the “hobbit” was a scaled-down version of Homo erectus, which arrived on the neighboring island of Java some million years ago, nor could they be sure that H. floresiensis was not a species it its own right.
“For the moment, we can’t say one way or the other,” Balzeau said.
The research conducted by Balzeau is intriguing, but it is doubtful the Hobbit controversy has ended. Most likely we will learn more about the identity of the Hobbits in the near future.
MessageToEagle.com
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