Homo floresiensis (cast) |
Reading Becoming Human: Our Past, Present and Future a special publication by Scientific American editors, the chapter Rethinking the Hobbits of Indonesia by Kate Wong was something of a surprise.
I had assumed the so-called 'Hobbit', the diminutive hominid known to taxonomists as Homo floresiensis and to paleoanthropologists as LB1, after Liang Bua, the name of the cave it was found in in 2004 on the Indonesian island of Flores, was generally considered just that - a member of the Homo genus which had become miniaturised. Miniaturisation is common on islands, probably in response to limited resource and a generally smaller number of predators.
The problem, as I understood it, was that the cranial capacity of LB1 was only a little larger than a chimpanzee's and yet stone tools were found associated with it which showed a tool-making ability at least as advanced as H. erectus with a far larger brain.