HUMAN EVOLUTION

The Small People of Flores

~700,000 to 50,000 years ago

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Pleistocene · Chibanian

On one Indonesian island a human lineage shrank to about a metre tall, with a brain the size of a chimpanzee's, and went on making stone tools for at least a hundred and forty thousand years. The elephants sharing the island shrank too, and the rats grew. Jaw fragments from elsewhere on Flores, seven hundred thousand years old and smaller still, suggest the shrinking happened early and then held.

Why it matters

Island rules apply to us as well. Isolation and a small food supply push large animals down in size and small ones up, and a human lineage went through the same machine as the elephants it lived beside. Brain size followed body size, which is a more uncomfortable thought than the dwarfing itself.

Dating & uncertainty

The skeletons from Liang Bua were first dated to 18,000 years ago; a restudy of the layers moved them to between 100,000 and 60,000. Jaw fragments from another site on the island, 700,000 years old and smaller still, suggest the dwarfing happened early and lasted.

Sources

1. Sutikna et al. (2016), Nature · Revised stratigraphy and chronology for Homo floresiensis at Liang Bua in Indonesia
2. van den Bergh et al. (2016), Nature · Homo floresiensis-like fossils from the early Middle Pleistocene of Flores
3. Scardia et al. (2021), Evolutionary Anthropology · What kind of hominin first left Africa?

Earth history as one day

23:59:4613.3 s before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day