Flora the Hobbit (Homo floresiensis) by EvX

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

Meet Flora the 'hobbit', aka Homo floresiensis. This sculpture is a composite based off this and the side view in this article.
Note: this is only my second sculpture made with Sculptris and I haven't gotten to print it, yet. If you do, I'd love to hear how it turns out, or any feedback on making it print better. Thank you.
These diminutive hominins were discovered on the island of Flores, Indonesia, in 2003. They lived about 60,000-100,000 years ago and were only about 3 and a half feet tall, with skulls significantly smaller than ours--yet they show unmistakable signs of being part of the human family tree.
Even among scientists, there is still debate about whether Homo floresiensis truly represents a new human species, or if it simply hails from a tribe that happened to be particularly short. For example, the pygmy Taron people are supposed to average only 4 feet 3 inches, yet they are undoubtedly members of Homo sapiens--but even they are considerably taller than Flora.
This controversy dissolved into outright vandalism and theft when one scientist, Teuku Jacob, stole most of the hobbits' remains from Jakarta's National Research Center of Archaeology! Eventually most of the bones were returned, several of them badly damaged and a pelvis, critical for understanding how Homo floresiensis walked, smashed.
Teuku Jacob thought Flora was not a new species, but simply a regular Homo sapiens suffering from some form of cretinism or dwarfism, and wen to extreme measures to prevent other scientists from proving him wrong.
Nevertheless, a variety of complicated mathematical analyses on the remaining bones indicate that Flora's skeleton was most similar not to Homo sapiens, but with earlier hominin species like Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and even Australopithecus.
The most parsimonious answer to the debate is that Flora was descended from Homo erectus, who arrived on the island of Flores about a million years ago. Even today, many of the people living on Flores are short--Flores may just trigger island dwarfism. But if Flora is actually more closely related to Homo habilis (or the non-homo Australopithecus line!) then she may have arrived in Flores long before Erectus--and may have been the first hominin to leave Africa.
And Flora was quite small--her skull only had a cubic volume of about 380 cm--Neanderthals had cranial volumes between 1,300 cm and 1,600 cm. (Modern human skulls are slightly smaller than Neanderthal.) It is only half the size of Homo erectus's brain and close to those of chimps or Australopithecus.
However, Flora may have been smarter than such a small cranium suggests. Much of our brain controls and responds to the body, so creatures with smaller bodies can function equally well with smaller brains--and Flora had a very small body. According to Falk et al, the parts of Flora's brain necessary for thinking are larger than expected--and much closer in size to a normal human's. If Flora was indeed a Homo erectus who had become dwarfed by some aspect of the environment on Flores, perhaps she retained strategic intelligence-boosting adaptations even as she shrank.
In silent testimony to Flora's abilities, Homo floresiensis fossils have been found alongside numerous stone tools, the remains of fires, and of large animals cooperatively hunted and butchered.
Unfortunately, the little hobbits died out around the same time Homo sapiens arrived on Flores, just like the Neanderthals in Europe.
Here's an article with more fascinating information about the "hobbits", Homo floresiensis...