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. A jaw fragment and six teeth 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 came down with 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. The first dates had the species surviving long after modern humans reached the region, and the new ones make any meeting between them uncertain. The older end of the range rests on a jaw fragment and six teeth from another site on the island, 700,000 years old and smaller still.

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