Early evolution of small body size in Homo floresiensis
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Kurniawan, I
Mizushima, S
Sawada, J
Lague, M
Setiawan, R
Sutisna, I
Wibowo, UP
Suwa, G
Kono, RT
Sasaki, T
Brumm, A
van den Bergh, GD
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Abstract
Recent discoveries of Homo floresiensis and H. luzonensis raise questions regarding how extreme body size reduction occurred in some extinct Homo species in insular environments. Previous investigations at Mata Menge, Flores Island, Indonesia, suggested that the early Middle Pleistocene ancestors of H. floresiensis had even smaller jaws and teeth. Here, we report additional hominin fossils from the same deposits at Mata Menge. An adult humerus is estimated to be 9 − 16% shorter and thinner than the type specimen of H. floresiensis dated to ~60,000 years ago, and is smaller than any other Plio-Pleistocene adult hominin humeri hitherto reported. The newly recovered teeth are both exceptionally small; one of them bears closer morphological similarities to early Javanese H. erectus. The H. floresiensis lineage most likely evolved from early Asian H. erectus and was a long-lasting lineage on Flores with markedly diminutive body size since at least ~700,000 years ago.
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Nature Communications
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15
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DP1093342
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© The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Archaeology
Anthropology
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Kaifu, Y; Kurniawan, I; Mizushima, S; Sawada, J; Lague, M; Setiawan, R; Sutisna, I; Wibowo, UP; Suwa, G; Kono, RT; Sasaki, T; Brumm, A; van den Bergh, GD, Early evolution of small body size in Homo floresiensis, Nature Communications, 2024, 15, pp. 6381