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Palaeoanthropology

The dawn of Homo floresiensis

Nature volume 534, pages 188–189 (2016)Cite this article

New fossil findings demonstrate that the diminutive hominin Homo floresiensis lived on the Indonesian island of Flores at least 700,000 years ago, and may point to its rapid dwarfism from the larger Homo erectus. See Letters p.245 & p.249

Since the first description of Homo floresiensis in 2004 (ref. 1), these little hominins from the Indonesian island of Flores have raised very big questions. Do these skeletal remains represent a new species in the extinct hominin family, or are they modern humans who were pathologically dwarfed, or members of a short-stature population? If they belong to a different species, what was its evolutionary origin? Why was it so different from other hominin species? The most common answer to these questions has been repeated for more than ten years: we need more remains from Flores — especially from different sites and older time periods — to tip the scales. On pages 245 and 249 of this issue, van den Bergh et al.2 and Brumm et al.3 report the finding of those long-awaited remains.

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Figure 1: Candidates for the ancestry of Homo floresiensis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, Aida Gómez-Robles is in the Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology, The George Washington University, Washington DC 20052, USA.,

    Aida Gómez-Robles

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  1. Aida Gómez-Robles
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Correspondence to Aida Gómez-Robles.

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Gómez-Robles, A. The dawn of Homo floresiensis. Nature 534, 188–189 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/534188a

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