Flora the Hobbit (Homo floresiensis)

thingiverse

Meet Flora, a diminutive hominin known as Homo floresiensis. This sculpture combines elements from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis#/media/File:Homo_floresiensis.jpg">this image</a> and the side view in this article.<a href="http://www.pasttime.org/2014/01/episode-10-field-guide-the-hobbit-an-unexpected-discovery/"> This sculpture was created with Sculptris, and I'm eager to hear how it prints out or any feedback on improving its printability.</a> These tiny hominins were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. They lived around 60,000-100,000 years ago and stood about three and a half feet tall, with skulls significantly smaller than ours - yet they clearly belonged to the human family tree. Even among scientists, there's ongoing debate about whether Homo floresiensis represents a new human species or if it's simply a tribe that happened to be particularly short. For instance, the pygmy Taron people average only four feet three inches tall, yet they're undoubtedly members of Homo sapiens - but even they are considerably taller than Flora. This controversy escalated into 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, crucial for understanding how Homo floresiensis walked, smashed. Teuku Jacob believed Flora was not a new species but simply a regular Homo sapiens suffering from some form of cretinism or dwarfism, and he went to extreme measures to prevent other scientists from proving him wrong. However, various 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 plausible explanation for the debate is that Flora descended from Homo erectus, who arrived on the island of Flores about a million years ago. Even today, many people living on Flores are short - Flores may 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 had a cubic volume of about 380 cm, while Neanderthals had cranial volumes between 1,300 cm and 1,600 cm. (Modern human skulls are slightly smaller than Neanderthal.) It's 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 became 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...<a href="http://www.pasttime.org/2014/01/episode-10-field-guide-the-hobbit-an-unexpected-discovery/">"hobbits"</a>.