The short stature humanoid fossil recorded in Southeast Asia known as the HobbitIt is one step closer to confirming whether it was a Homo sapiens small, or a new species.
Who would tell us that a couple of rocks and pieces of bone could offer us so much information about what happened millions of years ago in the ends of the earth. When identifying the nature of a fossil, it is quite a challenge to differentiate between some fossil bank similar to the one found, and to indicate whether our discovery may be a split of the known species, a population with a special characteristic, or even an entirely different species.
In this sense, the scientific community held a debate with the fossils of a small humanoid population from Flores, in Southeast Asia. If you like novels by Tolkien or the adaptation to the cinema of its magic, you will meet those little people who populated the region, who ate breakfast several times a day and whose size is defined by how medium by their human relatives of Gondor. While in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings stood at hobbits and humans around a common origin, heThe Flores fossils did not make it clear if they are relatives of the Homo Sapiens, or results in the chance of a population that for any reason is small.
The researchers diagnosed LB1 as having Down syndrome
LB1 is the most complete set of fossils recovered from an individual from the Flores population, and has served as a pattern in the investigation of the origin of these humanoids. What surprised us most was that the individual to whom these fossils belonged was diagnosed with Down syndrome, an anepluid characterized by trisomy 21.
The characteristics of Down syndrome are physically noticeable, due to the reduced size of the brain and therefore of the cranial cavity due to delayed cognitive development. However, the diagnosis in fossils is not easy, since there are tissues that disappear, along with the morphological changes characteristic of the group of fossils of their era, so that we cannot say with complete certainty that the individual suffered from Down syndrome.
But don’t worry, because they’ve already uncovered the secret of the Hobbit look of this fossil population, and its relationship to Down syndrome.
The truth about the appearance of the hobbit
The image provided by the international group of researchers led by anatomy professor Karen baab of theMidwestern University in Glendale refutes that the LB1 fossil belonging to the Homo floresiensis did not have Down syndrome thanks to a three-dimensional reconstruction of the figure of the skull.
The study published in the journal PLOS ONE found that the LB1 brain was much smaller than in individuals with Down syndrome, in addition to the size of the chin and cranial cavity that were outside the human size range.
The height of the individual LB1 will be 1.09 meters, and the The main characteristic resides in the size of the fur, as it was disproportionately short.relative to the feet and arms compared to all humans.
The conclusion that lovers of ESDLA will like
With all the evidence gathered, The hypothesis that the individual LB1 and the population that inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores 80,000 years ago suffered from Down syndrome is totally remote., and therefore they were a kind of archaic humanoids to which we could correctly assign the term of Homo florensis.
The ancestor of Homo sapiens had the appearance of a Hobbit, and although we know for sure that he did not suffer from Down syndrome, we cannot confirm if they ate breakfast several times a day, lived peacefully in the region of Flores, or had the difficult mission of carrying the unique ring to the Mount of Destiny.
