Japanese scholars say that hobbits may have evolved from Javanese apes

1. Capable people, 2. Homo sapiens, 3. Flores (Hobbit), 4. Homo erectus, 5. Bowers 6. Heidelberger, 7. Neanderthal

TOKYO, Nov. 22 (Xinhua) -- The islands of Indonesia once lived a very small primitive human flores, with an adult height of only about 110 centimeters, and scientists nicknamed them "Hobbits" according to the fantasy novel "The Lord of the Rings". Where did they come from? It has been controversial in recent years.

The National Museum of Nature and Science recently issued a communiqué saying that the latest research shows that the "hobbit" evolved from the more ancient Homo erectus, the Javan ape man, and in the process of evolution, the body and brain volume became miniaturized.

In 2003, researchers first discovered floresian fossils in formations about 20,000 to 70,000 years ago in the caves of Flores Island in Indonesia, and in 2004, after being reported by the journal Nature, it attracted global attention and is considered one of the most important discoveries in human evolutionary research.

The Flores were extremely short, with adult heights of only about 110 centimeters. Previous fossil records have shown that the general trend of human evolution is to be large, and the miniaturization process of Flores has always been curious. In addition, whether they are dwarfed breeds of modern humans (Homo sapiens) or a separate species is also controversial. Scientists now tend to think of them as a separate species of humanoids, unlike Homo sapiens.

A team led by Yosuke Kaibe, a researcher at the National Museum of Natural Science in Japan, investigated in detail the shape and size of the teeth of the Flores people, and compared them with modern humans, African and Asian ape people, and found that the tooth characteristics of the Flores people were closest to those of the Javan ape people, and it is likely that they evolved from the Javan ape man or its kind.

The Javan ape is 160 to 170 cm tall, and its fossils were found in 1891 in the middle Pleistocene strata of Java, Indonesia, and are thought to have lived about 1.7 million to 1.8 million years ago.

Fossil teeth are considered to be the most important clue to investigate the evolutionary process, but the teeth of flores have not been studied before, and there are several hypotheses about their evolutionary process. Humans have become unusually small as they have evolved, and the team believes that flores lived on islands with little food and no foreign enemies for a long time, so their bodies became smaller.

The paper has been published in a new issue of the American Online Science Journal, The Public Science Library Comprehensive Volume.