1 / 10

Homo Floresiensis AKA the Hobbit

Homo Floresiensis AKA the Hobbit. By Regina Barasch. What is Homo Floresiensis ?. A species of dwarf human Only about 1 meter in height (about 3.2 feet) With a very small brain size of 417 cc (human size =around 1130 cc) With human-like teeth and a receding forehead and no chin.

king
Download Presentation

Homo Floresiensis AKA the Hobbit

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Homo FloresiensisAKA the Hobbit By Regina Barasch

  2. What is Homo Floresiensis? • A species of dwarf human • Only about 1 meter in height (about 3.2 feet) • With a very small brain size of 417 cc (human size =around 1130 cc) • With human-like teeth and a receding forehead and no chin. • With relatively long arms.

  3. Where and When was Homo Floresiensis Discovered? • At the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian Island of Flores in 2003

  4. Who Made the Discovery • A joint Australian-Indonesian team of paleoanthropologists and archaeologists looking on Flores for evidence of the original human migration of H. sapiens from Asia into Australia.

  5. What Exactly Did They Find? • The specimens are not fossilized, but were described as having "the consistency of wet blotting paper" . • Once exposed, the bones had to be left to dry before they could be dug up.

  6. How Old is the Species? • One sub-fossil skeleton was dated at 18,000 years old. • Parts of eight other individuals, dated from 94,000 to 13,000 years ago

  7. What is the Significance of the Finding • The discovery is widely considered the most important of its kind in recent history. • The new species challenges many of the ideas of the discipline. • It is so different from other members of genus Homo that it forces the recognition of a new, undreamt-of variability in the genus,

  8. Is It Really a New Species? • Whether the specimens represent a new species is a controversial issue within the scientific community. • In 2005, a computer-generated model of the skull showed that it was neither a pygmy nor an individual with a malformed skull and brain. • This lends support to the idea it belongs to a species distinct from Homo erectus. • Other scientists argue that it is a modern human with microencephaly, a disorder resulting in a small brain and other defects.

  9. What Next? • The discoverers of H. floresiensis fully expect to find the remains of other, equally divergent Homo species on other isolated islands of Southeast Asia.

  10. Connection to Modern Humans • Modern humans arrived on Flores between 55,000 and 35,000 years ago, and presumably interacted with floresiensis, • though there is no evidence of this at Liang Bua.

More Related