I had imagined that the Flores Island small-bodied people descended from some ancient wave of Asians. My expectations were that they preceded H. erectus and were linked to the first people to leave Africa, H. georgicus or even H. habilis. Now we have some proof that they derive from Homo erectus.
A paper published ten years ago (Kaifu Y, Kono RT, Sutikna T, Saptomo EW, Jatmiko, Due Awe R (2015) Unique Dental Morphology of Homo floresiensis and Its Evolutionary Implications. PLoS ONE 10(11): e0141614. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141614) found that tooth morphology placed the hobbit closer to H. erectus than to modern sapiens or older hominins like habilis:
"This evidence contradicts the earlier claim of an entirely modern human-like dental morphology of H. floresiensis, while at the same time does not support the hypothesis that H. floresiensis originated from a much older H. habilis or Australopithecus-like small-brained hominin species currently unknown in the Asian fossil record. These results are however consistent with the alternative hypothesis that H. floresiensis derived from an earlier Asian Homo erectus population and experienced substantial body and brain size dwarfism in an isolated insular setting. The dentition of H. floresiensis is not a simple, scaled-down version of earlier hominins. "
A more recent paper (Kaifu, Y., Kurniawan, I., Mizushima, S. et al. Early evolution of small body size in Homo floresiensis. Nat Commun 15, 6381 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-50649-7) published in August 2024 states thtat H. floresiensis descends from dwarfedH. erectus and not from older and less evolved ancestors like the Australopithecines or H. habilis. It reaches these conclusions after studying bone sizes and molar features. It also gives a timeline for their settling in Flores Island:
"Coupled with the recently revised arrival date for H. erectus on Java ( ~ 1.1 Ma, or at most younger than 1.3–1.5 Ma) and hominins on Flores (1.0–1.27 Ma), as well as the reported craniometric and odontometric analyzes which almost unanimously support strong affinities of H. floresiensis with H. erectus (particularly early H. erectus from Java), the following evolutionary model emerges. The earliest Flores hominins appeared on this Wallacean island ~1.0–1.27 Ma, probably unintentionally (i.e., through accidental ‘rafting’, perhaps on tsunami debris), and possibly as part of the initial colonization of the Sunda Shelf region by early H. erectus. The Flores hominins experienced substantial body size reduction soon after this event (within ~300,000 years), despite the presence of large-bodied predators such as ~3 meter-long Komodo monitors and crocodiles from the earliest paleontological record ( ~ 1.4 Ma) onwards6. This implies that giant reptilians did not represent a serious predation threat for early H. floresiensis or its progenitors. This early evolutionary event was followed by long-term stability in hominin body size, possibly also in cultural adaptations (e.g., stone technology), and minor morphological specialization in the dentition. How the small brain size reported for the ~60,000 years old LB11, evolved still remains unknown. At present, however, the available fossil data imply that small body size had been a functional adaptation for these insular hominins during and slightly beyond the Middle Pleistocene and indeed potentially up until the arrival of H. sapiens on Flores around 50,000 years ago; an event that, we suspect, precipitated the demise of H. floresiensis."
Perhaps the minute humans of Luzon share the same origin.
I doubt that these small people ever moved out of their islands, so there is no way that they could have reached the New World to inspire myths about dwarves. However, they could have left an imprint in the legends and tales of the Southeast Asians who came across them in the jungles of Sahul and Sundaland 50,000 years ago. Myths that were taken by humans and spread across the World.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©
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