Smallest arm bone ever found sheds light on the mystery of the Flores ‘hobbits’

A little over a million years ago, a group of Homo erectus who had colonized Java in Indonesia continued their journey eastwards through the Sunda archipelago, perhaps on natural rafts, until they reached Flores. There they became isolated and, through an evolutionary phenomenon that sometimes occurs on islands, began to shrink. Around 300,000 years after their arrival — a very short time by evolutionary standards — the descendants of Homo erectus, who were about the same height as modern humans, had become dwarfs, measuring one meters in height. They had small brains, but the same ability as their ancestors to make tools. These tiny human relatives, the smallest ever discovered, are the ancestors of Homo floresiensis, the so-called hobbits, whose 60,000-year-old fossils were found on Flores in 2004.

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