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Originally shared by Ciro Villa

New study based on Dental analysis suggests that Homo Floresiensis was a separate species from modern humans!

"(Phys.org)—A team of researchers affiliated with the National Museum of Nature and Science in Japan, The University of Wollongong in Australia and The National Research and Development Centre for Archaeology, in Indonesia, has performed the first comprehensive analysis of the teeth from the skeletal remains of several of the creatures found on the Indonesian Island of Flores starting back in 2003—they are reporting that their examination has revealed that the creatures were indeed members of a separate species from modern humans, not modern humans with microcephaly. In their paper uploaded to the open access site PLoS ONE, the team describes their analysis and what they found that led them to their conclusions."

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-11-dental-analysis-homo-floresiensis-species.html

The study: Yousuke Kaifu et al. Unique Dental Morphology of Homo floresiensis and Its Evolutionary Implications, PLOS ONE (2015). http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0141614

Abstract:

" Homo floresiensis is an extinct, diminutive hominin species discovered in the Late Pleistocene deposits of Liang Bua cave, Flores, eastern Indonesia. The nature and evolutionary origins of H. floresiensis' unique physical characters have been intensively debated. Based on extensive comparisons using linear metric analyses, crown contour analyses, and other trait-by-trait morphological comparisons, we report here that the dental remains from multiple individuals indicate that H. floresiensis had primitive canine-premolar and advanced molar morphologies, a combination of dental traits unknown in any other hominin species. The primitive aspects are comparable to H. erectus from the Early Pleistocene, whereas some of the molar morphologies are more progressive even compared to those of modern humans. 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. "

Image: A female Homo floresiensis. Reconstruction by John Gurche. Photo by Chip Clark

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