"They kind of fit in where you'd probably expect them to fit in, in terms of ancestry, when you compare that group of people to other populations in South-East Asia, Oceania and so on," he said. They found Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA within the pygmy genomes - which was expected - but nothing out of the ordinary that might point to another archaic hominin, said study co-author and University of Queensland geneticist Peter Visscher.
To find out, Princeton University evolutionary biologist Serena Tucci and her colleagues compared DNA from 32 pygmy adults from the village of Rampasasa with sequences from modern humans from around the world, as well as Neanderthals and Denisovans. The question of whether or not they're related - and if today's pygmy population can attribute their short stature to hobbit ancestors - has sparked intense debate within archaeological circles. (To be classified a pygmy population, average male adult height must be no taller than 1.5 metres). The current pygmy population averages around 1.45 metres. Homo floresiensis stood just over a metre tall. We carry the signatures of those ancient dalliances in the form of Neanderthal and Denisovan genetic material woven in with our own.īut what about other long-dead hominins, such as the hobbit? The long and the short of itĪt first glance, modern Flores pygmies appear like they might harbour some of the extinct hobbit DNA. ( Supplied: Peter Schouten)Īnd they bred with hominin species that are extinct today. Modern humans are a relatively recent addition to the gang, arriving in Sumatra around 73,000 to 63,000 years ago and going on to colonise other islands shortly afterwards.įossils suggest the hobbit stood a tad over a metre tall. It's thought that an ancient human species known as Homo erectus colonised the island of Java from around 1.7 million years to 23,000 years ago, and Homo floresiensis lived on Flores from roughly 190,000 to 50,000 years ago. But it has a long history of habitation by people other than our own species, Homo sapiens.
Indonesia today is home to hundreds of ethnic groups spread across thousands of volcanic islands. The international study was published in Science today. Instead, short stature independently evolved in human inhabitants of the island at least twice, separated by tens of thousands of years.
Even though current inhabitants live just a few kilometres from the cave that housed fossils of the long-dead Homo floresiensis - also dubbed the "hobbit" for its miniature size - they are not descendants of the extinct hominin.
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