It seems that we just keep finding out more and more about our distant past. Evidence does not come easily however, we have to dig it out and sometimes search for many years, decades, or even longer, before we find anything relevant. Someday we may find something that will completely reverse our thinking on how we evolved to where we are now as a race. Science just keeps searching for clues of our origins. Sometimes new theories come along that show the we should think about things in a different way. An example of this is Homo Floresiensis. Homo Floresiensis was a population of early man that had a small body and a small brain. This race survived for quite a long time and on the scale of man's time on earth, they only recently disappeared. This race got their name from an Indonesian island called Flores. The remains of these people were found there. Skeletons were found that dated back 18,000 years. Stone tools have also been found that were used by these people and the newest has been dated at only 13,000 years old. When these specimens were found, scientists split on whether they were a new species or not. Some scientists believed that they had discovered a new race of people, while others felt that these people had a disorder called Microcephaly, which is a disorder in which the circumference of the head is more than two standard deviations smaller than average, for a person's sex. Today the argument of whether these people constitute a new species of humans still rages.

Today these people are classified as a possible species in the genus Homo and their official designation is Homo Floresiensis. Unlike most old bones that are found, the bones of Homo Floresiensis were not fossilized. Nature magazine described the bones as having the consistency of blotting paper. Now the hunt is on for DNA. If the scientists can find some, they want to compare it to that from Homo Neanderthalensis and Homo Sapiens. The odds on finding any useful DNA in this case, are very unlikely, but not impossible. The tropical climate is an enemy of DNA. DNA degrades very rapidly in warm tropical climates. There is another huge problem for DNA hunters. Warm tropical climates are conducive to contamination of specimens. The real question is whether these people were actually related to us or not? They had no chin. They also had a strange twist in the forearm bones. Some researchers believe that these features represent what is known as pathology. This would mean that they were Homo Sapeins, but were deformed. Other scientists believe that the features found do not mean that these people were not Homo Sapiens, while some do. It is thought that the average height of these people were 3 foot 7 inches, which would have made them shorter than the average height of an African Pygmy, which is 4 foot 11 inches.

Homo Floresiensis people have been called Hobbits due to their diminutive size. They were discovered in the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. You can see by this that they were a very recent discovery. I can't help but wonder what is out there that we have not discovered yet? Most people would have thought that we would have known all about early man by now, but nothing is further from the truth. Homo Floresiensis people walked on two feet like us, but their brains were very small. They had no chin. The evidence seems to indicate that Homo Floresiensis had a very small brain, the average size being 417cc, which is only a fraction of that of a modern human. It is thought that these people go back as far as 95,000 years ago. The record seems to indicate that they had fire, used stone tools and hunted pigmy elephants, along with Komodo dragons and giant rats. These people are believed by some to be a dwarf form of Homo Erectus. It seems that for some reason, dwarf forms of large mammals are not uncommon on islands.

While an entire skeleton has never been found, scientists have found an almost complete skull and partial skeleton. The skeleton had leg bones, hands, feet and partial pelvis. There was enough there to give us an idea of what these people looked like. Since the brain is only 417 cc, one has to realize that it is smaller than some chimps, which can range up to 500 cc and have an average size brain of about 400 cc. It just so happens that chimps are bigger than Homo Floresiensis people. One point that we have to remember is that this race of people might have been very small, but they had no where the brain capacity of a Pygmy, which is almost the same as a normal human. The detractors of the theory that Homo Floresiensis are a branch of our own evolutionary path, state that they came from another brach of development, such as Dmanisi hominids. These hominids have been found in Georgia and their brain sizes are between 600 and 700 cc, smaller than the brain of the early erectus.

Science has been knocked on it's evolutionary ear. It used to have been thought that Homo Erectus was responsible for a find of stone tools dating back over 840,000 years. Today we find that there might be other possibilities. When these tools were found in Indonesia, it was assumed that they belonged to Homo Erectus. The reason for this was that this was the only pre-sapien hominid that was known. This has all changed and today we realize that there is a possibility that Homo Erectus was not able to cross a sea barrier that existed and that the Dmanisi hominid, or a partly evolved form of Floresiensis, was responsible for making these tools. Scientists are hoping that they will be able to get DNA from the bones of these races, since the bones have not been fossilized. The tropical climate in Indonesia decreases the chance of success on this venture however. Scientists feel that even though we have discovered Homo Floresiensis, we are not related. What the discovery does, is make us rethink human evolution and how we are subject to those forces.

There are a lot of disagreements over the the find of Homo Floresiensis. One scientist states that these people had a disease that caused small brain size and sites an example of a microcephalic specimen that he has from Crete. Another team of scientists have rejected this conclusion. They state that the skeletons show no signs of anything that would stop them from reaching adulthood, while anyone with the above disease would have a very hard time doing so. Most scientists agree that Homo Floresiensis is just too different to be a modern human. The scientific community is abuzz with different opinions regarding Homo Floresiensis. I guess you could say that there is a scientific opinion available to suit everyone's taste. Will other discoveries come along that muddy the waters even more, or will we find something that will clear things up? Having been a scientific observer for quite a long time, I have to bet that things will get a lot more complicated, before they clear up, if they ever do.