Small Humans Discovered in Palau

PLoS ONE has an exciting paper out today that reports the discovery of very unique human remains from the islands of Palau. The skeletal remains, which appear to be somewhere between 900 and 2,900 years old, are very fascinating because the exhibit derived features shared with Homo sapiens in addition to characteristics that are thought to be more "primitive for the genus Homo." These people were 3-4 feet tall and weighed 70-80 pounds, and had distinctive cranial morphology including small eye sockets, deep jaws, and shallow chins.

The authors suggest that these remains indicate that many features we consider to be basal to the genus Homo may in fact be "correlates of extreme size reduction." The Palau people had brains much larger than Homo floresiensis (the position/validity of this species is the subject of ongoing controversy, involving some questionable characters and claims), but still at the bottom of the scale for Homo, which makes sense due to their small overall stature. The authors of this paper suggest that the features of the Palau specimens support the hypothesis that H. floresiensis was an island-adapted form of H. sapiens, which would mean that their distinctive features were size-associated morphology, not pathology, as some have argued.

Very fascinating find! Read the PLoS paper here, National Geographic's coverage here, and video here.

Berger, L.R., Churchill, S.E., De Klerk, B., Quinn, R.L., Hawks, J. (2008). Small-Bodied Humans from Palau, Micronesia. PLoS ONE, 3(3), e1780. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001780