Sept 21 : An international team of researchers has completed a new study on Homo floresiensis, commonly referred to as the hobbit, a three foot tall, 18000 year old hominin skeleton, discovered four years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores.

The team focussed the research on the most complete of the 12 skeletons discovered, and specifically on the three little bones from the hobbit’s left wrist.

The findings revealed that modern human and our closest fossil relative, the Neanderthals had a very differently shaped wrist in comparison to living great apes, older fossil hominins like Australopithecus (e.g., “Lucy”) and even the earliest members of the genus Homo (e.g., Homo habilis, the “handy-man”).

Elsewhere, the hobbit’s wrist was basically indistinguishable from an African ape or early hominin-like wrist.

Anything like this has not been seen in modern humans and Neanderthals.

Lead author of the study, Matt Tocheri, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institute’s Human Origins Program at the National Museum of Natural History, said he was completely surprised when he first saw casts of the hobbit’s wrist bones.

“Up until then, I had no definitive opinion regarding the hobbit debates. But these hobbit wrist bones do not look anything like those of modern humans. They’re not even close!” said Tocheri.

Tocheri said the evidence from the hobbit’s wrist was extremely important because it demonstrated further that the hobbit indeed represented a different species of human as was originally proposed by its discoverers.

“It is not a modern human with some sort of pathology or growth disorder. The distinctive shapes of wrist bones form during the first trimester of pregnancy while most pathologies and growth disorders do not begin to affect the skeleton until well after that time,” Tocheri said in his study in the Sept 21 issue of Science.

“Therefore, pathologies or growth defects cannot adequately explain why a modern human would have a wrist that was indistinguishable from that of an African ape or primitive hominin,” he said.

He said the evidence also suggested that modern humans and Neanderthals shared an earlier human ancestor that the hobbits did not.

“Basically, the wrist evidence tells us that modern humans and Neanderthals share an evolutionary grandparent that the hobbits do not, but all three share an evolutionary great-grandparent. If you think of modern humans and Neanderthals as being first cousins, then the hobbit is more like a second cousin to both,” said Tocheri. (ANI)