Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis

Brown, Peter et al.  “A new small-bodied hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia.”  Nature 431(7012):1055–1061.  Oct 28, 2004.  The paper that described LB1 and named the species.  Brown, then at the University of New England, was the anatomist who cleaned and measured the skeleton;  Morwood led the excavation.  The stature and body-mass formulae are in its Supplementary Information. ↩

1. 1a.

   Page 1060:  “The first hominin immigrants may have had a similar body size to H. erectus and early Homo, with subsequent dwarfing; or, an unknown small-bodied and small-brained hominin may have arrived on Flores from the Sunda Shelf.” ↩

2. 1b.

   Page 1055:  “The skeleton is extremely fragile and not fossilized or covered with calcium carbonate.” ↩

3. 1c.

   Page 1055:  “It is associated with calibrated accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dates of approximately 18 kyr and bracketed by luminescence dates of 35 ± 4 kyr and 14 ± 2 kyr.”  Under the heading "Horizon." ↩ ↩ ↩

4. 1d.

   Page 1056:  “The endocranial volume, measured with mustard seed, is 380 cm3, well below the previously accepted range for the genus Homo and equal to the minimum estimates for Australopithecus.”  The sentence runs over the page turn to 1057. ↩

5. 1e.

   Page 1060:  “Applying stature estimation formulae developed from human pygmies gives a stature estimate of 106 cm for LB1 (Supplementary Information). This is likely to be an overestimation owing to LB1's relatively small cranial height. A stature estimate for LB1 of 106 cm gives a body mass of 16 to 28.7 kg, and a femur cross-sectional area of 525 mm2 gives a mass of 36 kg (Supplementary Information).” ↩ ↩

6. 1f.

   Page 1055:  “Small-bodied bipedal hominin”.  The opening words of the formal diagnosis of the species. ↩

7. 1g.

   Page 1059:  “Distally there is a relatively high bicondylar angle of 14°, which overlaps with that found in Australopithecus.”  Of LB1's thigh bone.  The diagnosis on page 1055 also lists "a high bicondylar angle". ↩

8. 1h.

   Page 1060:  “Instead, the facial and dental proportions, postcranial anatomy consistent with human-like obligate bipedalism, and a masticatory apparatus most similar in relative size and function to modern humans all support assignment to the genus Homo—as does the inferred phylogenetic history, which includes endemic dwarfing of H. erectus.”  The sentence runs over the page turn to 1061. ↩

Kaifu, Yousuke et al.  “Early evolution of small body size in Homo floresiensis.”  Nature Communications 15:6381.  Aug 6, 2024.  Reports the adult humerus SOA-MM9 and two teeth from Layer II at Mata Menge, bringing the site to ten hominin pieces, with bone histology, stature estimates and a molar-shape comparison.  Kaifu is a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Tokyo.  Open access.

1. 2a.

   Page 1:  “An adult humerus is estimated to be 9 − 16% shorter and thinner than the type specimen of H. floresiensis dated to ~60,000 years ago, and is smaller than any other Plio-Pleistocene adult hominin humeri hitherto reported.” ↩ ↩

2. 2b.

   Page 6:  “In all available measurements of the mandibular body, postcanine teeth (P3, M1/2 and M3) and distal humerus, the Mata Menge fossils reported here or previously are smaller than the Liang Bua H. floresiensis remains (LB1 and LB6/1) by 1–21% (Table 2). Stature estimates, based on humeral length of SOA-MM9 (211–220 mm) and LB1 (243 mm), are 103–108 cm and 121 cm, respectively, using the human pygmy model; or 93–96 cm and 102 cm, respectively, using the ape model.” ↩ ↩

3. 2c.

   Page 10:  “The earliest Flores hominins appeared on this Wallacean island ~1.0–1.27 Ma, probably unintentionally (i.e., through accidental 'rafting', perhaps on tsunami debris), and possibly as part of the initial colonization of the Sunda Shelf region by early H. erectus. The Flores hominins experienced substantial body size reduction soon after this event (within ~300,000 years), despite the presence of large-bodied predators such as ~3 meter-long Komodo monitors and crocodiles from the earliest paleontological record ( ~ 1.4 Ma) onwards.” ↩ ↩ ↩

4. 2d.

   Page 10:  “How the small brain size reported for the ~60,000 years old LB1 evolved still remains unknown.” ↩

5. 2e.

   Page 8:  “Therefore, the current Mata Menge hominin assemblage includes at least four individuals including one adult, one adolescent/young adult, and two children (Table 1). The observation that all four (or more) individuals are extremely diminutive supports the argument that small body size was not an idiosyncratic (individual)”. ↩ ↩

6. 2f.

   Page 8:  “Alternatively, if H. habilis s.l. was ancestral to Mata Menge/Liang Bua H. floresiensis, the latter would need to have experienced substantial molar size reduction of ~65–60% in mesiodistal and buccolingual crown diameters (from H. habilis means), and this accompanied by form changes comparable to the early Javanese H. erectus condition. Because no such allometric relationships are evident between molar crown size and form within H. habilis (Supplementary Note 6), the hypothesis that H. floresiensis is a direct lineal descendant of H. habilis s.l. is not supported.”  Page 10:  “the reported craniometric and odontometric analyzes which almost unanimously support strong affinities of H. floresiensis with H. erectus (particularly early H. erectus from Java)”.  Page 8 also reports that the 2016 jaw and first or second molar, and now the third molar, are closer in shape to early Javan Homo erectus than to Australopithecus and Homo habilis. ↩ ↩

Wise, Kurt P.  “The Flores Skeleton and Human Baraminology.”  Occasional Papers of the BSG 6:1–13.  Nov 2, 2005.  The one young-earth paper that gives the hobbit a place in a chronology and a mechanism other than disease or island selection.  Wise is a Harvard-trained palaeontologist and the leading young-earth theorist of post-Flood diversification.  Written eleven years before the Mata Menge fossils.

1. 3a.

   Page 2:  “Since post-Flood trans-continental distribution of humans did not occur until after Babel, we can deduce that H. erectus represents an early post-Babel morphology and we then deduce that both Lower and Upper Pleistocene sediments are post-Babel in age. Given that the Flores skeleton was found in Upper Pleistocene sediments, it follows that it would date from slightly later post-Flood (and post-Babel) times.” ↩

2. 3b.

   Page 2:  “Lying between the Flood and ca 1000 B.C. (the time of David), the C-14 dates of LB 1 are consistent with a post-Babel date for the specimen. Thus although young-age creationists have not yet reinterpreted most of the absolute dating technologies employed for dating the Flores skeleton, a post-Babel patriarchal date is a very likely one.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

3. 3c.

   Page 2:  “The C-14 dates associated with the Flores skeleton (ca. 18 ka.) are substantially younger than the C-14 dates of Flood carbon (40-60 ka.: Giem 2001; Baumgardner, et al. 2003) but older than C-14 dates which actually correspond with dendrochronological dates on Bristlecone Pines (2-3 ka.) (e.g. Aardsma, 1992. Figure 3.2). Lying between the Flood and ca 1000 B.C. (the time of David), the C-14 dates of LB 1 are consistent with a post-Babel date for the specimen.” ↩ ↩

4. 3d.

   Page 5:  “if H. floriensis is not only a descendant of the erectines (probably the Indonesian erectines: Brown, et al. 2004, p. 1058) but also occupied a narrow geographical area (the Island of Flores), the Flores skeleton probably represents a more recent morphology of one lineage that dispersed from Babel.”  "floriensis" is the source's spelling. ↩ ↩

5. 3e.

   Page 5:  “I propose that the developmental programs of many of the Babel lineages changed rapidly in post-Babel times, creating a number of unique morphologies around the world.”  Page 7:  “Early post-Flood records (e.g. in Job and Genesis) of specialized taxa (e.g. camels, lions) suggest that intrabaraminic diversification was extremely rapid (within a few centuries of the Flood).”  The second passage is about animals and plants, not people. ↩

Morwood, Michael J. et al.  “Further evidence for small-bodied hominins from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia.”  Nature 437(7061):1012–1017.  Oct 13, 2005.  The second season's finds:  LB1's right humerus and ulna, a second adult mandible (LB6/1), a very small adult tibia (LB8), and scattered bones of at least nine individuals.  Its claims of a 12,000-year terminus and of fire use were later withdrawn or unsupported.  Morwood led the Liang Bua project until his death in 2013. ↩

1. 4a.

   Page 1012:  “The excavation also yielded more evidence for the depositional history of the cave and for the behavioural capabilities of H. floresiensis, including the butchery of Stegodon and use of fire.” ↩

2. 4b.

   Page 1012:  “The finds further demonstrate that LB1 is not just an aberrant or pathological individual, but is representative of a long-term population that was present during the interval 95–74 to 12 thousand years ago.” ↩

3. 4c.

   Page 1012:  “In contrast, none of the hominin remains recovered from the Pleistocene deposits are of modern humans. Instead, all diagnostic hominin elements are consistent with H. floresiensis size and morphology (Table 1). In total, there are now at least nine such individuals represented in the excavated finds from Sectors IV, VII and XI.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

4. 4d.

   Page 1012:  “Use of fire by hominins is indicated by charred bone and clusters of reddened and fire-cracked rocks.” ↩

5. 4e.

   Page 1012:  “However, no pigments or symbolic items were found, in contrast with Holocene occupation levels.” ↩ ↩

6. 4f.

   Page 1016:  “For example, the humerofemoral index ((humerus length × 100)/femur length) of 85.4 is outside the range of variation for H. sapiens, but is the same as AL 288-1 A. afarensis, and midway between the indices for apes and humans.” ↩ ↩

7. 4g.

   Page 1016:  “Abnormal growth seems an unlikely explanation, as growth-hormone-related dwarfism and microcephaly in modern humans result in normal limb and pelvic proportions.” ↩

Tocheri, Matthew W. et al.  “The Primitive Wrist of Homo floresiensis and Its Implications for Hominin Evolution.”  Science 317(5845):1743–1745.  Sep 21, 2007.  Three-dimensional shape analysis of three of LB1's wrist bones against modern humans, Neanderthals, early Homo, australopiths and African apes.  Tocheri, then at the Smithsonian, is a specialist in the primate wrist.  Six of the ten authors were members of the Liang Bua excavation team.

1. 5a.

   Page 1743:  “Analysis of three wrist bones from the holotype specimen (LB1) shows that it retains wrist morphology that is primitive for the African ape-human clade. In contrast, Neandertals and modern humans share derived wrist morphology that forms during embryogenesis, which diminishes the probability that pathology could result in the normal primitive state. This evidence indicates that LB1 is not a modern human with an undiagnosed pathology or growth defect; rather, it represents a species descended from a hominin ancestor that branched off before the origin of the clade that includes modern humans, Neandertals, and their last common ancestor.” ↩

2. 5b.

   Page 1744:  “In modern humans, the trapezoid, capitate, and trapezium arise in the mesenchyme in essentially their adult form by the 11th week of development, long before the processes of chondrification and ossification are complete”. ↩ ↩

3. 5c.

   Page 1743:  “The modern human trapezoid is shaped like a boot (9, 13, 14), wherein the palmar half of the bone is radio-ulnarly and proximo-distally wide (Fig. 1). In contrast, other primates have a trapezoid that is more wedge-shaped with a narrow palmar tip and a wide dorsal base”.  “Instead, they show the general symplesiomorphic pattern exhibited by all extant African apes, as well as fossil hominins that preserve comparable wrist morphology and date before 1.7 Ma”.  "They" are LB1's trapezoid, scaphoid and capitate.  The trapezoid is compared with living apes and baboons;  the fossil comparisons are made on the scaphoid, with Homo habilis, and on the capitate, with two australopiths. ↩

4. 5d.

   Page 1744:  “The genes that result in dysplasias, however, do not normally become expressed until after normal shape formation of the carpal mesenchyme (27). Although skeletal dysplasias may include carpal and digit abnormalities related to ossification errors, as well as various forms of microcephaly (27), none are known to result in abnormal carpal morphology that closely mimics a plesiomorphic state. Our diverse modern human sample includes a pituitary dwarf (USNM 314306) and a pituitary giant (USNM 227508) (tables S1 and S2). Both show normal modern human carpal shapes and articular configurations despite their abnormal sizes, demonstrating that LB1's wrist morphology is not the result of allometric scaling, errors in metabolism, or a skeletal growth disorder.”  The passage runs over the page turn to 1745. ↩

Obendorf, Peter J. et al.  “Are the small human-like fossils found on Flores human endemic cretins?”  Proceedings of the Royal Society B 275(1640):1287–1296.  Jun 7, 2008.  The cretinism proposal.  Obendorf is a biologist at RMIT, Oxnard a senior anatomist at the University of Western Australia.  None of the authors had examined the fossils, which is why the paper calls its hypothesis tentative;  the pituitary measurement was taken from a published photograph of the endocast.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 6a.

   Page 1288:  “Anteroposterior length of the pituitary fossa and whole brain of LB1 were measured from expanded images of the LB1 endocast (fig. S2E in Falk et al. 2005).”  From the Material and Methods. ↩

2. 6b.

   Page 1294:  “The reported brain size of LB1 (sample size of 1) is smaller than would be expected of a cretin but consistent with brain sizes reported in small brained populations and undernutrition of cretins in hunter-gatherer societies as well as post-mortem reductions of cretin skull volumes. … However, until the original fossils are examined in relation to the cretinism hypothesis, and until more cretin skeletons can be examined, the cretin hypothesis must continue to be tentative.”  From the Conclusion. ↩ ↩

Baab, Karen L. et al.  “A Critical Evaluation of the Down Syndrome Diagnosis for LB1, Type Specimen of Homo floresiensis.”  PLoS ONE 11(6):e0155731.  Jun 8, 2016.  Tests each Down-syndrome sign claimed by Henneberg against measured samples of people with a documented diagnosis and of unaffected people, using CT of LB1.  Six of the seven authors had already published in defence of the species, Brown and Falk among them;  the clinical measurements are deposited at the Harvard Dataverse and can be re-measured.

1. 7a.

   Page 19:  “In contrast, the greatly reduced brain size (EV = ~417 cm3) and head circumference of LB1 mark this individual as an outlier relative to those DS individuals evaluated here whose values are much closer to control samples of euploid individuals.” ↩

2. 7b.

   Page 7:  “Using the data from Aylward, Habbak [73], the average EV of the DS sample was 87% of the average EV from a matched euploid sample. Applying this relationship to the average EV of 1270 cm3 for the local Indonesian population of Rampasasa [17], we estimated an average EV of 1106 cm3 for individuals with DS from Rampasasa. This value was >2.5 times the size of the LB1 EV”.  EV is endocranial volume and DS is Down syndrome.  The Aylward sample is 30 adults with Down syndrome, mean 1,261 cm³. ↩ ↩

Jacob, Teuku et al.  “Pygmoid Australomelanesian Homo sapiens skeletal remains from Liang Bua, Flores: Population affinities and pathological abnormalities.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103(36):13421–13426.  Sep 5, 2006.  The founding paper of the pathology school, by Teuku Jacob's team at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, which had the bones for study from November 2004.  It proposes that LB1 is a microcephalic member of a pygmy modern population like the Rampasasa who live beside the cave.  Contributed by K. Hsü, a co-author, under the PNAS rules of the time.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 8a.

   Page 13423:  “Compared with our Rampasasa sample, with average cranial capacities of 1,198 ml (n = 41) for females, 1,354 ml (n = 35) for males, and 1,270 ml for the combined sex sample, LB1's cranial capacity directly measured using seed displacement was 430 ml. This volume is slightly higher than other published estimates, but we removed from the endocranial surface some breccia that had lowered earlier estimates. Comparatively, LB1 falls 5.5 SD below the combined sex Rampasasa mean, whereas our estimate for stature falls 3.3 SD below Rampasasa average stature of 1.46 m.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

Kubo, Daisuke et al.  “Brain size of Homo floresiensis and its evolutionary implications.”  Proceedings of the Royal Society B 280(1760):20130338.  Jun 7, 2013.  A high-resolution micro-CT measurement of LB1's endocranial volume, 426 cc, with about 17 per cent of the surface reconstructed, followed by brain-on-body scaling from two candidate ancestors using slopes fitted across twenty Holocene human populations.  The authors note that the slope is a within-human one extrapolated below the human range.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 9a.

   Page 5:  “With this HMH thresholding, the volume of the endocranial cavity was 425.7 cc.” ↩

2. 9b.

   Page 6:  “In our model of ancestor (early Indonesian H. erectus) and descendant (LB1) relationships, and RMA or MA scaling, the estimated body size decrease (changes in the FHD from 45–50 to 31 mm) would reduce the ECV from 860 to 469–585 cc (63–90% reduction) by body size scaling alone (table 2).”  Page 5, table 2:  The table's expected volumes after shrinking Homo habilis at 614 cc to LB1's femoral head are 488, 468, 447, 417, 449, 427, 400 and 378 cc across the eight slopes.  The habilis start is the mean of three skulls, KNM-ER 1470, 1805 and 1813, at 614 cc, with a femoral head of 42 mm from two femora, KNM-ER 1472 and 1481a (pages 4 and 6).  From the earliest Indonesian Homo erectus at 860 cc the same eight slopes give 599–649, 561–616, 522–582, 469–536, 525–585, 485–551, 438–508 and 400–474 cc. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

3. 9c.

   Page 2:  “Using traditional seed displacement methods, the ECV of LB1 was initially measured as 380 cc [1], whereas Jacob et al. [6] obtained 430 cc after removing some 'breccia' from the endocranial surface. Another report is 417 cc which is based on a virtual endocast from CT data taken by a medical CT scanner, with interpolation of missing areas and adjustment of slight taphonomic distortion [3].”  ECV is endocranial volume. ↩ ↩ ↩

4. 9d.

   Page 5:  “we conclude that the original ECV of the LB1 cranium was 426 cc with only a limited degree of error, probably within ±3 cc.” ↩

5. 9e.

   Page 6:  “Still, the earlier-mentioned results, based on the best available data and various regression methods, suggest that at least 50 per cent, probably much more, of the brain size reduction in H. floresiensis could occur as scaling effect if this little hominin derived from early Indonesian H. erectus. This means that 0–50% of its brain size decrease needs to be explained by other factors.” ↩ ↩

6. 9f.

   Page 7:  “We conclude that evolution from early Javanese H. erectus to H. floresiensis was possible in terms of brain size. Still, in this scenario, some amount of the brain size reduction remains to be explained by factors other than body size scaling, posing a challenge to our current knowledge about human brain size evolution. If H. floresiensis descended from H. habilis-like ancestor, the need for such relative brain size reduction is less significant, but we stress currently we have no convincing fossil evidence to support this hypothesis except for the brain size issue discussed here.”  Page 5, table 2:  The two steepest slopes, the OLS-CC fits, give 438 to 508 cc for males and 400 to 474 cc for females from the 860 cc Javan start. ↩ ↩

Tucci, Serena et al.  “Evolutionary history and adaptation of a human pygmy population of Flores Island, Indonesia.”  Science 361(6401):511–516.  Aug 3, 2018.  Genomes of the Rampasasa, the short-statured villagers beside Liang Bua:  32 people genotyped at 2.5 million sites, ten sequenced whole.  Locators below are pages of the authors' manuscript;  the journal pagination is 511–516.  Tucci was then at Princeton.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 10a.

   Section manuscript page 2:  “We collected DNA samples from 32 adult individuals from Rampasasa (average height of 145 cm)”. ↩ ↩

2. 10b.

   Section manuscript page 3:  “We found no evidence that unknown sequences in Flores are enriched for older or more divergent lineages (figs. S15 and S16) (13), as would be expected if they contained lineages inherited from a more deeply divergent hominin group, such as H. floresiensis or H. erectus. Although it is difficult to exclude very low levels of admixture from such groups given current methodological limitations, our data are inconsistent with substantial levels of ancestry from a deeply divergent hominin lineage.” ↩

Sutikna, Thomas et al.  “Revised stratigraphy and chronology for Homo floresiensis at Liang Bua in Indonesia.”  Nature 532(7599):366–369.  Apr 21, 2016.  The correction of the Liang Bua chronology, from the 2007 to 2014 excavations, by the same team that published the original dates.  It dates the hobbit-bearing pedestal by thermoluminescence, infrared-stimulated luminescence, uranium-thorium on speleothem, laser-ablation uranium-series on the hobbit bones, argon-argon on the overlying tephra, and radiocarbon on charcoal at the top of the pedestal.  Sutikna led the Indonesian side of the excavations.  Quotations are located by the paragraph of the main text in which they sit, since the authors' manuscript is not paginated like the journal.  Mirror:  Ro.uow.edu.au

1. 11a.

   Paragraph beginning "The pedestal deposits have been truncated":  “The pedestal deposits have been truncated by one or more phases of erosion, resulting in an erosional surface (i.e., an unconformity) that slopes steeply down towards the cave mouth”. ↩

2. 11b.

   Paragraph beginning "The pedestal deposits have been truncated":  “This unconformity was not recognised during the 2001–2004 excavations, raising serious questions about the accuracy of previous age estimates … for H. floresiensis, which were based on inferred stratigraphic associations.”  The ellipsis stands for reference numerals. ↩

3. 11c.

   Paragraph beginning "Sediment samples for infrared stimulated luminescence":  “These samples gave statistically indistinguishable weighted mean IRSL and TL ages (± 1σ) of 65 ± 5 kyr (LB12-OSL3 to -OSL6) and 71 ± 13 kyr (LB12-23-2 and -4), respectively, for the time since sand-sized grains of feldspar and quartz were last exposed to sunlight. A TL age of 89 ± 7 kyr (LB08-15-3) was obtained for the basal H. floresiensis-bearing deposits in Sector XV, while two further samples from the immediately underlying, gravel-rich layer (in Sectors XXI and XXIII) gave IRSL and TL ages of 128 ± 17 kyr (LB12-OSL7) and 113 ± 9 kyr (LB12-23-1), respectively.” ↩

4. 11d.

   Paragraph beginning "Sediment samples for infrared stimulated luminescence":  “We also used 234U/230Th methods to date four samples of in situ speleothem from the H. floresiensis-bearing deposits in Sectors XII and XVII (LB07-SXII-F4 and LB09-SXVII-F1 to -F3), which gave ages (± 2σ) of between 80.8 ± 0.8 and 58.3 ± 0.5 kyr.” ↩

5. 11e.

   Paragraph beginning "Three H. floresiensis ulnae and seven Stegodon bones":  “Owing to the open system behaviour of bone, such analyses usually yield minimum ages for bone deposition and subsequent uranium uptake”. ↩

6. 11f.

   Paragraph beginning "Three H. floresiensis ulnae and seven Stegodon bones":  “The H. floresiensis ulnae have modelled 234U/230Th ages (± 2σ) for individual laser-ablation tracks that range from 86.9 ± 7.9 to 71.5 ± 4.3 kyr for LB1 (Sectors VII and XI), 71.4 ± 1.1 to 66.7 ± 0.8 kyr for LB2 (Sector IV), and 66.0 ± 4.3 to 54.6 ± 2.1 kyr for LB6 (Sector XI).” ↩

7. 11g.

   Paragraph beginning "Three H. floresiensis ulnae and seven Stegodon bones":  A modern human femoral shaft from the Holocene deposits in Sector IV gave a modelled uranium-series age of about 7.5 thousand years, between the charcoal radiocarbon ages of about 9.5 and 6.4 thousand years for the sediments below and above it. ↩

8. 11h.

   Paragraph beginning "We dated T1, which directly overlies":  “The inverse isochron age (± 1σ) of 79 ± 12 kyr (Extended Data Fig. 3) is imprecise due to the low yield of radiogenic argon from the hornblende crystals, but the 2σ age range (103–55 kyr) is consistent with the luminescence and 234U/230Th ages for the underlying samples.” ↩

9. 11i.

   Paragraph beginning "Sediments between T2 and T3 in Sector XXI":  “Hominin skeletal remains have not been recovered from the deposits between T2 and T3. However, stone artefacts are present and these display similar raw material proportions to those found underneath T1 (~80% silicified tuff and ~20% chert), in contrast to the preference of modern humans for chert (~60%) observed at Liang Bua during the Holocene”. ↩

10. 11j.

    Paragraph beginning "Sediments between T2 and T3 in Sector XXI":  “The specific processes that ultimately resulted in the extinction of these taxa and H. floresiensis remain poorly understood.” ↩

11. 11k.

    Paragraph beginning "In contrast, all of the charcoal samples":  “In contrast, all of the charcoal samples used previously to infer ages of ~18 kyr cal. BP for LB1 and about 17 or 13–11 kyr cal. BP as the terminus ante quem for H. floresiensis and Stegodon … originate from deposits that unconformably overlie the remnant pedestal, based on their plotted coordinates (Fig. 3).”  The ellipsis stands for reference numerals. ↩ ↩ ↩

12. 11l.

    Paragraph beginning "In contrast, all of the charcoal samples":  “The onset of accumulation of the depositional sequence above the unconformity ~20 kyr ago is consistent with a TL age of 23 ± 7 kyr for sediments collected less than 15 cm above the unconformity in Sector XVI (LB09-16-2) and two new 14C ages of ~12.7 kyr cal. BP for charcoal recovered from just beneath T7 in Sector XXII (D-AMS 005953 and 005954).” ↩

13. 11m.

    Paragraph beginning "Portions of the pedestal have been reworked":  “We investigated the possibility that the luminescence ages for the sediment samples collected in 2003 from alongside LB1 and ~1 m above it … were compromised by inadvertently sampling across the unconformity and measuring multiple grains simultaneously from this mixture. The wide spread in ages (from about 170 to 10 kyr ago) obtained for individual feldspar grains using newly developed IRSL dating procedures … supports this suggestion”.  The ellipses stand for reference numerals. ↩

14. 11n.

    Paragraph final paragraph of the main text:  “All skeletal remains assigned to H. floresiensis are from the pedestal deposits dated to approximately 100–60 kyr ago, while stone artefacts reasonably attributable to this species range from about 190 kyr … to 50 kyr in age.”  The ellipsis stands for a reference numeral. ↩ ↩

15. 11o.

    Paragraph final paragraph of the main text:  “But whether H. floresiensis survived after this time, or encountered modern humans, Denisovans or other hominin species on Flores or elsewhere, remain open questions that future discoveries may help answer.” ↩

16. 11p.

    Paragraph beginning "The 2001–2004 excavations at Liang Bua":  “Charcoal samples collected from similar depths near the eastern wall of the cave (Sector VII) were dated to between about 19 and 13–11 kyr cal. BP”. ↩

17. 11q.

    Paragraph beginning "Overlying T3 is T4":  “At 1.89 m depth in Sector XXIII, charcoal (sample OxA-X-2648-13) from immediately above the upper surface of T5 yielded a 14C age of ~46 kyr cal. BP (95% confidence interval of 47.7–44.1 kyr cal. BP).”  T5 is the fifth and highest ash of the pedestal.  Supplementary Table 8 gives this sample's conventional radiocarbon age as 42,500 ± 900 years BP. ↩ ↩

Brumm, Adam et al.  “Age and context of the oldest known hominin fossils from Flores.”  Nature 534(7606):249–253.  Jun 9, 2016.  The dating paper for the Mata Menge hominins:  argon-argon on single crystals, zircon and glass fission-track, laser-ablation uranium-series on a hominin tooth root, and combined uranium-series and ESR on two Stegodon molars from the fossil layer.  Line numbers below are those of the authors' accepted manuscript, which is titled "Stratigraphic context and age of hominin fossils from Middle Pleistocene Flores";  the journal pagination is 249–253.  Mirror:  Strathprints.strath.ac.uk ↩

1. 12a.

   Lines 171–175:  “At Mata Menge, PGT-2 occurs 13.5 m above Layer II, and produced a 40Ar/39Ar weighted mean age of 0.65 ± 0.02 Ma from single crystal dating of hornblende (Extended Data Fig. 5). This is in accordance with the published ZFT age of a basaltic tephra inter-bed from the lower part of the GLM (0.65 ± 0.06 Ma).” ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 12b.

   Lines 186–191:  “U-series dating of the hominin tooth root independently confirms this specimen was deposited at least 0.55 Ma, whereas combined U-series/ESR indicates minimum and maximum ages of around 0.36 Ma and 0.69 Ma, respectively, for the Stegodon molars. In sum, therefore, we have used multiple dating methods to establish a secure age of ~0.70 Ma for the Layer II hominin fossils.” ↩

3. 12c.

   Lines 223–225:  “Our excavations uncovered 149 in situ stone artefacts in E-32, including 47 artefacts from Layer II, in direct association with the hominin remains”. ↩ ↩

4. 12d.

   Lines 104–108:  “At the base of this slot-trench, a thin (<30 cm-thick) fossil-bearing fluvial sandstone layer was exposed underlying a sequence of mudflow deposits (Layers Ia-f) up to 6.5 m thick. This fossiliferous sandstone, named Layer II, represents the deposit of a small stream channel that has an irregular lower bedding plane and was incised into a well-developed, consolidated paleosol with prominent root traces (Layer III).”  Lines 169–171:  “The GLM contains at least 85 crystal-rich tephra inter-beds of basaltic composition, collectively named the Piga Tephra (the lower 56 tephras are sequentially numbered PGT-1 to PGT-56).”  GLM is the Gero Limestone Member, the thin-bedded lake limestones and clays that cap the basin fill.  PGT-2, dated in the next sentence, is one of the 85. ↩

Line, Peter.  “Revisiting Homo floresiensis.”  Journal of Creation 36(3):82–91.  Dec 2022.  The most recent and most detailed young-earth treatment.  It discusses the 2016 redating and the Mata Menge fossils.  Line holds a doctorate in neuroscience and writes Creation Ministries International's hominin articles.  Its reference list carries Obendorf 2008, Oxnard 2010 and Oxnard's 2012 rejoinder, and not Brown 2012, Baab 2013, Baab 2016, Falk 2007 or Falk 2009;  it also holds that Homo habilis is "an illusory species" and that all australopiths are "extinct apish primates."  Locators are the section headings of the web version. ↩

1. 13a.

   Section Dating:  “Whether those (evolutionists) advocating the pathological modern human hypothesis were silenced by the new dating is unclear, but they have been very quiet since. From the creation viewpoint, both the old and new dates are rejected, and so have little bearing on the interpretation of Homo floresiensis presented here. The redating illustrates the fickle nature of age estimates obtained from dating methods”. ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 13b.

   Section Contrasting views:  “It is not unreasonable to suggest that the finds from Liang Bua (Homo floresiensis) and Mata Menge are related, although the small mandibular fragment (SOA-MM4 right mandibular corpus) from Mata Menge, believed to be from an adult individual, and the other small, isolated teeth also from the same location, do not reveal much except that there were small-jawed individuals living there.” ↩

3. 13c.

   Section The skull:  “Congenital hypothyroidism is said to be able to 'reduce brain size by approximately 50%.' Oxnard argues that small parent populations in terms of brain size (e.g. pygmoid crania) could have given rise to cretins with brain sizes as small as 400 cc.” ↩

4. 13d.

   Section The skull:  “Thus, normal South East Asian pygmoid crania of 800–1000 ml have been recorded … . On this basis, cretins from such populations could have brain sizes as small as 400–500 ml, based on scaling of height and brain size found among European endemic cretins.”  Line is quoting Oxnard, Obendorf and Kefford 2010;  the ellipsis is his. ↩

5. 13e.

   Section Tools:  “Evidence indicates that the toolmakers at Liang Bua were able to use fire and hunt dwarfed stegodonts”. ↩

6. 13f.

   Section Discussion and conclusion:  “Consequently, if some Homo floresiensis individuals were cretins, their morphological features may still have differed. It is likely that only a relatively small percentage were cretins.” ↩

7. 13g.

   Section Discussion and conclusion:  “That a detailed analysis concluded that 'LB1 is most similar to early Javanese Homo erectus from Sangiran and Trinil' raises the possible scenario that Homo floresiensis may have been a robust type of human (e.g. Homo erectus) with cretinism. Another possible scenario is that 'modern' humans and Homo erectus interbred on Flores, and individuals like LB1 are the resultant offspring of such interbreeding, albeit with pathology. Regardless, specimens labelled Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis were descendants of Adam and Eve, and so fully human.”  The paper's final paragraph. ↩

8. 13h.

   Section Contrasting views:  “is making the unproven evolutionary assumption that Homo floresiensis was a different species of human”.  Of Tucci et al. 2018, the genome study of the Rampasasa. ↩

Klenck, Joel David.  “A Genesis Model for the Origin, Variation, and Continuation of Human Populations.”  Creation Research Society Quarterly 47(2):111–137.  2010.  A creationist model in which the non-modern human forms of the fossil record are the Nephilim of Genesis 6 or their hybrids with Adam's line, all destroyed by the Flood, so that only anatomically modern humans come after it.  It gives no dates in years and calls the conventional ones "alleged".  Klenck wrote from the Paleontological Research Corporation of Arlington, Virginia.

1. 14a.

   Page 114:  “Therefore, all human populations with characteristics outside those of anatomically modern humans—including but not limited to some specimens attributed to H. habilis and H. rudolfensis and most remains attributed to H. ergaster, H. erectus, H. antecessor, H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis, and H. floresiensis—should be interpreted as Nephilim or populations genetically influenced by the Nephilim.”  The same page says the Flood destroyed "all Nephilim populations". ↩ ↩

2. 14b.

   Page 123, figure 2:  “Just before the Flood human populations comprised direct non-Nephilim descendants of Adam, Nephilim populations, and hybrid populations with morphological features of both aforementioned groups. … (2.2) H. floresiensis, LB I, Liang Bua Cave, 18 kya, Liang Bua Cave, Flores, Indonesia”.  From the caption.  The 18 kya is the date then in print, one of those Klenck calls alleged. ↩ ↩ ↩

Lister, Adrian M.  “Rapid dwarfing of red deer on Jersey in the Last Interglacial.”  Nature 342(6249):539–542.  Nov 30, 1989.  The benchmark measured case of fast island dwarfing in a large mammal.  Full-sized red deer occur in older deposits on Jersey and dwarfs a sixth of their weight in Last Interglacial ones;  the time given is the estimated length of the island's isolation, so it is a ceiling on how long the dwarfing took.  Lister is a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, London.

1. 15a.

   Page 539:  “Here I give the first example in which the island dwarf is well dated, the full-sized ancestor is found in demonstrably older deposits on the island, and a good estimate can be made for the duration of the isolation leading to dwarfing. In the Last Interglacial, red deer on Jersey, Channel Islands, became reduced to one sixth of their body weight in less than six thousand years.” ↩ ↩

Weston, Eleanor M., and Adrian M. Lister.  “Insular dwarfism in hippos and a model for brain size reduction in Homo floresiensis.”  Nature 459(7243):85–88.  May 7, 2009.  Skull-volume measurements on the two extinct dwarf hippos of Madagascar, 24 and 12 skulls, against 18 of their mainland ancestor, with the Sicilian dwarf elephant as a further case, then applied to three candidate ancestors of the hobbit.  Both authors are at the Natural History Museum, London.  Locators below are pages of the authors' manuscript;  the journal pagination is 85–88.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 16a.

   Section manuscript page 1:  “Here we show that the endocranial capacities of extinct dwarf species of hippopotamus from Madagascar are up to 30% smaller than those of a mainland African ancestor scaled to equivalent body mass. These results show brain size reduction is much greater than predicted from an intraspecific 'late ontogenetic' model of dwarfism where brain size scales to body size with an exponent of 0.35.” ↩ ↩

2. 16b.

   Section manuscript page 3:  “If the hippo model is applied to a typical H. erectus ancestor with a body mass of 60 kg and average endocranial capacity of 991 (cm3) that reduced its body mass by 62 % to 23 kg (the median of the 16 – 29 kg estimated body mass of H. floresiensis), an endocranial capacity of 704 cm3 (71 % of the original value) would be predicted from scaling (body mass)0.35. If the brain were reduced by a further 30 % of that value, as in the case of the Malagasy hippo H. lemerlei, an endocranial capacity of 493 cm3 would result. This is still larger than the actual value of H. floresiensis (380 – 430 cm3), but if the ancestor had an endocranial capacity of 804 cm3, as in the African H. erectus KNM-ER 3883, scaling the body mass of the ancestor down to 23 kg and then reducing the brain size by a further 30 % of the scaled value gives an endocranial capacity of 405 cm3, comparable to that of H. floresiensis (see Supplementary Table 5). By the same analogy if the Dmanisi adult Homo remains (skull D3444 cf. H. erectus), with an endocranial capacity 650 cm3 (ref. 29) and body mass of 40 kg (ref. 30) are considered, an endocranial capacity of 378 cm3 would result”.  The passage runs onto page 4.  "(body mass)0.35" is body mass raised to the power 0.35.  Reference numerals in the printed passage are omitted. ↩ ↩

3. 16c.

   Section manuscript page 1:  “The strongest case previously documented is that of a fossil bovid Myotragus, isolated on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca for more than 5 million years. The brain mass of Myotragus was reduced by up to 50% relative to values of extant bovids of equivalent body mass. A link between the relatively small brain of Myotragus and the process of dwarfism has, however, been disputed in the light of the length of the bovid’s isolation and its uncertain ancestry.”  Reference numerals are omitted. ↩

Wood, Todd Charles.  “Baraminological Analysis Places Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Australopithecus sediba in the Human Holobaramin.”  Answers Research Journal 3:71–90.  2010.  The founding statistical-baraminology study of the hominins, by the young-earth biologist most identified with the method.  It places Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis and Australopithecus sediba with humans on skull and tooth characters, and lists the hobbit only as a possible additional member.  Locators are section names. ↩ ↩

1. 17a.

   Section Discussion:  “Homo floresiensis was also included in the inconclusive Argue et al. (2009) dataset. Their cladistic analysis would seem to place H. floresiensis among the homininans, although bootstrap support was exceptionally poor. Creationist opinion on H. floresiensis differs. Hartwig-Scherer (2005) and Wise (2005) consider it a legitimate human species, but Line (2006) believes that it was a microcephalic H. sapiens. This debate also continues among professional paleoanthropologists … but it is immaterial to the question of whether H. floresiensis is human, which creationists agree that it is.” ↩

2. 17b.

   Section Discussion, Australopithecus:  “Though there is disagreement among creationists over which members of Homo are truly human, there is unanimity that Australopithecus is not human”. ↩

Wieland, Carl.  “Soggy dwarf bones.”  creation.com.  Oct 28, 2004.  The first young-earth response, written the day the Nature papers appeared, with an addendum and a note.  Wieland, a physician, was then head of Creation Ministries International's Australian office;  the page is unsigned and his authorship is fixed by his later note in "Hobbling the Hobbit?" of 8 November 2004.

1. 18a.

   Paragraph 5:  “The remains have many features strikingly similar to Homo erectus, which we have also long maintained is really just a variety of Homo sapiens. The researchers who discovered the Flores bones apparently think that they are dwarfed descendants of Homo erectus. We would agree.” ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 18b.

   Paragraph 4:  “Interestingly, the bones, found in a cave, were apparently not fossilized (mineralized), and due to the damp climate had the consistency of 'wet blotting paper'. One would think that given this, long-agers would themselves get a bit wary about the ages assigned to them.” ↩

3. 18c.

   Section Addendum:  “NOTE: We are not suggesting that the anatomical features of the Flores woman were simply those of a (miniature) modern type human. They are those of a (miniature) Homo erectus, a variant of the modern type, but within the human kind”. ↩

Rupe, Christopher, and John Sanford.  Contested Bones.  FMS Publications.  1st edition.  2017.  The fullest book-length young-earth treatment of the human fossil record;  its chapter 5, pages 79 to 94, is on the hobbit.  Sanford is a retired Cornell plant geneticist;  Rupe is a researcher at his foundation.  A second edition appeared in 2019 and may differ in pagination.

1. 19a.

   Page 80:  “they had discovered a new human species that lived 18,000 years ago, based on carbon-14 dating of the surrounding limestone”. ↩

2. 19b.

   Page 81:  “So at this point the age for these bones could range anywhere from 1,000 to 1 million years old, based on conventional dating methods.” ↩

3. 19c.

   Page 87:  “This is far-fetched because while it could happen to a stray individual, it would be extremely unlikely to transport a viable breeding population. The more reasonable alternative is that Hobbit arrived by sailing (as Dennell puts it, 'purposeful navigation'). … Building and navigating boats would clearly prove that both Erectus and Hobbit were fully human.” ↩ ↩

4. 19d.

   Page 92:  “Their impressive cultural inventory (an array of sophisticated stone tools), ability to sail the open ocean, endocast scans revealing a modern human brain, and an overall modern human anatomy further confirms their fully human status. … Their small body size and reduced brain size are quite clearly due to island dwarfism, subsequent inbreeding, and reductive selection.”  Under the heading "Conclusion—Hobbit was Fully Human." ↩ ↩ ↩

5. 19e.

   Page 92:  “The findings of José Alexandre and colleagues is almost a point for point confirmation of our assessment of Hobbit in this chapter. … 6) this process can occur relatively rapidly in small, isolated populations.”  "José Alexandre" is Diniz-Filho, cited by his given names. ↩

6. 19f.

   Page 85:  “Their comparative analysis revealed that Hobbit looked most similar to Homo erectus—only smaller.” ↩

7. 19g.

   Page 86:  “Among the excavated remains were found charred bones and a circular hearth of stones revealing controlled use of fire and cooking.” ↩

8. 19h.

   Page 91:  “We have shown that Erectus is just a variant of Homo sapiens. Hobbit can be understood as a extreme version of Erectus (more isolated, more inbred, more dwarfed).”  "a extreme" is the source's wording. ↩ ↩

Brumm, Adam et al.  “Early stone technology on Flores and its implications for Homo floresiensis.”  Nature 441(7093):624–628.  Jun 1, 2006.  Compares 507 stone artefacts excavated at Mata Menge with the tools from the hobbit levels at Liang Bua.  Brumm is an archaeologist, now at Griffith University, who later led the Mata Menge dating.

1. 20a.

   Section abstract:  “The Mata Menge evidence negates claims that stone artefacts associated with H. floresiensis are so complex that they must have been made by modern humans (Homo sapiens).” ↩

2. 20b.

   Section abstract:  “We also note specific similarities, and apparent technological continuity, between the Mata Menge stone artefacts and those excavated from Late Pleistocene levels at Liang Bua cave, 50 km to the west.”  Answers in Genesis gives the distance as 46 miles, and the difference is not resolved here. ↩ ↩ ↩

Morley, Mike W. et al.  “Initial micromorphological results from Liang Bua, Flores (Indonesia): Site formation processes and hominin activities at the type locality of Homo floresiensis.”  Journal of Archaeological Science 77:125–142.  Jan 2017.  Thin-section study of the cave sediments, which found hearths and dated them by radiocarbon on their own charcoal, and then reviewed the fire evidence claimed in 2005.  Morley is a geoarchaeologist, then at the University of Wollongong.  Sutikna, Jatmiko, Saptomo, Wasisto and Roberts were also authors of the 2005 paper.  Manuscript pages 28 and 29 below are pages of the authors' accepted manuscript, numbered 1 to 41;  the journal pagination is 125–142.  Mirror:  Ro.uow.edu.au

1. 21a.

   Page 125:  “Importantly, we identify anthropogenic signs of fire-use at the site between 41 and 24 thousand years ago, most likely related to the presence of modern humans.” ↩ ↩

2. 21b.

   Section Combustion features and fire-use, manuscript page 28:  “The 'charred bones' initially reported by Morwood et al. (2004, 2005) within the H. floresiensis-bearing deposits are clearly the result of manganese staining, and no definitive evidence of burnt faunal remains has been recovered during subsequent excavations of these deposits. Similarly, analyses of the "clusters of reddened and fire-cracked rocks" (Morwood et al., 2005:1012) from within the H. floresiensis-bearing sediments have demonstrated that these stones were not exposed to any significant heat source (Roberts et al., 2009). Furthermore, the most extensive study so far of the Liang Bua stone artefact assemblages (Moore et al., 2009) found a marked discrepancy in terms of artefact exposure to fire, with negligible evidence (<1%) in assemblages associated with H. floresiensis remains, versus almost 18% of stone artefacts of Holocene age attributed to modern humans.” ↩ ↩

3. 21c.

   Section Combustion features and fire-use, manuscript page 29:  “Given the available evidence, we suggest that the use of fire at Liang Bua—particularly the construction of hearth-like structures that were presumably used for warmth and/or cooking—is more likely a behavioural signature of modern humans than of H. floresiensis. Although this hypothesis requires confirmation by additional investigation at Liang Bua and elsewhere on Flores, the micromorphological evidence from Sector XXIV suggests that modern humans were present on Flores by ~41 ka cal. BP or shortly thereafter.” ↩

Détroit, Florent et al.  “A new species of Homo from the Late Pleistocene of the Philippines.”  Nature 568(7751):181–186.  Apr 11, 2019.  The paper that named Homo luzonensis from thirteen pieces in layer 14 of Callao Cave.  Locators below are pages of the authors' manuscript as deposited at HAL, counting its cover sheet as page 1;  the journal pagination is 181–186.  Détroit is at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, Mijares at the University of the Philippines led the excavation.  Mirror:  Hal.science

1. 22a.

   Section manuscript page 3:  “seven postcanine maxillary teeth (CCH6-a to CCH6-e, CCH8, CCH9; Fig. 2a, f, g), two manual phalanges (CCH2 and CCH5; Fig. 2b, c), two pedal phalanges (CCH3 and CCH4; Fig. 2d, e) and a femoral shaft (CCH7; Fig. 2h). CCH1 and CCH6-a are directly dated by U-series analysis to minimum ages of 67 thousand years (kyr) and 50 kyr, respectively.” ↩ ↩

2. 22b.

   Section manuscript page 3:  “The presence of two right upper third molars (M3; CCH6a and CCH9) and a juvenile femoral shaft (CCH7) indicates that at least three individuals are represented.” ↩

3. 22c.

   Section manuscript page 4:  “The proximal pedal phalanx (rays 2–4) shares shape affinities with Australopithecus: marked longitudinal curvature, parallel medial and lateral sides in dorsal view, a small bicondylar head and weak dorsal canting of the proximal articular surface (unlike African and European early Homo, H. naledi, H. neanderthalensis, H. floresiensis and H. sapiens).”  From the formal diagnosis. ↩

4. 22d.

   Section manuscript page 5:  “H. luzonensis premolars have multiple roots (P3 has three, P4 has two) that are robust and highly divergent, an archaic condition typically found in Australopithecus, Paranthropus and early Homo. Multiple robust and divergent premolar roots also occur in Asian H. erectus (Early Pleistocene Indonesian and Middle Pleistocene Chinese specimens), but are rare in H. sapiens and absent in H. floresiensis”.  The same paragraph says that a three-rooted fourth premolar, which the isolated tooth CCH8 may be, "is rarely found in modern humans (1 to 3%)". ↩ ↩ ↩

5. 22e.

   Section manuscript page 6:  “essentially indistinguishable from the features of A. afarensis and A. africanus”.  Of the curved proximal foot phalanx CCH4. ↩

6. 22f.

   Section manuscript page 7:  “As is the case for most hominins recovered from tropical Asia, attempted DNA extraction from H. luzonensis fossils has been unsuccessful.” ↩ ↩

7. 22g.

   Section manuscript page 7:  “As is the case with the island of Flores, a substantial sea crossing has always been required to reach Luzon from any mainland, even during the lowest sea level periods of the Quaternary period (Fig. 1).” ↩ ↩

8. 22h.

   Section manuscript page 4:  “Intermediate manual phalanx (rays 2–4) that is long and narrow (unlike all hominins except H. sapiens), with a longitudinally curved and dorso-palmarly compressed shaft, well-developed flexor sheath attachments and a strongly developed dorsal beak; it shares shape affinities with Australopithecus, H. floresiensis and—to a lesser extent—H. sapiens.”  From the formal diagnosis. ↩

9. 22i.

   Section manuscript page 6:  “The proportions of CCH5 (apical tuft expansion and robusticity indices) are within the ranges of variation for H. sapiens and Australopithecus and outside those of H. neanderthalensis and H. floresiensis”.  CCH5 is the finger-tip bone.  The diagnosis as printed in Nature reads "Distal hand phalanx with proportions unlike those of early Homo/Paranthropus, Homo naledi, H. floresiensis and H. neanderthalensis";  the manuscript's diagnosis names only H. neanderthalensis.  The description quoted here is the same in both. ↩

Creation Ministries International.  “Hobbit: New news is good news.”  creation.com.  Aug 24, 2006.  Unsigned web article responding to Jacob et al. 2006, with an addendum of 5 October 2006.  It records CMI's shift from Wieland's dwarfed-erectus reading toward a diseased modern human.

1. 23a.

   Section summary paragraph:  “In summary, it is now even more likely that this is a diseased modern human, rather than a dwarfed erectus. But as our 'hobbit-forming' article of 5 May 2005 indicated, either conclusion would make little difference to the obvious conclusion that the 'Hobbit' remains were those of a fully human descendant of Adam.” ↩ ↩

O'Micks, Jean.  “Rebuttal to "Reply to O'Micks Concerning the Geology and Taphonomy of the Homo naledi Site" and "Identifying Humans in the Fossil Record: A Further Response to O'Micks".”  Answers Research Journal 10:63–70.  2017.  Part of O'Micks's exchange with Todd Wood over Homo naledi, in which he applies Wood's baraminology methods and concludes that both naledi and the hobbit are australopiths.  The only published young-earth claim that the hobbit is not human.

1. 24a.

   Page 63:  “H. floresiensis might well be another example of a fossil ape, based on both cranial and post-cranial characteristics (similar to H. naledi), mistaken to be a diminutive archaic human. … Baraminic analyses of one cranial data set and two post-cranial data sets suggest that both H. naledi and H. floresiensis are not part of the human holobaramin, but are rather australopiths.” ↩ ↩

2. 24b.

   Page 66:  “Furthermore, H. floresiensis has bony reinforcements alongside its nose (which is lacking in humans), and also thigh bones which are less obliquely aligned than those of humans. The oblique thigh bones are a crucial postcranial character, since the alignment of the thigh bones influences gait and body posture, making it possible that H. floresiensis wasn't even bipedal.” ↩

3. 24c.

   Page 67:  “BDC results were obtained at a relevance cutoff > 0.95 for five characters. Three pairs of species formed: 1) A. afarensis + A. sediba, 2) H. habilis + H. naledi, and 3) A. africanus + H. floresiensis”. ↩

Sinclair, Peter, and Todd Charles Wood.  “Revising Hominin Baraminology with Medoid Partitioning and Fuzzy Analysis.”  Answers Research Journal 14:451–462.  2021.  Reruns the statistical baraminology of the hominins on a 391-character matrix that includes Homo floresiensis, with three clustering methods.  Its Table 1 sorts creationist opinion on the hobbit:  "Not human", O'Micks 2017;  "Human", Wise 2005, Line 2006, Wood 2016, Rupe and Sanford 2017.  Locators are section names.

1. 25a.

   Section Discussion:  “Distance correlation placed H. floresiensis in its own singleton cluster rather than in a human or nonhuman cluster. Three-cluster and two-cluster medoid partitioning placed H. floresiensis in the human cluster, but fuzzy analysis did not. … Two-cluster fuzzy analysis uniformly placed H. floresiensis in a cluster with nonhuman apes. Given the lack of consistency, we cannot make a firm conclusion regarding the status of H. floresiensis.” ↩

Ham, Ken.  “Homo luzonensis—a New Human Species Discovered in the Philippines?”  Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham Blog.  Apr 15, 2019.  Answers in Genesis's response to Détroit et al. 2019.  It prints the verdict and the bone-by-bone notes of the anatomist David Menton, with a comment by the palaeontologist Gabriela Haynes.

1. 26a.

   Section Homo or Ape?:  “Dr. David Menton, an anatomist … studied the paper and concluded, 'This is absolutely not Homo. It's an ape.' Dr. Menton notes that the finger and toe bones bear no resemblance to human fingers and toes, but do resemble the highly curved fingers and toes of Australopithecus”. ↩ ↩

2. 26b.

   Section bullet "Teeth":  “They point out that the premolars 'display several primitive features. . . . [the] premolars have multiple roots that are robust and highly divergent, an archaic condition typically found in Australopithecus.'” ↩

3. 26c.

   Section bullet "Finger":  “The authors say that the intermediate phalanx has a "longitudinally curved and dorso-palmarly compressed shaft" that "shares shape affinities with Australopithecus." This is clearly not a human finger.”  “The distal manual phalanx is described by the authors as having "proportions unlike those of early Homo/Paranthropus, Homo naledi, H. florensis and H. neanderthalensis." This is clearly not a human finger.”  Menton's notes, as printed by Ham.  "H. florensis" is the article's spelling. ↩

4. 26d.

   Section Homo or Ape?:  “The portions of the paper, "Diagnosis" and "Description and Comparison of the fossil elements," point to characteristics that show similarities to Australopithecus, Paranthropus, or "early" Homo, as they call it, which would be ape-like. But despite all that, they keep pushing the idea of a new species for the genus Homo.”  Gabriela Haynes, a palaeontologist in Answers in Genesis's research department, quoted near the end of the article. ↩

Cserhati, Matthew et al.  “What is Homo luzonensis? Ape or man?”  creation.com.  Oct 16, 2019.  Creation Ministries International's response to Détroit et al. 2019, updated 7 November 2019.  Cserhati is a bioinformatician, Line a neuroscientist who writes CMI's hominin articles, Tay a CMI speaker.

1. 27a.

   Paragraph 3:  “The number of bones is too few to draw any definitive conclusion, but it still may be worth the time to analyze the bones.” ↩

2. 27b.

   Section Morphology:  “The premolars have multiple robust roots, and resemble those of Australopithecus and Paranthropus. However, they also resemble those of Indonesian Homo erectus, which almost all creationists agree is human.” ↩

3. 27c.

   Section conclusion:  “None of the bones have features which resemble only australopithecines. From the scant evidence there is at this point no reason to think that H. luzonensis is not human. It could be that H. luzonensis is very similar to H. floresiensis and both are human, likely belonging to the Negrito population living in the Philippines.” ↩ ↩

4. 27d.

   Section Morphology:  “The third right metatarsal (a bone in the mid-foot) is gracile (slender) and resembles that of H. floresiensis. … It fits into the range of other Homo species, and overlaps with the range of variation measured for Philippine Negritos.” ↩

5. 27e.

   Section Animal remains:  “Also, stone tools associated with a butchered rhinoceros, indicating human intelligence, were found nearby in the Cagayan Valley of northern Luzon, dated by evolutionists to between 777 and 631 ka. Whilst not accepting these age dates, they nonetheless indicate there was likely a human presence in the region relatively early post-Flood.” ↩

Falk, Dean et al.  “The Brain of LB1, Homo floresiensis.”  Science 308(5719):242–245.  Apr 8, 2005.  A virtual endocast of LB1 from CT, compared with great apes, five Homo erectus, ten modern humans, a pygmy, one microcephalic and two australopiths.  Falk is a palaeoneurologist at Florida State University.  Its one-microcephalic comparison was its stated weakness, repaired in the 2007 paper.

1. 28a.

   Page 242:  “Morphometric, allometric, and shape data indicate that LB1 is not a microcephalic or pygmy. LB1's brain/body size ratio scales like that of an australopithecine, but its endocast shape resembles that of Homo erectus.” ↩

2. 28b.

   Page 245:  “The CT-estimated cranial capacity was 417 cm3, as opposed to 380 cm3 measured with mustard seeds (1). The 37-cm3 difference is attributable to variation in how cranial holes were plugged and thus to measurement error associated with the current reconstructions.”  Note 10 of the paper. ↩

3. 28c.

   Page 245:  “Our data show that LB1's well-convoluted brain could not have been a miniaturized version of the brain of either H. sapiens or H. erectus.” ↩

4. 28d.

   Page 245:  “LB1's polar convolutions appear derived compared with those of H. erectus and other early hominins.”  “thus, LB1's extremely wide temporal lobes (brachycephaly; fig. S3) may represent another derived feature.” ↩

van den Bergh, Gerrit D. et al.  “Homo floresiensis-like fossils from the early Middle Pleistocene of Flores.”  Nature 534(7606):245–248.  Jun 9, 2016.  The first description of the Mata Menge hominin fossils, a mandible fragment and six teeth.  van den Bergh is a palaeontologist at the University of Wollongong who has worked the So'a Basin since the 1990s.

1. 29a.

   Page 245:  “These specimens comprise a mandible fragment and six isolated teeth belonging to at least three small-jawed and small-toothed individuals. … The Mata Menge fossils are derived compared with Australopithecus and H. habilis, and so tend to support the view that H. floresiensis is a dwarfed descendent of early Asian H. erectus. Our findings suggest that hominins on Flores had acquired extremely small body size and other morphological traits specific to H. floresiensis at an unexpectedly early time.” ↩

Falk, Dean et al.  “The type specimen (LB1) of Homo floresiensis did not have Laron Syndrome.”  American Journal of Physical Anthropology 140(1):52–63.  Sep 2009.  The Liang Bua team's reply to Hershkovitz, comparing LB1 with the clinical literature on Laron syndrome and with the patient images Hershkovitz published.

1. 30a.

   Page 52:  “The statements regarding most of these traits are new to the clinical literature and lack quantitative support. LB1 and patients with LS differ markedly in the size and shape of the cranium; thickness and pneumatization of cranial bones; morphology of the face, mandible, teeth, and chin; form of the shoulder, wrist, and pelvis; and general body proportions including relative foot size. Claims that patients with LS are similar to LB1 in displaying protracted scapulae, short clavicles, low degrees of humeral torsion, flaring ilia, and curved tibiae are not supported by data or corroborating images. … From our review and analysis, we conclude that LB1 did not suffer from LS.”  From the abstract.  LS is Laron syndrome. ↩

Brown, Peter.  “LB1 and LB6 Homo floresiensis are not modern human (Homo sapiens) cretins.”  Journal of Human Evolution 62(2):201–224.  Feb 2012.  A point-by-point test of the cretinism diagnosis against the clinical literature and against the original bones, by the anatomist who described them, and so a reply by an interested party.

1. 31a.

   Page 213:  “Contrary to claims by Obendorf et al. (2008), a dramatic reduction in brain mass (>60%) has never featured in the clinical literature on human cretinism, and the small size of LB1's brain does not support their speculation about the pathological status of LB1.” ↩ ↩

2. 31b.

   Page 213:  “Using a median sagittal section CT scan and a sectioned stereolithographic model, it is possible to estimate the length of the sella turcica in LB1 at ~8.5 mm (Fig. 9b). Contrary to Obendorf et al. (2008), this is within the normal human range”.  The sella turcica is the bony seat of the pituitary.  Obendorf's figure from the photograph was 12.9 mm. ↩ ↩

Oxnard, Charles et al.  “More on the Liang Bua finds and modern human cretins.”  HOMO 63(6):407–412.  Dec 2012.  The cretinism authors' rejoinder to Brown 2012, in six sections:  unfused growth plates, limb proportions, bone torsions, robusticity, the skull, and iodine deficiency on Flores.

1. 32a.

   Page 407:  “Brown (2012: LB1 and LB6 Homo floresiensis are not modern human (Homo sapiens) cretins, Journal of Human Evolution) makes errors of fact, omission and interpretation. … In each of these areas, much information about cretins is incorrect and much information (Oxnard et al., 2010) comparing the Liang Bua remains with cretins is ignored.”  From the abstract. ↩

2. 32b.

   Section Skull features:  “Brown consistently misreports brain sizes in cretins. Thus he writes "brain weights and endocranial volumes … are in the normal human range of variation" therefore taking no notice of the large reductions in brain and skull sizes in small statured endemic cretins observed by de Quervain that we reported in 2008 (an English translation is now available in Dennison et al., 2012).”  The ellipsis is the authors' own. ↩ ↩

Eckhardt, Robert B. et al.  “Reply to Westaway et al.: Mandibular misrepresentations fail to support the invalid species Homo floresiensis.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(7):E606.  Feb 17, 2015.  A one-page letter by the Down syndrome authors answering Westaway and colleagues on the jaw.  It also restates the group's position on brain volume, stature and asymmetry.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 33a.

   Page E606:  “Given hundreds of disorders producing small brain and short stature and asymmetry (2), Hf is an invalid taxon independent of any particular diagnosis.”  Hf is the letter's abbreviation for Homo floresiensis. ↩

Eckhardt, Robert B., and Maciej Henneberg.  “Paleospecies as cognitive construct: The meme of "Homo floresiensis".”  Anthropological Review 84(3):317–336.  Sep 30, 2021.  An essay by two of the Down syndrome authors that sets the hobbit beside Piltdown Man and other abandoned fossil species.  It restates their figures for brain volume and stature, answers Baab's criticism in one sentence, and discusses the Mata Menge jaw and teeth.  It was written before the Mata Menge arm bone was published.

1. 34a.

   Page 323:  “our emphasis for the parallel to criticisms of our Down syndrome (DS) hypothesis by Baab and colleagues (Baab et al. 2015) because some variably-expressed DS signs were not present in LB1”.  A bracketed aside in the essay's account of the Gardar skull, a medieval Greenland skull once named as a species and later diagnosed as acromegaly.  The next sentence says the missing signs "were overwhelmed by critically important signs that were not missing."  The Baab 2015 in the essay's reference list is a conference abstract;  the 2016 paper is not listed. ↩

Orr, Caley M. et al.  “New wrist bones of Homo floresiensis from Liang Bua (Flores, Indonesia).”  Journal of Human Evolution 64(2):109–129.  Feb 2013.  Describes a right capitate, LB20, and two partial hamates, LB21 and LB22, picked out in 2009 from unsorted bone of the 2004 excavation, with three-dimensional shape analysis.  From the wrist team of the 2007 paper, so a reply by an interested party.

1. 35a.

   Page 109:  “The new capitate is smaller than that of LB1 but is nearly identical in morphology. … Because there is no accommodation for the derived, palmarly blocky trapezoid that characterizes Homo sapiens and Neandertals, this individual most likely had a plesiomorphically wedge-shaped trapezoid (like LB1). … Documentation of a second individual with primitive carpal anatomy from Liang Bua, along with further analysis of trapezoid scaling relative to the capitate in LB1, refutes claims that the wrist of the type specimen represents a modern human with pathology.”  From the abstract. ↩

Morwood, Michael J. et al.  “Archaeology and age of a new hominin from Flores in eastern Indonesia.”  Nature 431(7012):1087–1091.  Oct 28, 2004.  The companion paper to the 2004 description, carrying the radiocarbon and luminescence samples that gave the original age of about 18,000 years.

1. 36a.

   Section abstract:  “Dating by radiocarbon (14C), luminescence, uranium-series and electron spin resonance (ESR) methods indicates that H. floresiensis existed from before 38,000 years ago (kyr) until at least 18 kyr.” ↩

Brumm, Adam et al.  “Hominins on Flores, Indonesia, by one million years ago.”  Nature 464(7289):748–752.  Apr 2010.  Reports stone artefacts at Wolo Sege in the So'a Basin, lower in the section than Mata Menge, sealed by a dated ignimbrite.  No hominin fossil is associated with them.

1. 37a.

   Section abstract:  “We show using 40Ar/39Ar dating that an ignimbrite overlying the artefact layers at Wolo Sege was erupted 1.02 ± 0.02 Myr ago, providing a new minimum age for hominins on Flores.” ↩

Ingicco, Thomas et al.  “Earliest known hominin activity in the Philippines by 709 thousand years ago.”  Nature 557(7704):233–237.  May 2018.  Excavation at Kalinga in the Cagayan Valley of Luzon:  57 stone tools with a butchered rhinoceros skeleton, dated by electron spin resonance and uranium-series on a tooth of the animal.  Line numbers are those of the authors' manuscript.  Mirror:  Hal.science

1. 38a.

   Line 122:  “The tooth yielded an age of 709 ± 68 ka”. ↩

van den Bergh, Gerrit D. et al.  “Earliest hominin occupation of Sulawesi, Indonesia.”  Nature 529(7585):208–211.  Jan 14, 2016.  Stone artefacts at Talepu, Sulawesi, dated from before 200 thousand to about 100 thousand years, with no hominin fossil. ↩

Searches run on 10 October 2026 for the exact terms "Liang Bua", "Mata Menge", "floresiensis", "Callao" and "luzonensis".  Full-text searches:  creation.com's article index, where 14 articles hold "Liang Bua", 2 hold "Mata Menge", both by Line, and 1 holds "luzonensis" and "Callao";  the Creation Research Society Quarterly's archive, which also indexes Answers Research Journal, where 1 paper holds "Liang Bua",¹⁴ 7 hold "floresiensis", 1 holds "Callao Cave" and "luzonensis",⁵⁶ and none holds "Mata Menge";  the site search of Answers in Genesis, where 5 articles and a topic page hold "Liang Bua", 1 holds "Mata Menge",⁴¹ 2 hold "luzonensis" and none holds "Callao";  and the Institute for Creation Research's own search, where 9 articles hold "floresiensis" and none holds any of the site names.  That last search page says it is being rebuilt, so its result is the weakest of the four.  The site search of Answers Research Journal reads titles and abstracts only, and returned one paper for "floresiensis".  Every article returned was fetched, and each mention of the hobbit or of the sites in it was read for a date in years or a place in a biblical chronology, except one book review in the Quarterly's archive that could not be fetched.  Print-only issues of Creation magazine and Acts & Facts, and books other than the two cited here, were not searched. ↩

Mitchell, Elizabeth.  “Hobbits of Flores Were an Archaic Human Variety, Studies Suggest.”  Answers in Genesis, News to Know.  Jul 15, 2016.  Answers in Genesis's response to the 2016 redating and the Mata Menge fossils, by a physician on its staff.  It accepts Baab's rebuttal of Down syndrome and reads Mata Menge as evidence of a population.

1. 41a.

   Section Hobbits Likely the Norm on Ancient Flores:  “Hobbit-like fossils newly discovered at a distant site on the island of Flores may soon totally tip the anthropological scale in favor of the view that the Flores hobbits were a unique variety of human, not a few diseased outliers among the island's population.” ↩

2. 41b.

   Section footnote 1:  “We do not know exactly when various people groups reached places like Flores after dispersion from the Tower of Babel; however, when human history is understood in the light of the reliable history provided in God's Word, the vast temporal separations postulated by these scientists, as well as the 700,000 year age assigned to the new Mata Menge hobbit-like fossils, fall by the wayside.” ↩ ↩

3. 41c.

   Section Island Dwarfism: Evolutionary Shrinkage?:  “The population bottleneck of the global Flood about 4,350 years ago reduced the world's human population to eight people—Noah and his family. … Thus we can readily understand that so-called separate species of humans such as the Neanderthals, Homo erectus, Denisovans, early modern humans were just as human as we are.” ↩ ↩

4. 41d.

   Paragraph final:  “Whether the entire population manifested some sort of yet-to-be-identified growth disorder, island dwarfism, or genetically inbred characteristics, the remains of these small Flores inhabitants are consistent with our biblically based understanding that variations would have appeared among isolated groups of people after the global Flood and the subsequent dispersion from the Tower of Babel.” ↩

Lubenow, Marvin L.  “'Hobbits' Were Real!”  Answers in Genesis.  Sep 13, 2006.  A short web article by the author of Bones of Contention;  a second, "'Hobbits' Were True Humans!", followed on 14 February 2007.

1. 42a.

   Paragraph 7:  “Both of these alternate views are offered by evolutionists, and the controversy is heating up! However, both of these views are compatible with young-earth creationism.” ↩

2. 42b.

   Paragraph 8:  “However, the seven-year RATE program by creationist scientists has produced evidence strongly suggesting that all evolutionist dates are inflated because they are based on invalid assumptions.” ↩

3. 42c.

   Paragraph 9:  “There are other grounds for questioning the evolutionary dates for the Flores hobbits. Consider this quotation from Discover (January 2005, p. 31): ". . . local folktales suggest that little people were living in caves on some Indonesian islands when the first Dutch explorers arrived in the 16th century." Normally I would give no credence to folktales. However, there is a colony of "modern Rampasasa pygmies living only a few kilometers from Liang Bua cave" (Science, 25 August 2006, p. 1028).” ↩

4. 42d.

   Paragraph final:  “The 'hobbits' were real, and they were human. … While we creationists cannot prove that they could reproduce with modern humans, the cultural artifacts associated with them are things that only true humans produce—stone tools and fire.” ↩

Wieland, Carl.  “Hobbling the Hobbit?”  creation.com.  Nov 8, 2004.  Wieland's follow-up eleven days after the announcement, relaying what the Indonesian palaeoanthropologist Teuku Jacob told the Jakarta Post.

1. 43a.

   Paragraph 5:  “The skeleton is not a new species as claimed by these scientists, but simply a fossil of a modern human, Homo sapiens, that lived about 1,300 to 1,800 years ago.”  Paragraph 8:  “Certainly our view (that this is likely a miniature human being exhibiting part of the same range of post-Babel human variation as encompasses the larger so-called Homo erectus) is not harmed, if anything the opposite, by this Indonesian opinion.”  The first quotation is Jacob's, as the Jakarta Post of 8 November 2004 reported it. ↩

500 years divided by 85 ash layers is 5.9 years.  Wise's window runs from the Flood to about 1000 B.C.³  On Answers in Genesis's Flood date of about 4,350 years before 2016,⁴¹ the Flood falls near 2334 B.C. and the window is about 1,330 years;  1,330 divided by 85 is 15.6 years.  The 500-year figure is no source's claim and is used for scale only. ↩

Evans, Alistair R. et al.  “The maximum rate of mammal evolution.”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109(11):4187–4190.  Mar 13, 2012.  Maximum rates of body-mass change in mammals over 70 million years, in generations and in haldanes, against a reference set of 1,453 published rates.  Evans is an evolutionary biologist at Monash University.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 45a.

   Section SI Appendix, page 5, Examples of island dwarfism:  “The Jersey deer represents a change from about 200 kg to 36 kg during a maximum of 5800 years (16). As this is a maximum estimate of the divergence time, this will represent a minimum and therefore conservative estimate of the evolutionary rate.”  Reference 16 is Lister 1989.  Table S4 of the same appendix gives the deer a generation of 2.5 years, which makes 5,800 years the 2,300 generations of the main text. ↩

Diniz-Filho, José Alexandre Felizola, and Pasquale Raia.  “Island Rule, quantitative genetics and brain–body size evolution in Homo floresiensis.”  Proceedings of the Royal Society B 284(1857):20171065.  Jun 28, 2017.  The only published quantitative-genetic pricing of the hobbit's dwarfing:  50,000 simulations of a 50 kg, 750 to 1,000 cm³ ancestor becoming a 27 kg, 426 cm³ descendant, with heritability 0.725, over 2,000 to 10,000 generations.  Diniz-Filho is a Brazilian evolutionary ecologist, Raia an Italian palaeontologist.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 46a.

   Page 4:  “Under Lande's [36] model, the mean value of truncation selection threshold b was equal to 3.138 ± 0.155 phenotypic standard deviations, which corresponds to a minimum selective mortality of about 8.48 × 10−4 per generation (95% CI between 4.01 × 10−4 and 2.71 × 10−3) against the largest individuals.” ↩

2. 46b.

   Page 4:  “We started by applying a range of 50 kya to 300 kya for the time”.  The paper writes kya for thousands of years.  “Thus, combining these limits for divergence time with an average generation length of ca 30 years [63,64] gives lower and upper limits of approximately 2000–10 000 generations for the divergence between H. floresiensis and H. erectus.” ↩

3. 46c.

   Page 5:  “Under the range of parameters used in the simulations, there is a wide possible variation in EBS, with a mean of 479 ± 73 cm3 (figure 3a). Although the 426 cm3 estimated for LB1 brain size is within this relatively wide interval, the mean EBS values from the simulations are slightly larger than 426 cm3. The distribution of expected ancestral brain size (EABS) peaks at around 750 cm3 (median 775, with 95% CI from 628 to 1050)”. ↩

4. 46d.

   Page 2:  “We found that dwarfing in H. floresiensis is best explained by strong directional selection over a relatively short time, and that, in agreement with a recent study based on an allometric analyses of brain–body size variation in fossil hominids [26], body size reduction alone would produce a larger brain than observed in Flores Man.” ↩

Gingerich, Philip D.  “Rates of evolution on the time scale of the evolutionary process.”  Genetica 112–113:127–144.  Nov 2001.  Measures how the rate of change in a trait depends on the interval it is measured over, using D. S. Falconer's 1973 selection experiments on mouse body weight, field studies, and fossil sequences, all in haldanes.  Gingerich is a University of Michigan palaeontologist who named the haldane as a unit.  Mirror:  Archive.org

1. 47a.

   Page 130:  “In the second, six ‘small’ lineages were maintained in the laboratory for 23 generations, selected in each generation for smaller body size.”  Page 132:  “A line fit to all points declines slightly as interval length gets longer (slope −0.000), indicating a very slight decline in response over time. This line has an intercept of −0.138, and a predicted H0 of −0.138, which is again very close to the observed mean rate of −0.137 for 1-generation rates (Figure 4(A)).”  Rates are in standard deviations of log body weight per generation.  The experiment is Falconer's, on six-week body weight of laboratory mice. ↩

Martin, Robert D. et al.  “Flores hominid: New species or microcephalic dwarf?”  The Anatomical Record Part A 288A(11):1123–1145.  Nov 2006.  The microcephaly case argued from brain-body scaling, by a primatologist at the Field Museum with a paediatric neurologist, Dobyns, among the authors.  Its scaling model shrinks a 60 kg, 991 cm³ Homo erectus to 16 kg and gets 794 cm³.

1. 48a.

   Page 1128:  “The artifact assemblage clearly involved a tradition using the prepared-core technique, which is confined to Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens. Furthermore, the explicitly noted presence of bladelets is a hallmark of Homo sapiens”.  “However, they also mention a "more formal component . . . including . . . blades and microblades," thus reinforcing the interpretation that there are at least two sets of assemblages in the cave, both seemingly associated with their hominid.”  "They" are Morwood et al. 2004, the companion dating paper, whose words Martin is quoting. ↩

Sutikna, Thomas et al.  “The spatio-temporal distribution of archaeological and faunal finds at Liang Bua (Flores, Indonesia) in light of the revised chronology for Homo floresiensis.”  Journal of Human Evolution 124:52–74.  Nov 2018.  Re-plots every find from the cave against the revised stratigraphy, tracing the disappearance of the hobbit and the extinct fauna and the change in stone raw material.

1. 49a.

   Page 52:  “Our results suggest that H. floresiensis and Stegodon florensis insularis, along with giant marabou stork (Leptoptilos robustus) and vulture (Trigonoceps sp.), were likely extinct by ~50 ka ago. Moreover, an abrupt and statistically significant shift in raw material preference due to an increased use of chert occurs ~46 thousand calibrated radiocarbon (14C) years before present”. ↩ ↩

van den Bergh, Gerrit D. et al.  “The Liang Bua faunal remains: a 95 k.yr. sequence from Flores, East Indonesia.”  Journal of Human Evolution 57(5):527–537.  Nov 2009.  The study of the animal bones from the cave, written on the old chronology in which the hobbit lasted to 17 thousand years ago.

1. 50a.

   Section abstract:  “The accumulation of Stegodon and Komodo dragon remains at the site in the Pleistocene is attributed to Homo floresiensis, while predatory birds, including an extinct species of owl, were largely responsible for the accumulation of the small vertebrates.” ↩

University of Wollongong.  “Fire discovery sheds new light on 'hobbit' demise.”  University of Wollongong press release, reproduced by Archaeology Wiki.  Jun 30, 2016.  The university's press release for Morley et al. 2017, quoting its lead author.  A press release, not a paper.

1. 51a.

   Paragraph 9:  “Given that no evidence for the use of fire by Homo floresiensis during roughly 130,000 years of presence at the site has been found, Dr Morley said modern humans are the most likely candidates for the construction of the fire places.” ↩

Lubenow, Marvin L.  Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils.  Baker Books, Grand Rapids.  revised and updated edition.  2004.  The standard young-earth survey of the human fossil record.  Written before LB1 was announced;  its pages 130 to 131 discuss the 1998 Flores stone tools and the sea crossing they imply.

1. 52a.

   Page 131:  “The remarkable thing about this discovery is that Flores is several hundred miles and three deepwater straits east of Java. The widest of these is 12 miles, and none were dry land during the Ice Age. Morwood and his associates write, 'We conclude that Homo erectus in this region was capable of repeated water crossings using watercraft.'”  Lubenow is quoting Morwood et al. 1998, Nature 392:173–176. ↩

Line, Peter.  “The Hobbit: Precious fossil or poisoned chalice?”  creation.com.  Jun 21, 2006.  Line's first treatment, published two months before Jacob et al.'s paper.  It leans to microcephaly on the strength of Henneberg's and Jacob's statements to the press and of Weber et al. 2005, whether in a modern human or in a Homo erectus.

1. 53a.

   Paragraph final:  “As arguments to the contrary accumulate, it is probably more likely that the LB1 skeleton, whilst still human and hence a descendant of Adam, is a reflection of post–Babel human pathological variation.” ↩

Thomas, Brian.  “New 'Species' Was Just a Tiny Human.”  Institute for Creation Research, Creation Science Update.  Dec 31, 2008.  The Institute for Creation Research's position in 2008, written after Falk 2007 and Baab and McNulty's three-dimensional study of the skull's shape.  The same author reversed it in 2020.

1. 54a.

   Paragraph 3:  “Now researchers have offered even more evidence that these were diminutive, not diseased, people.” ↩

Thomas, Brian.  “How Do Hominids Fit with the Bible?”  Institute for Creation Research, Acts & Facts.  Apr 30, 2020.  A short question-and-answer column sorting hominin fossils into ape, invented and human.  Its two references for the hobbit are Hershkovitz et al. 2007, the Laron-syndrome paper, and Martin et al. 2006.

1. 55a.

   Paragraph final:  “Homo floresiensis (nicknamed "Hobbit") presented a challenge. The skull and other fragments from a remote island in Indonesia came from a small person with a tiny head. Initial reports declared it a possible ancestor, but later work showed an excellent match between Hobbit and people today who have microcephaly. Diseased humans don't show evolution, just sin's curse on creation.” ↩

Rupe, Christopher.  “"Lucy" and the Pygmy Human Hypothesis.”  Creation Research Society Quarterly 62:208–227.  2026.  Argues that the Lucy skeleton is a small-bodied human from an isolated pygmy population and not an australopith, using the hobbit and Homo naledi as comparisons.  Rupe is the co-author of Contested Bones.

1. 56a.

   Page 221:  “Once again, curved fingers and toes should not be considered a diagnostic trait since they can occur in humans. For example, finger bones belonging to another small-bodied human were discovered in Callao Cave on the Philippine Island of Luzon (Détroit et al., 2019).”  Page 221, figure 14:  “there can be no question it belonged to the small-bodied human, H. luzonensis”. ↩ ↩

Jungers, William L. et al.  “The foot of Homo floresiensis.”  Nature 459(7243):81–84.  May 7, 2009.  Describes LB1's foot:  a human-like big toe in line with the others, but a foot exceptionally long for the leg with ape-like proportions elsewhere.  Jungers was the Liang Bua team's postcranial anatomist.

1. 57a.

   Section abstract:  “Here we show that LB1's foot is exceptionally long relative to the femur and tibia, proportions never before documented in hominins but seen in some African apes. Although the metatarsal robusticity sequence is human-like and the hallux is fully adducted, other intrinsic proportions and pedal features are more ape-like. The postcranial anatomy of H. floresiensis is that of a biped, but the unique lower-limb proportions and surprising combination of derived and primitive pedal morphologies suggest kinematic and biomechanical differences from modern human gait.” ↩ ↩

Boissoneault, Lorraine.  “A New Genetic Study Suggests Modern Flores Island Pygmies and Ancient Hobbits Are Unrelated.”  Smithsonian Magazine.  Aug 2, 2018.  A staff writer's news report on Tucci et al. 2018, quoting researchers by email.  A magazine article, not a laboratory report.

1. 58a.

   Paragraph 5:  “We have been unable to obtain DNA from Homo floresiensis. At least three ancient DNA labs have tried”.  Debbie Argue, a palaeoanthropologist at the Australian National University who was not part of the study, writing to the magazine by email. ↩