Homo floresiensis: Island Dwarfing and the Small Brain

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. 1a.

   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.” ↩ ↩ ↩

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:  “The H. floresiensis lineage most likely evolved from early Asian H. erectus and was a long-lasting lineage on Flores with markedly diminutive body size since at least ~700,000 years ago.” ↩

2. 2b.

   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.” ↩

3. 2c.

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

4. 2d.

   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. ↩ ↩

5. 2e.

   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).” ↩

6. 2f.

   Page 1:  “technologically simple stone artefacts (the oldest of which date back to at least 1.02 ± 0.02 million years ago [Ma])”. ↩

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. 3a.

   Section Results:  “In all analyses H. floresiensis shares no significant distance correlation, positive or negative, with any of the other taxa, human or nonhuman.” ↩

2. 3b.

   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.” ↩ ↩

3. 3c.

   Section Discussion:  “Given the results of our analysis of Berger et al.’s (2010) and Dembo et al.’s (2016) updated characters sets, we conclude that these additional methods do not substantially alter previous conclusions: the human holobaramin consists of the well-characterized human forms of H. sapiens, Neandertals, and H. erectus and probably includes the more fragmentary H. heidelbergensis, H. habilis, H. rudolfensis, H. naledi, and Au. sediba.”  The additional methods are the medoid partitioning and fuzzy analysis that Colin Reeves had recommended. ↩ ↩

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. 4a.

   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. 4b.

   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. 4c.

   Section manuscript page 10, table 1:  Hippopotamus amphibius 882 ± 16 cm³ (n = 18) at an adult body mass of 1,495 ± 29.5 kg;  H. lemerlei 380 ± 7.25 cm³ (n = 24) at 374 kg, predicted 544 cm³;  H. madagascariensis 421 ± 11.9 cm³ (n = 12) at 393 kg, predicted 553 cm³;  Palaeoloxodon falconeri 1,800 cm³ against 9,000 cm³ in P. antiquus, predicted 2,250 cm³.  Section manuscript page 11, table 2. ↩ ↩

4. 4d.

   Section manuscript page 4:  “Similar intercept shifts to those illustrated in Figure 1 have been reported from domesticated mammals that on average have smaller brains than their wild relatives. Domesticated mammals provide proof of the developmental malleability of the brain among closely related species or within species, but there are some noteworthy distinctions between the phenomena of domestication and island dwarfism. The brain size reduction in domestic mammals is not necessarily associated with body size reduction, as it is in phyletic dwarfism, and domestication is usually associated with a reduction in the size of the sense organs. H. floresiensis, unlike the bovid Myotragus and domesticated mammals, does not have reduced orbital dimensions”.  Reference numerals are omitted. ↩

5. 4e.

   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. ↩

6. 4f.

   Section manuscript page 2:  “Madagascar is a large island of diverse habitats that has prehistorically supported up to three species of hippopotamus whose times of dispersal to Madagascar are unknown, but whose remains persist to within the last 6000 years.”  Reference numerals are omitted. ↩

The brain figures are this article's own reproduction of three published models, run in the script research/dwarfing-rates.ts in the parent article's folder and recomputed separately for this article.  Kubo 2013:  a descendant's volume is the ancestor's volume times the ratio of femoral-head diameters raised to the slope, with LB1's femoral head at 31 mm, Homo habilis at 614 cc and 42 mm, the earliest Javan Homo erectus at 860 cc and 45 to 50 mm, and the eight slopes of Kubo's Table 2 from 0.76 to 1.60;⁶  the sum recovers every value in that table to within 2 cc.  A modern brain of 1,350 cc at 45 mm, which no source models, gives 744 to 1,017 cc and is used for scale only;  at 50 mm it gives 628 to 939 cc.  Weston and Lister 2009:  scale the ancestor's volume by the ratio of body masses to the power 0.35, then take off a further 20, 24 or 30 per cent, the shortfalls measured in the Sicilian dwarf elephant and the two Madagascar hippos;⁴  the sum recovers the paper's 544, 553 and 2,250 cc predictions to within 2 per cent and its hominin figures of 493, 405 and 378 cc to within 1 per cent.  Run from 1,350 cc at 60 kg down to 23 kg the model gives 965 cc from scaling and 676 cc at the 30 per cent penalty;  from the Rampasasa mean of 1,270 ml,³³ 636 cc;  both are scale figures.  The Myotragus figures are also for scale:  half of the scaled 708 cc for a typical Homo erectus is 354 cc, and half of the scaled 965 cc for a modern brain is 483 cc.  Standard-deviation distances use a standard deviation of 0.10 in the natural log of brain size from Diniz-Filho and Raia's Table 1:  the distance is the natural log of the ratio of the two volumes divided by 0.10, which gives 11.5 from 1,350 cc, 7.0 from 860, 4.2 from 650 and 3.7 from 614. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

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. 6a.

   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. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 6b.

   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.” ↩ ↩

3. 6c.

   Page 6:  “In the model of Martin et al. [8], decreased body size from 60 (estimated average for generalized H. erectus) to 16 kg (smallest estimate for LB1 [1]) results in only moderate reduction of ECV from 991 to 794 cc.” ↩

4. 6d.

   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. ↩ ↩

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. 7a.

   Page 1:  “We showed that insularity may have triggered slightly different evolutionary trajectories for body and brain size, which means explaining the exceedingly small cranial volume of H. floresiensis requires additional selective forces acting on brain size alone.” ↩

2. 7b.

   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.” ↩ ↩ ↩

3. 7c.

   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.” ↩

4. 7d.

   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)”. ↩

5. 7e.

   Page 5:  “A total of 21.3% simulations gives EBS values in the range of 400–450 cm3.”  EBS is the expected brain size of the descendant.  The sentence runs across a column break.  “the brain size of simulations is skewed towards values perfectly fitting the range of early H. erectus, peaking at about 750–800 cm3.”  “although larger values close to the lower limit found in H. sapiens, or the upper limits for H. erectus, that is around 1000–1100 cm3, are present within the EABS distribution (figure 3b).” ↩

The rate figures are this article's own, computed in research/dwarfing-rates.ts in the parent article's folder and recomputed separately for this article.  Definition:  a haldane is the change in the natural log of the trait, divided by the pooled standard deviation of the log, divided by the number of generations.¹⁷  Inputs:  body mass 50 kg to 27 kg and heritability 0.725, both from Diniz-Filho and Raia;⁷  standard deviation of log body mass 0.15 from Evans¹⁷ or 0.05 from Diniz-Filho and Raia;  a generation of 25 years, which is this article's assumption.  The change is the log of 50 over 27, or 0.616, which is 4.1 standard deviations at 0.15 and 12.3 at 0.05.  The Jersey deer:  log of 6, over 0.15, over 2,300 generations, gives 0.0052 haldanes;  from Evans's own inputs, 200 kg to 36 kg in 5,800 years at 2.5 years a generation, it is 0.0049.¹⁷  Evans's fastest three-fold decrease in 1,000 generations gives 0.0073.  All three are floors, because the durations are maxima.  LB1 on the conventional clock:  0.616 over 0.15, over 2,000 and 10,000 generations, gives 0.0021 and 0.0004.  The young-earth windows are this article's scale figures, which no creationist source states for the hobbit:  250, 500 and 1,000 years at 25-year generations are 10, 20 and 40 generations, and 4,200 years is 168;  the same change over those gives 0.41, 0.21, 0.10 and 0.024 haldanes, which are 3.0, 1.5, 0.75 and 0.18 times the 0.137 of Falconer's mice.⁹  The share of each generation that must leave no children comes from the breeder's equation, response equals heritability times selection differential.  The per-generation response in standard deviations is divided by 0.725 to give the selection intensity, and the fraction of a normal distribution that must be cut from the top to produce that intensity is found from the standard formula, intensity equals the height of the normal curve at the cut divided by the fraction kept.  At a standard deviation of 0.15 that is 35, 16, 7 and 1 per cent;  at 0.05 it is 89, 53, 25 and 5 per cent.  With 20-year generations the first set becomes 27, 12, 5 and 1 per cent;  with 30-year generations, 42, 19, 9 and 2.  As a check, the same sum on Diniz-Filho and Raia's inputs, 0.05 and 6,000 generations, gives a cut 3.15 standard deviations out and a share of 8.3 in ten thousand, against their published 3.138 and 8.48.  From a habilis-sized start the distance is shorter by the ratio of the log changes in femoral-head diameter in Kubo's model, 42 to 31 mm against 45 or 50 to 31 mm, which is 0.82 or 0.64;  that assumes body mass scales on femoral-head diameter by the same power in both, and it gives shares of 21 to 28, 9 to 12 and 4 to 5 per cent for the three scale windows.  Truncation is the most efficient form of selection, so softer selection would need to remove more. ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩ ↩

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. 9a.

   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. ↩ ↩ ↩

2. 9b.

   Page 140:  “Microevolutionary studies yield rates on the order of 10⁻¹–10⁻² haldanes calculated over intervals of historical time ranging from 10¹–10² generations.” ↩

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. 10a.

   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. 10b.

   Section Discussion, The Human Holobaramin:  “Despite these contradictory opinions, the present results strongly support the classification of all three species in the human holobaramin. … The human holobaramin here described includes only the species or specimens included in the datasets, namely H. sapiens, H. erectus, H. ergaster, H. rudolfensis, H. habilis, H. neanderthalensis, “Au.” sediba, and H. heidelbergensis … First, although holobaramins are supposed to be defined from “holistic” data, all of the datasets used in this study contain only craniodental data.”  Table 3:  The table lists H. floresiensis, H. antecessor and the Dmanisi hominid under "Possible additional taxa" of the human holobaramin. ↩

3. 10c.

   Section Discussion, Biblical and Cultural Context:  “Third, the dispersal of the human population from Babel would presumably have been led by H. habilis and H. rudolfensis, specimens of which appear stratigraphically lower than any other human species. Specimens of both of these species (and of “Au.” sediba) are known only from Africa, whereas the erectus-like species (H. erectus sensu stricto, H. ergaster, and the Dmanisi hominids) are the next stratigraphically and the first human species to disperse across the Old World.” ↩ ↩ ↩

4. 10d.

   Section Discussion, The Human Holobaramin:  “As noted above, Hartwig-Scherer (1999) considers H. habilis an australopith, but Lubenow (2004, pp. 299–301) and Line (2005a) believe some H. habilis specimens might be human. Additional creationists who reject the human status of H. habilis include Gish (1995, p. 279), Hummer (1979), Mehlert (1996), Murdock (2006), and Young (2006).” ↩

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. 11a.

   Section opening text, before the heading "Small brains, big achievements":  “These may well have arisen because places with limited resources favour the transmission of already-existing genes which consume less of those resources—e.g., the genes for 'smallness'. Even a mutational stunting, like some hereditary instances of dwarfism today, might be favoured in such a situation and come to dominate a population.” ↩

2. 11b.

   Section opening text:  “The researchers who discovered the Flores bones apparently think that they are dwarfed descendants of Homo erectus. We would agree.” ↩

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. 12a.

   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. All the varieties of people in the world are their descendants. In the years following the Flood, after man's disobedience led to God's dispersal of the human population from the Tower of Babel, many groups of people would have been isolated linguistically, geographically, and genetically.” ↩

2. 12b.

   Section Island Dwarfism: Evolutionary Shrinkage?:  “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.” ↩

3. 12c.

   Section Small Archaic Humans or Diseased Modern Humans?:  “Could hobbits be a dwarfed variety of Homo erectus, a variety of archaic human whose presence has been demonstrated in Southeast Asia, and specifically on Flores? Possibly.” ↩

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. 13a.

   Page 88:  “Under these conditions severe inbreeding occurs, as well as selection for reduced body size and brain volume (see chapter 4). Deleterious mutations accumulate in the population and drift to fixation, causing changes in skeletal proportions and various other malformations.” ↩

2. 13b.

   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. ↩

3. 13c.

   Page 92:  “The findings of José Alexandre and colleagues is almost a point for point confirmation of our assessment of Hobbit in this chapter. … The researchers made the following points that were in remarkable agreement with our assessment, in addition to citing some of the same studies: 1) Hobbit is a dwarfed descendant of Erectus from Indonesia; 2) Hobbit’s small body and brain size was subject to insular dwarfism; 3) Hobbit’s small brain is explained by reductive selection; 4) reduced brain size would be advantageous in starvation conditions (because it is energetically costly); 5) dwarfed hippo fossils from Madagascar show how brain size can be reduced more than expected in relation to body size; and 6) this process can occur relatively rapidly in small, isolated populations.”  Of Diniz-Filho and Raia 2017, whose time span is 2,000 to 10,000 generations. ↩ ↩

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. 14a.

   Page 1:  “The morphology, age, and stratrigraphic relations of the recently described Homo floresiensis skeleton suggests it might represent a distinct post-Babel human population with an extreme morphology. Combined with the morphologies and relative ages of other post-Babel humans (e.g. H. erectus, H. neanderthalensis), H. floresiensis suggests a high post-Flood intrabaraminic diversification rate decreasing to the present.”  "stratrigraphic" is the source's spelling. ↩

2. 14b.

   Page 1:  “These changes in humans probably followed pre-programmed trajectories through biological character space, the specific course of which may have been largely effected by founder effect and genetic drift in small populations following Babel.” ↩

3. 14c.

   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.” ↩

4. 14d.

   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. 14e.

   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. ↩ ↩

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. 15a.

   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. 15b.

   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. ↩

Wise, Kurt P.  “Egypt or Babel: Which Came First?”  Answers magazine.  Apr 2008.  A short magazine piece placing Babel within the lifetime of Peleg.

1. 16a.

   Section Peleg and the "Division of the Earth":  “The Bible gives us no more specific information on when Babel occurred—namely, it falls between the Flood and the time of Abraham, probably near the midpoint (around 2200 BC), give or take a century.” ↩

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. 17a.

   Page 4189:  “The largest decreases, such as insular dwarfism, are more than 30 times the rate of increases of the same magnitude (Table 2).” ↩

2. 17b.

   Page 4189, table 2:  "Minimum number of generations (millions) required to evolve various magnitudes of change in mammals", row for insular dwarfism, decrease:  a three-fold change in 0.001 million generations, ten-fold in 0.008, hundred-fold in 0.12.  The durations behind the island cases are maximum estimates, so these generation counts are ceilings. ↩

3. 17c.

   Page 4190:  “In the reference dataset, the largest decreases in body size were rates of dwarfing in large mammals after isolation on islands by rising sea levels during the last few million years: elephants on the Mediterranean islands of Sicily, Malta, and Cyprus; mammoths on the California Channel Islands; and red deer on Jersey (SI Appendix). These island dwarfism cases involve body mass changes of 5- to 100-fold over estimated time intervals of 0.006–0.8 myr or 2,300–120,000 generations.”  Reference numerals in the printed sentence are omitted.  The same page states that the pooled standard deviation of log body mass was taken as 0.15. ↩ ↩

4. 17d.

   Page 4187:  “Evolutionary rates of morphological traits such as size are often quantified in haldanes (h) (10, 11), which measure proportional change in a feature (Mi) between two time points (i) standardized by the available variation (pooled ln SD sp) using a timescale in number of generations (g): h = (lnM2 − lnM1)/(sp × g).”  The i, the p and the 1 and 2 are subscripts in print. ↩

5. 17e.

   Page 4188:  “A third dataset from empirical selection experiments on mouse body size (3, 14) measured evolutionary change over 1–23 generations. Directly comparing rates at different interval lengths is complicated; although a very high rate can be sustained for a short interval, over longer periods, rates tend to vary and the direction of evolution may change (12). Thus, interval length must be incorporated into any analysis.” ↩ ↩

6. 17f.

   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. ↩ ↩ ↩

Bromham, Lindell, and Marcel Cardillo.  “Primates follow the 'island rule': implications for interpreting Homo floresiensis.”  Biology Letters 3(4):398–400.  Aug 22, 2007.  The first test of the island rule in primates, comparing island species with their nearest mainland relatives.  Bromham is an evolutionary biologist at the Australian National University.  Mirror:  PMC

1. 18a.

   Page 399:  “For the mass dataset, the three largest island species (over 7 kg) are 52, 61 and 80% of the size of their mainland counterparts. The predicted mass of H. floresiensis is around 55% of the mass of modern Indonesian H. sapiens, around 52% of the estimated mass of Indonesian H. erectus and similar in body size to some australopithecines”. ↩

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. 19a.

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

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. 20a.

   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. 20b.

   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. ↩

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. 21a.

   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. 21b.

   Page 1743:  “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”.  Page 1744:  “However, LB1’s scaphoid includes a fused centrale, as does the OH7 scaphoid from Olduvai Gorge”.  OH 7 is the type specimen of Homo habilis and is plotted in the paper's analysis of the scaphoid.  Its analysis of the trapezoid has no fossil hominin other than Neanderthals and early modern humans, and its analysis of the capitate adds australopiths. ↩

3. 21c.

   Page 1745:  “Unfortunately, no carpals are attributed to Homo erectus sensu lato, which is otherwise well represented in the fossil record between 1.8 and 0.8 Ma, with the exception of a partial lunate from Zhoukoudian”. ↩

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. 22a.

   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.” ↩

Wood, Todd Charles.  “An Evaluation of Homo naledi and "Early" Homo from a Young-Age Creationist Perspective.”  Journal of Creation Theology and Science Series B: Life Sciences 6:14–30.  May 9, 2016.  Wood's baraminology of Homo naledi and the Dmanisi skulls, with a review of which early forms he counts as human and on what grounds.  It argues that the forms called early Homo are human.  Mirror:  Archive.org

1. 23a.

   Page 23:  “For example, Wise (2005) argued based on usage of stone tools and fire that the Flores fossils referred to Homo floresiensis are the remains of true humans. In addition, Wise noted that their location east of Wallace’s line implied dispersal by boats, reflecting advanced technology. Thus, although Wood’s (2010) baraminological analysis of H. floresiensis was inconclusive, we may still include the Flores form in the human holobaramin.” ↩

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. 24a.

   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.” ↩

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. 25a.

   Page 245:  “Although it is possible that H. floresiensis represented an endemic island dwarf that, over time, became subject to unusual allometric constraints, an alternative hypothesis is that H. erectus and H. floresiensis may have shared a common ancestor that was an unknown small-bodied and small-brained hominin (1).” ↩

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. 26a.

   Page 1016:  “However, although tooth size and facial morphology dictate inclusion of the species in the genus Homo, the genealogy of H. floresiensis remains uncertain. Similarities in stature and body proportions with Australopithecus, for example, may reflect phylogeny or secondary evolutionary convergence. Either way, H. floresiensis is not just an allometrically scaled-down version of H. erectus.” ↩

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. 27a.

   Section abstract:  “was not Homo erectus but instead some other, more primitive, hominin”.  Of the possible ancestor of the Flores form. ↩

Argue, Debbie et al.  “The affinities of Homo floresiensis based on phylogenetic analyses of cranial, dental, and postcranial characters.”  Journal of Human Evolution 107:107–133.  Jun 2017.  Parsimony and Bayesian trees on characters of the skull, jaw, teeth and limb bones of Homo and Australopithecus together.  Argue is an Australian National University palaeoanthropologist;  Groves and Jungers were senior anatomists, Jungers on the Liang Bua team.

1. 28a.

   Section abstract:  “The new data and analyses support the hypothesis that H. floresiensis is an early Homo lineage: H. floresiensis is sister either to H. habilis alone or to a clade consisting of at least H. habilis, H. erectus, Homo ergaster, and H. sapiens. A close phylogenetic relationship between H. floresiensis and H. erectus or H. sapiens can be rejected; furthermore, most of the traits separating H. floresiensis from H. sapiens are not readily attributable to pathology (e.g., Down syndrome).” ↩

Menton, David N. et al.  “Baraminological Analysis Places Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Australopithecus sediba in the Human Holobaramin: Discussion.”  Answers Research Journal 3:153–158.  Aug 25, 2010.  Three separate replies to Wood's 2010 paper, printed together in the journal that published it.  Menton was an anatomist at Answers in Genesis, Habermehl signs as an independent scholar, and DeWitt was at Liberty University's Center for Creation Studies.  All three reject Wood's placement of Australopithecus sediba with humans.

1. 29a.

   Pages 155–156:  “The enthusiasm of baraminologists for using statistical analysis to determine humanness should perhaps be tempered; indeed, this paper raises very real doubt whether statistical methods should be applied to baraminology at all.”  From Habermehl's reply. ↩

2. 29b.

   Page 158:  “Based on the discussion above, it would appear that the statistical baraminology results placing Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, and Australopithecus sediba within the human holobaramin is a false positive result. This is most clearly demonstrated for sediba and therefore raises questions about habilis and rudolfensis.”  From DeWitt's reply. ↩ ↩

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. 30a.

   Section Australopithecine or Homo habilis:  “Hence, Homo habilis is an illusory species. I regard all australopithecines, including the ones evolutionists assign to Homo habilis sensu lato, as extinct apish primates.” ↩

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. 31a.

   Page 217:  “Lucy and the Hobbit have several unique features in common, including flat-footedness (DeSilva et al., 2010; Henneberg et al., 2014), curved fingers and toes, nearly identical endocranial capacities (Falk et al., 2005; Kubo et al., 2013), nearly identical limb proportions (Jungers et al., 2016), nearly identical height (Jungers et al., 2016) … The commonality of all these aberrant features makes sense if both belonged to small, genetically isolated pygmy human populations. … Perhaps parallel processes include genetic isolation, insular dwarfism, inbreeding, and fixation events associated with founder effects, just as evolutionary paleoanthropologists have proposed”. ↩

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. 32a.

   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.” ↩

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. 33a.

   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.” ↩ ↩

Reeves, Colin R.  “A Critical Evaluation of Statistical Baraminology: Part 1—Statistical Principles.”  Answers Research Journal 14:261–269.  Jul 14, 2021.  A critique of the statistics behind baraminic distance correlation and its multidimensional-scaling companion, with a second part proposing ordinary cluster analysis in their place.  Reeves is a statistician at the Applied Mathematics Research Centre, Coventry University, and writes as a creationist.

1. 34a.

   Page 261, section abstract:  “This paper will argue that these methods are based on a shaky understanding of statistical principles, and that their use ought to be abandoned.” ↩

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. 35a.

   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.” ↩