YET ANOTHER ONE

Evidence of yet another previously unknown species of hominin (early example of the human genus) has been found. This newly discovered human forerunner has been dubbed Homo

luzonensis: the 50,000-year-old fossil remains of at least two adults and one youngster have been uncovered in the Callao Cave on Luzon Island, Philippines.

“The fossil remains included adult finger and toe bones, as well as teeth,” informs Professor Philip Piper of Australian National University. “The teeth are really very small…The size of the teeth generally, though not always, reflect the overall body-size of a mammal, so we think Homo luzonensis was probably relatively small. Exactly how small we don’t know yet.” In fact, it seems that Homo luzonensis shares some unique skeletal features with tiny Homo floresiensis, aka ‘the hobbit’, discovered on the island of Flores near the Philippine archipelago, about which FT has reported since 2004 [FT191:4-5, 355:16, etc]. (Species that develop in island isolation tend to be subject to ‘island dwarfism’ – perhaps due to a need to exist on limited resources.)

“The Philippines is made up of a group of large islands that have been separated long enough to have potentially facilitated archipelago speciation,” Piper points out. “There is no reason why archaeological research in the Philippines couldn’t discover several species of hominin. It’s probably just a matter of time.” EurekAlert, 10 April 2019. (Full account in the journal, Nature, 10 April.)