Fossil studies add some new twists to debate about a tiny, humanlike species
Fossil hobbits followed a simple motto: Walk, don't run. That's the implication of a new analysis of foot bones from an 18,000-year-old partial skeleton assigned to the controversial species Homo floresiensis, or hobbits.
But the relatively long and unusually primitive left foot of the female skeleton, known as LB1, feeds into growing confusion about the evolutionary origins of hobbits, researchers report in the May 7 Nature. So does another new investigation, of fossil hippo skulls, in the same issue.
"The hobbit foot could have made something like the more than 3-million-year-old Laetoli footprints in Tanzania but probably not the modern-looking footprints ascribed to 1.5-million-year-old H. erectus in Kenya," says anthropologist William Jungers of Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York (SN: 3/28/09, p. 14). Hobbits walked with a shuffling gait but would have had difficulty running, Jungers and his colleagues report.
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