14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers writing in yesterday's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argue that, contrary to previous assumptions, Indonesia's so-called hobbit human was actually a regular guy suffering from Down syndrome.
The skeletal remains that scientists now say belong not to a new human species but to somebody suffering from the aforementioned developmental disorder were found on the island of Flores in Indonesia back in 2004.
Preliminary investigations revealed that the 15,000-year-old remains were left behind by an individual who had surprisingly short thighbones and stood merely 1.06 meters (roughly 3.5 feet) tall, and whose brain was one third the size of the average modern human's.
Based on these anatomical peculiarities and on other quirks never before documented in human specimens, it was concluded that the skeletal remains belonged to a previously undocumented species that scientists named Homo floresiensis.
An international team of scientists now say that this classification was erroneous, and that, according to recent evidence, the remains belong to a regular human whose odd appearance was due to developmental abnormalities linked to Down's syndrome.
Thus, specialists with the Pennsylvania State University in the US and their colleagues maintain that this ancestor of ours' height, as revealed by new and more accurate measurements (i.e. 1.26 meters / 4.13 feet), fell well within the range documented for Down's syndrome patients.
Besides, it looks like the specimen's skull, whose volume was initially estimated to be approximately 380 milliliters (23.2 cubic inches), actually has a volume of 430 milliliters (26.2 cubic inches). This too is consistent with Down's syndrome tell-tale signs.
As detailed in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, other anatomical peculiarities documented in the case of this human specimen can also be explained when accepting the hypothesis that this individual was born with said developmental disorder.
“When we first saw these bones, several of us immediately spotted a developmental disturbance, but we did not assign a specific diagnosis because the bones were so fragmentary. Over the years, several lines of evidence have converged on Down syndrome,” researcher Robert B. Eckhardt said in a statement.
“Are the skeletons from Liang Bua cave sufficiently unusual to require invention of a new human species? Our reanalysis shows that they are not. The less strained explanation is a developmental disorder. Here the signs point rather clearly to Down syndrome, which occurs in more than one per thousand human births around the world,” he added.
This theory that the skeletal remains discovered on the island of Flores in Indonesia in 2004 belong not to a new human species similar to the hobbits described in fantasy tales but to a regular guy born with Down's syndrome is backed up by the fact that no other bones displaying the same anatomical quirks have until now been unearthed in this part of the world.