Studying the species of Homo Floresiensis this week really gave me a deeper insight into human history. They are from an island in Indonesia called Flores, and they lived approx. 100,000 to 50,000 years ago. Despite having small brains, this species hunted and used tools. This species also stood very small in stature. I found it interesting that this species was confined to an island. Thinking about a small habitat like this, I am sure there could have been competition for resources.

The article titled “How a hobbit is rewriting the history of the human race”, told about a team of researchers from Australia exploring a cave and how they found the skull of a Homo Floresiensis. I cannot believe something so precious like this skull had to be transported back on a hike, a plane, and then put back together. This was such a lucky discovery! Imagine if researchers did not even look on this island, this important piece of history would have been lost. It is fascinating to think about the theory of them shrinking to adapt to the environment. This was disproved however, when the researchers found the similarities to lucy and decided this species had always been tiny. This discovery taught us so much about these beings and about ourselves in the current time period. It is still a shock to me that beings like this existed millions of years ago. The article mentions that these beings had larger brains than certain species of apes. This makes me wonder how far along their emotional intelligence was.

When learning about this in lecture I never considered how the Homo Floresiensis made it all the way to island. The article makes it clear that this was also a surprise to researchers. Learning about how this species died out was also very intriguing to me. A volcanic eruption being one of the answers, makes sense to me. If the only remnants of the species resided on this one island, it is not plausible to think two of them survived this event. Even if they did survive, there is a very small chance they could figure out how to get off the island and repopulate elsewhere. A volcanic eruption would’ve destroyed a lot of resources as well. The other was that Neanderthals could have killed the Floresiensis, or used all the resources they had for themselves. The floresiensis being tiny and frankly weaker than the Neanderthals, did not stand a chance once their peaceful island life got invaded by outsiders.

I think the biggest contribution this discovery has made is that ANYTHING is possible. There are still many parts of this earth that have no yet been explored by researchers and could be holding some key information to unlocking evolution (especially in the depths of the ocean). There is a small chance that everything we know could be thrown off by one simple discovery. In the future, new technology could also be the key to unlocking unknown information about our true origin.