For my blog this week, I decided to focus on Homo Floresiensis and how the discovery and study of them, have further expanded my insight on human evolution. The Homo Floresiensis are from an island in Indonesia called Flores. H. Floresiensis lived approximately 100,000 to 50,000 years ago. A fact that I found interesting about H. Floresiensis, was that they were extremely small in stature, only standing about 3 feet tall. Due to their short stature, we see that they had a relatively smaller brain size as well compared to Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens living around the same time period as them. Although they had smaller brains, the Homo Floresiensis’ were still able to use stone tools and there is evidence pointing to the hunting of other animals. Which leads me to believe that since H. Florensiensis was confined to an island isolated from the mainland, there was a highly competitive nature for resources.

I found it interesting how, although, Homo Floresiensis was isolated from the mainland and was located on an island, how they were still able to develop and use stone tools. It had never crossed my mind that isolated communities, especially hundreds of thousands of years ago, were able to use their resources around them to form stone tools, and even, from what we know, hunt other animals. Though, it makes sense in order for the species to have survived and developed throughout time.

The reason that we are able to know so much about Homo Florensiensis, is due to the study of the fossil remains of the species. Despite their small stature, they were, in fact, bipedal. This species was known for having an absence of a chin, thick leg bones, and having a relatively low twist of the arm bones. This leads me to believe that the low twist could infer walking. Though, since they were short in stature, they wouldn’t be able to walk as much as modern-day humans, so they could still use their arms to walk on all fours. Another interesting fact was that Homo Florensiensis had their knee caps further back compared to nowadays. Which, again, I would correlate to the shorter distances of walking, though, walking had been developed as an evolutionary trait at that point in time.

Overall, the biggest contribution from finding these fossils remains is the amount of expanded knowledge that we now know of. If we did not have paleoanthropologists, this entire species may have gone unnoticed and undiscovered. It is crucial that we, as a society, desire to further our knowledge of our evolutionary traits and where we came from and how we developed as a species. Human diversity has allowed us to use fossil remains of ancestors in order to find the evolutionary differences of different species in different parts of the world, in order to acknowledge why we act, think, and look like we do nowadays. These discoveries also allowed us, as humans, to realize that if we truly put our minds to something, that anything is possible and plausible, and that every single thing in the universe has an explanation.