If you’ve been following the story of “Homo floresiensis” since it began some years ago, it is the story of some 15,000 year old human(oid) remains found on an island in Indonesia. The only issue has been that the bones do (or did) not appear to coincide with an anatomically modern Homo sapiens.
It was proposed that the remains represent a new branch of human lineage, called Homo floresiensis. But others have maintained that the bones represent a modern human with some medical issue. First it was said that it could be a dwarf person due to an exceptionally poor diet.
Now two new papers are claiming the evidence strongly supports the idea that in fact the bones correspond to an individual, a modern human, who had Down’s syndrome, not a new species of hominid.
I put quotes around Homo floresiensis because it seems more appropriate now that the LB1 remains do not truly represent a new lineage of hominid but rather one who had a medical issue.
From the article:
Though these and other features are unusual, he acknowledged, “unusual does not equal unique. The originally reported traits are not so rare as to have required the invention of a new hominin species.”
and:
These and other Down-like characteristics, the researchers state, are present only in LB1, and not in the other Liang Bua skeletal remains, further evidence of LB1’s abnormality.
“This work is not presented in the form of a fanciful story, but to test a hypothesis: Are the skeletons from Liang Bua cave sufficiently unusual to require invention of a new human species?” Eckhardt said.
“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.”
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