What do these small-bodied skeletons tell us about Homo floresiensis?
These ancient skeletons from Palau are not anything other than small-bodied modern humans. There is no question about that. However, the bones share some interesting features with the Flores specimens. Here is what the authors say about the resemblances: We feel that the most parsimonious, and most reasonable, interpretation of the human fossil assemblage from Palau is that they derive from a small-bodied population of H. sapiens (representing either rapid insular dwarfism or a small-bodied colonizing population), and that the primitive traits they express reflect possible pleiotropic or epigenetic correlates of developmental programs for small body size. In the comparisons drawn below, we note the shared possession of these traits with the Liang Bua fossils not to imply phylogenetic affinity or taxonomic identity, but rather to caution that some of the primitive features argued to reflect an ancestor-descendant relationship between H. erectus and H. floresiensis may also be homoplasti
