Hobbit possibly was a quadruped
Homo floresiensis (nicknamed the Hobbit) might very well have walked on all fours. This is the conclusion of Dutch paleontologist Gert van den Bergh from an analysis of its partly discovered skeleton, which was recently published in the British scientific journal Nature. The Dutch popular science magazine Natuurwetenschap & Techniek made a reconstruction of the Hobbit on the basis of these findings.
“The remains of the Hobbit that we found on Flores last year suggest that evolutionary regression can take place in humans as well”, says palaeontologist dr Gert van den Bergh. An expert on insular fauna, he recently returned to the Netherlands after taking part in the excavations on Flores. “We knew already that elephants and hippo’s can show dwarfism on islands, but until now the assumption was that this scenario did not apply to humans.”

And yet, Homo floresiensis seems to have gone through some kind of reverse evolution, making this humanoid fall back from a bipedal existence to one mostly on hands and feet.

Dwarf woman
Homo floresiensis appears to be an entirely new kind of humanoid. One year after the sensational first publication, which mainly emphasized the extremely small skull, this conclusion is still standing. In a second publication in Nature (13 October 2005) the research team describe the dwarf woman’s skeleton. The Hobbit had relatively long arms and the orientation of the shoulder differs from that of other humanoid species. Van den Bergh explains: “The humerus of Homo sapiens (modern man) and Homo erectus (our ancestor) has a significant twist in the connection to the shoulder. In the Hobbit, however, the humerus is connected to the shoulder without twist. You don’t see this in the even more ancient Australopithecus, nor in erectus or sapiens, nor in apes, but you do see it in gibbons and macaques! As a consequence, the Hobbit’s shoulder is less mobile. Probably she could freely move her arms forward and backward, but had difficulty moving them sideways, like we can.”

The same conclusion is drawn in the Nature-article, without stating unequivocally that Homo floresiensis walked on hands and feet. According to Van den Bergh, this research does imply a quadrupedal Hobbit, to enable climbing steep mountain slopes as well as trees, like macaques do. “This could be an adaptation to the inhospitable and rugged island of Flores, where the largest coastal plain is just fifteen kilometers wide. The larger part of the island consists of very steep mountain sides.”

Additional information (not for publication)
High resolution versions of these illustrations are available for publication. Contact Sanne Deurloo for a detailed price list, tel. 0031-20-5310958, mobile 0031-6-11380376, sdeurloo@natutech.nl.

The complete cover story (in Dutch) of the Hobbit will appear in the November issue of Natuurwetenschap & Techniek, available in print from Friday 28 October. For content-related questions contact Gert van den Bergh, tel. 0031-70-3862021, gdvdb73@yahoo.co.uk.

Natuurwetenschap & Techniek is a popular science monthly magazine published in the Netherlands and Belgium. More information: www.natutech.nl