The foot of Homo floresiensis

The Flores bones: primitive hominin retentions or insular dwarfing? The diminutive hominin Homo floresiensis , first described in Nature in 2004, lived on the island of Flores in Indonesia until about 14,000 years ago. The cover shows the partial skeleton of the type specimen, LB1. It preserves enough material to permit partial assembly of the foot, and that assembly is now reported by Jungers et al . LB1's foot had human-like fully adducted big toes, but they were longer relative to the rest of the lower limb than in modern humans, instead resembling some apes. The idea that H. floresiensis was a diminutive hominin met with some scepticism, in particular its small brain size was attributed by some to pathology. New work by Eleanor Weston and Adrian Lister shows that the brains of extinct dwarf hippos from Madagascar were disproportionately a lot smaller than those of their mainland relatives. This supports suggestions that island dwarfism breaks the 'rule' that body size reduction in mammals is accompanied by only a moderate reduction in brain size. In News & Views, Daniel Lieberman discusses these papers and a special issue of The Journal of Human Evolution , and concludes that H. floresiensis probably is a bone fide — and very interesting — species of hominin. The 'hobbit', Homo floresiensis , was a species of diminutive hominin that lived on the island of Flores in Indonesia until around 14,000 years ago. Analysis of the legs and feet of the partial skeleton of the type specimen (LB1) shows some ape-like features which suggest an origin not from Homo erectus but rather some other, more primitive, hominin whose dispersal into southeast Asia is still undocumented. Homo floresiensis is an endemic hominin species that occupied Liang Bua, a limestone cave on Flores in eastern Indonesia, during the Late Pleistocene epoch 1 , 2 . The skeleton of the type specimen (LB1) of H. floresiensis includes a relatively complete left foot and parts of the right foot 3 . These feet provide insights into the evolution of bipedalism and, together with the rest of the skeleton, have implications for hominin dispersal events into Asia. Here we show that LB1’s foot is exceptionally long relative to the femur and tibia, proportions never before documented in hominins but seen in some African apes. Although the metatarsal robusticity sequence is human-like and the hallux is fully adducted, other intrinsic proportions and pedal features are more ape-like. The postcranial anatomy