A LIVING HOMO FLORESIENSIS WERE TO BE FOUND WOULD THEY GO TO A SCHOOL OR A ZOO?

Abstract

 

The migration of Homo sapiens from Asia to Australia influences the evolution of a new species called H. floresiensis. (1)

 

Homo floresiensis is a species in the genus Homo. It has small body, small brain, and survived for about 13, 00 years ago, as modern human. They are the early human who live in the island. They resemble Homo erectus, which was a species of human that populated Asia and Africa from about 1.8 to 0.2 million years ago. (2)

 

 

H. erectus thought to be the immediate ancestor of H.floresiensis and almost have the same size as modern humans. In the limited food environment on the Flores, H. erectus is thought to have undergone strong island dwarfing, a form of speciation also seen on Flores in several species, including a dwarf Stegodon. (1)

 

Dwarfing of H. Floresiensis was influenced by environmental condition, which favoured small body size species. Mostly, island offer limited food supply, few predators competing for the same niche and survival depends on energy minimisation. These have an impact on the H. erectus as they were living in the island and automatically lead to the evolution of H. floresiensis. Due to climate adaptation H. erectus changes to H. floresiensis in their body structure, but does not change the advanced skills and knowledge they inherit from H. erectus and H sapiens. (1)

 

 

If H. floresiensis were still surviving to day; it would go to school rather than zoo. This is due to the fact that it has the skill like modern human, and its small body structure, small brains and a mixture of primitive does not make it suitable for the species to live in a zoo.(1)

 

 

 H. floresiensis was discovered between the Homo erectus and Homo sapiens and shares the same character with human. This brings the idea that this species can do what ever human can do if it was living to day. H. floresiensis use fire for cooking and able to hunt species such as stegodon and primitive dwarf elephant for survival. They use joint communication and planning during hunting, which is relatively the same to modern human. Most important could be H. floresiensis share the same diet as human; they ate fish, tortoise, birds, rodents, frogs and snakes. (1)

 

 

These mean that if H. floresiensis were to be found today it would go to school depending on the surrounding environment. This live us with question about human evolution as we don’t know as to whether we are still evolving or not, but this shows that the speciation and adaptation can also influence human evolution. It was suggested that humans are more subject to evolutionary forces than we tend to think. Human evolution is unknown, and this suggests that there could be other surprises waiting in the human family tree. (2)

 

 

Reference:

 

1. Mayell.H. (2004) hobbit-like human ancestor found in Asia

[Online].Accessed:http://seabed.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/forum2.tmpl?issue_id=20050401&forum_index=1&start=0 [2006-April-11]

 

2.  Moreno.N. Homo floresiensis  

[Online].Accessed:http://www.bioedonline.org/slides/slide01.cfm?tk=23           [2006-   April-11]

 

3. [Online].Accessed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution [2006-April-11]

 

 

 

Mr Elelwani Muanalo
CSIR Pretoria
NISL- Ecological Informatics Student
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