Australian-Geographic-Magazine-September-Octobe..

90 Australian Geographic

My specialty is facial anthropology and forensic facial

approximation, which, to the lay person, could be described as

facial reconstruction. Many researchers in my fi eld prefer the

term facial approximation, because the results of estimating

the ‘average’ appearance of soft tissues from fossils are, of necessity,

always going to be an approximation. No-one is average, nor

is their skull.

My job – with the help of research funding from the

Australian Geographic Society – was to take the only skull we

now have from the 11 or so known individuals of H. fl oresiensis

and use computer software to attempt to reconstruct her facial

appearance. More on this and the results later – but let’s start at

the beginning of this story with the remarkable and surprising

discovery made in 2003.

W

HAT NOT MANY people realise is that the home of

H. floresiensis, the Indonesian island of Flores,

occupies a special place in the history of the planet.

Ever since it began emerging above the sea some 10 million

years ago, Flores – located about 500km east of Bali – has been

an island. And the fossil record of vertebrate animals that it

holds shows very little variation – a consequence of never being

connected to a larger landmass.

The older inhabitants, those that lived on Flores more than

1 million years ago, include a 1m-tall pygmy elephant (Stegodon

sondaari), a giant tortoise and the Komodo dragon. More recent

inhabitants can be found within stratigraphic layers dated to

900,000 and 700,000 years ago. By this time, the pygmy ele-

phant had been replaced by a 1.8m-tall dwarf species (Stegodon

fl orensis), and a giant rat (Hooijeromys nusatenggara) had appeared.

To palaeontologists, fossil evidence of a limited number of

endemic vertebrate animals, including dwarf and giant versions

of mainland animals, is a clear indication that the bizarre phe-

nomenon known as the ‘Island Rule’ is at play. Being small has

distinct survival advantages on an island: smaller mammals need

less food, which is often a restricted resource anyway. In such an

environment, therefore, smaller individuals are likely to be phys-

ically fi tter, live longer, and produce more surviving off spring.

Consequently, over long periods of time, large vertebrate

animals become smaller in order to adapt and survive. In an

interesting twist, some smaller vertebrates, such as the rat, then

become bigger to fi ll the empty niche left by the shrinking large

vertebrates (islands do not have many medium-sized mammals).

Flores is also unique because it is the only island, so far, to

have yielded fossil remains and artefacts proving the presence

of early human relatives. These ‘hominins’ include extinct

Every skull has a quirk that doesn’t quite fi t the pattern. And

every human skull was once a living person – someone with

particular likes and dislikes, who had family and friends, who

ate, who slept and who dreamed. Each and every skull is the

only one of its kind, and all skulls demand respect for the lives

they once lived. That being said, the skull of the ‘Hobbit’,

Homo fl oresiensis, took being unique to a whole a new level.

From the moment she was excavated, this ancient and totally

unexpected new species of human turned what we knew

about human evolution on its head.

EV ERY SKULL IS EXCEPTIONAL.

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