Modern Flores Island pygmies show no genetic link to extinct ‘hobbits’

Credit: Illustration by Matilda Luk, Office of Communications, Princeton University


It's a simple question that took years to answer.

As no one has been able to recover DNA from the fossils of Homo floresiensis (nicknamed the "hobbit"), researchers had to create a tool for finding archaic genetic sequences in modern DNA.


"In your genome — and in mine — there are genes that we inherited from Neanderthals," said Serena Tucci, a postdoctoral research associate in Akey's lab. "Some modern humans inherited genes from Denisovans [another extinct species of humans], which we can check for because we have genetic information from Denisovans.

"But if you want to look for another species, like Floresiensis, we have nothing to compare, so we had to develop another method: We 'paint' chunks of the genome based on the source. We scan the genome and look for chunks that come from different species — Neanderthal, Denisovans, or something unknown."


"They definitely have a lot of Neanderthal," said Tucci, who was the first author on a paper published Aug. 3 in the journal Science that detailed their findings. "They have a little bit of Denisovan. We expected that, because we knew there was some migration that went from Oceania to Flores, so there was some shared ancestry of these populations."

But there were no chromosomal "chunks" of unknown origins.

"If there was any chance to know the hobbit genetically from the genomes of extant humans, this would have been it," said Richard "Ed" Green, an associate professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California-Santa Cruz (UCSC) and a corresponding author on the paper. "But we don't see it. There is no indication of gene flow from the hobbit into people living today."




Fossil evidence indicates H. floresiensis was significantly smaller than the modern Flores pygmies, standing about 3.5 feet tall (106 centimeters, shorter than the average American kindergartener), while modern pygmies average about 15 inches taller (145 centimeters). Floresiensis also differed from H. sapiens and H. erectus in their wrists and feet, probably due to the need to climb trees to evade Komodo dragons, said Tucci.


"Islands are very special places for evolution," Tucci said. "This process, insular dwarfism, resulted in smaller mammals, like hippopotamus and elephants, and smaller humans."


"This is really intriguing, because it means that evolutionarily, we are not that special," she said. "Humans are like other mammals; we are subject to the same processes."





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