Gordon Adam D, Nevell Lisa, Wood Bernard
Department of Anthropology, Center for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology, The George Washington University, 2110 G Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20052, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Mar 25;105(12):4650-5. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0710041105. Epub 2008 Mar 20.
The skeletal remains of a diminutive small-brained hominin found in Late Pleistocene cave deposits on the island of Flores, Indonesia were assigned to a new species, Homo floresiensis [Brown P, et al. (2004) A new small-bodied hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia. Nature 431: 1055-1061]. A dramatically different interpretation is that this material belongs not to a novel hominin taxon but to a population of small-bodied modern humans affected, or unaffected, by microcephaly. The debate has primarily focused on the size and shape of the endocranial cavity of the type specimen, LB1, with less attention being paid to the morphological evidence provided by the rest of the LB1 cranium and postcranium, and no study thus far has addressed the problem of how scaling would affect shape comparisons between a diminutive cranium like LB1 and the much larger crania of modern humans. We show that whether or not the effects of its small cranial size are accounted for, the external cranial morphology of the LB1 cranium cannot be accommodated within a large global sample of normal modern human crania. Instead, the shape of LB1, which is shown by multivariate analysis to differ significantly from that of modern humans, is similar to that of Homo erectus sensu lato, and, to a lesser extent, Homo habilis. Our results are consistent with hypotheses that suggest the Liang Bua specimens represent a diminutive population closely related to either early H. erectus s. l. from East Africa and/or Dmanisi or to H. habilis.
在印度尼西亚弗洛勒斯岛晚更新世洞穴沉积物中发现的一具脑容量小的小型人类的骨骼遗骸被归为一个新物种，即弗洛勒斯人[布朗·P等人（2004年）。来自印度尼西亚弗洛勒斯岛晚更新世的一种新的小型人类。《自然》431：1055 - 1061]。一种截然不同的解释是，这些材料不属于一个新的人类分类单元，而是属于一群受或未受小头症影响的体型较小的现代人类。这场争论主要集中在模式标本LB1的颅腔内部的大小和形状上，而对LB1颅骨其余部分和颅后骨骼提供的形态学证据关注较少，而且迄今为止没有研究探讨缩放比例会如何影响像LB1这样的小型颅骨与现代人类大得多的颅骨之间的形状比较问题。我们表明，无论其小颅骨尺寸的影响是否被考虑在内，LB1颅骨的外部形态都无法纳入大量正常现代人类颅骨的全球样本中。相反，多变量分析表明，LB1的形状与现代人类的形状有显著差异，它与广义的直立人相似，在较小程度上也与能人相似。我们的结果与一些假设一致，这些假设表明梁布阿标本代表了一个与来自东非和/或德马尼西的早期广义直立人及/或能人密切相关的小型种群。
