Meet Your Tiniest Ancestor (Who Might Still Be Around) | Random Thursday

I'm not a tall man not the shortest man either I used to be though growing up I was the shortest kid in my class too like my junior year in family photos and they lined up all the kids according to height yeah I was on the end until they outgrew my sister that was a big moment for me she didn't care for it much you know growing up as a small kid that it sucked in a lot of ways but it did help me in other ways like I wasn't gonna win any fights or anything so my way of kind of surviving middle school was to just you know become a total weirdo because they can't fight you and laugh at you at the same time so I became this spazzy goofy silly kid that was always just trying to do whatever it took to get people to laugh and you know it wasn't a personality trait so much as a survival strategy and I guess that worked I'm still here but you know over time that raw unfettered weirdness kind of honed itself into something resembling a sense of humor and and now I kind of make my living doing that so yeah it all worked out but if I lived on the island of Flores around 20,000 years ago I would have fit right in because there was an entire species of humans that were undersized like me and I wouldn't have had to be funny or maybe they were the funniest humans of all time 19:50 a Dutch archeologist and missionary named Theodore spear Hogan came to the island of Florence in Indonesia to spread the good word little loud whether they wanted to hear it or not Forrest by the way gorgeous Theo was a man of the cloth it was also a part of the international order of the Society's verb' Divini or SVD for short nothing to confuse with std and that's a different thing people in the SVD were highly educated our man Theo for example had a PhD in archaeology from the University of Utrecht some of him the island wasn't just a great place to spread the word of the Lord it was also a place of great biodiversity and he also thought that he might be able to find some remains of Homo erectus which came to that area around 1.5 million to 750,000 years ago he got to work and he quickly started coming up with some discoveries including a pig elephant species that he named staggered on which is not a pygmy sounding name that sounds like something that fought Godzilla but he wasn't there looking for pygmy elephants he was there looking for Homo erectus and by the way look if you're gonna get through this video you're gonna have to learn to just not giggle when I say homo erectus I know you're doing it so in 1965 he was excavating a cool cave called the yang Hwa which translates to cool cave that's not a joke caves being a good place to find homo erectus bones and artifacts there's a reason why they were called cavemen and after digging about a metre down which translates to about 2,000 years ago he found some Homo erectus bones and artifacts and this started a whole bunch of series of explorations and archaeological digs into that cave digs that are still going on to this day but in 2004 they found a skeleton that stood out and it was called lb one because it was the size of a small child but it was a fully grown adult and there were some other things that were weird about it as well things like a misshapen head giant feet was about 30 years old a metre tall only weighed 25 to 30 kilos and it was only 18,000 years old meaning she was alive when modern humans were around this was the holy grail of weird and they nicknamed her Paula and shortly after that they found 11 more skeletons just like Paula so 11 more holy grails these were in poor shape they weren't as complete as the paula skeleton was but it was enough to show that this wasn't just one weird short person from a long time ago this was a whole new species Homo florensis it came to be known or Flores man and it sent shockwaves throughout the archaeological world some people calling it the hobbit species and it set off whole new waves of theories to explain how it got there now the difficult thing about home appliances is that it actually shares some qualities with a couple of different species one being Homo erectus the other one being Australopithecus afarensis and so you may be thinking you know so what these two species got together and made the base with two backs what no that would be difficult because Australopithecus actually went extinct like a million years before Homo erectus came around I mean love crosses many boundaries but a million years another theory suggests that they were modern humans that were all sort of afflicted with a genetic disorder like Down syndrome or microcephaly or Leron syndrome but the likelihood of an entire species having the same genetic disorder is unlikely besides there are other tells of those conditions that don't show up in these skeletons in really science hasn't completely settled on this issue but they do think they know how they got there like other how many species Flores man just kind of followed the food and the resources available to it and around this time Earth was slowly warming up from a previous Ice Age so a lot of sea water was locked up in glaciers which lowered the sea levels in this created some land bridges around the world allowing humans to kind of walk freely so these guys were able to just kind of walk to the island of Flores because it wasn't an island at the time and then when the water came back up again they got trapped there and then separated from the rest of the world they evolved separately and that means they started shrinking very slowly generation by generation but as my first girlfriend once asked why the shrinkage this is known as Foster's rule which explains a couple of different types of evolutionary morphology one called into their dwarfism the other cult insular gigantism and it's exactly what it sounds like insular dwarfism is when species get smaller over time and so gigantism when it gets bigger but why would some species get smaller and other species get bigger well according to Foster's rule large mammals tend to get smaller when they're on the smaller landmass of limited resources smaller people can get by on fewer resources so they survive longer reproduce more and so the whole species shrinks over time this is why Flores was also the home to adorable tiny pygmy elephants adorable pygmy elephants called stirring insula gigantism occurs in smaller mammals that grow larger because there's fewer predators and Flores had examples of this as well like giant 16-inch rats with 27 inch tails five foot tall storks and 300-pound Komodo dragons Foster's law actually applies especially well the lizards because they're cold-blooded and they can control their metabolisms they can go longer between males plus as the rats got bigger those were the meals of the Komodo dragon so the Komodo dragons got bigger but if you are a large mammal with a big hungry brain and you're trapped on an island with fewer resources you're survival strategy is to get smaller much smaller some scientists theorize that even though homo Florian's has had a smaller brain than dyers that they may have been a more efficient brain maybe even more efficient than our own it's not the size of your axons it's how you use them the idea of small people forming advanced cultures is not that hard to imagine they're actually pygmies all over the world today and they have some commonalities that they share in terms of how they got that way environmental pressure is much like Homo florensis but not quite to that extreme pygmy culture is usually arrived out of places where they don't have a caloric intake that the rest of the world does and the second is just natural selection if you're you know living in a really thick rainforest of South America or in Africa and you're trying to chase down prey you know running through that being six foot four inches tall is not an advantage and it doesn't exactly help you to sneak up on prey either so naturally smaller individuals are going to be more favored through time so that they can more easily get around in the jungle and there were a lot of pygmy cultures around today the Greedo people on Austronesian butter own people in the foothills of myanmar the Andamanese from the Andaman Islands in India and there are many different tribes of pygmies in the Congo many of these cultures are actually the oldest people that have been around in that particular part of the world which makes sense because the longer you've been there the more chance there is for the environment to shape your morphology in humans hominid species throughout time have always been shaped by the environment I mean they had to be or we would have died out take Paranthropus robustus for example Paranthropus robustus or PR for short lived around tune of 1.2 million years ago in Africa and it was a large ape-like hominid with massive jaws and I had a massive sagittal crest for those jobs to attach to and massive cheekbones to let the jaw muscles go under it was a very head dominant hominid with really strong jaws so they thought that maybe they use these jaws to crush nuts until lasers got involved they didn't laser cut off of a sample of a pea ours to to try to determine what kind of carbon it contains so they could determine what kind of food at ate and it turned out this massive ape was actually more like a massive cow it ain't grass and a lot of it you know it found success in this niche its digestive tract evolved to process grass and it continued to eat grass and in a grass unfortunately when PR was around the climate wasn't exactly stable so there was a massive cooling event that killed off all the grass in the area and its habitat and without a food source PR kind of went away and much like PR humma Florian's this is also extinct or is it I kind of hate that these zones that move but no there is a possibility a very slight possibility that the Hobbit people florensis is are still kind of around possibly maybe back in the 1700s when the Portuguese discovered the island of Flores the natives told them stories about little human-like creatures they called them the EBU gogo and they described them as these little impish light creatures that would steal food and children they had a whole mythology around and apparently back in the day way back when they they kind of lived together like the the EBU gogo lived in the caves and the people lived in their villages and stuff and they had an uneasy truce going on but they maintained it and then at one point the EBU gogo got a little bit too greedy and stole too many children I guess and the people went the caves and they burn the caves to destroy the EBU gogo but the rumor has it the legend has it that some of them survived and to this day they're out there lurking in the woods watching for bad little boys and girls to steal and take back to their caves I mean as fairy tales go it's not bad but the fact that they have this legend on an island where tiny people did used to live a long time ago alongside modern humans I mean pretty interesting so yeah some people think that Houma florence's might still be around running around in the jungles of the island of Flores and just like Bigfoot you know news stories come out from time to time but it hasn't been any hard evidence yet what do you think you think the hobbit people are still out there roaming around in jungles do you believe in Bigfoot are you into cryptozoology interesting at all touch that it down below and this is of course just one of countless evolutionary examples of ways that our species is transformed and involved according to the environment that they lived in if you have one that you think is super interesting talk about that one too all right I hope you enjoyed that one if you did maybe think about giving it a thumbs up likes getting all that kind of stuff and maybe check out this video Google things you like that one as well or any of the others down the side and if you like them I invite you to subscribe I come back with videos every Monday and every Thursday as always t-shirts available at the store it answers with Joe dot-com slash store this one is I don't know where Australopithecus afarensis would fit on here but this would be Iron Man assists alright thanks again for watching you guys go out now have an eye-opening rest of the week and I'll see you on Monday hope you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 587,804

Rating: 4.900466 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, homo floriensis, flores island, indonesia, human evolution, homo erectus, australapithicus afarensis, cryptozoology

Id: sJ3AWZAAs1M

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Massive-Gas]

I was literally googling around about previous human ancestors/species yesterday