Homo floresiensis at Liang Bua

Record summary

Excavations at Liang Bua produced a small-bodied hominin skeleton, announced in 2004 as Homo floresiensis and dated broadly to the Late Pleistocene. The find matters for comparison because it challenged assumptions about island evolution, hominin diversity and possible survival of archaic populations in Southeast Asia. Uncertainty concerns the species’ evolutionary relationship, the effects of pathology or developmental abnormalities, the dating of associated layers and the interpretation of later remains. The identification remains widely accepted, but several anatomical and chronological details have been debated.