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Recent discoveries of taxonomically challenging Southeast Asian dwarf hominins from Liang Bua in Indonesia and the Callao Cave in the Philippines have enabled us to investigate the general tendency towards dwarfism or gigantism already observed in endemic insular animals. One current hypothesis suggests that the pygmy human phenotype is the result of evolutionary selection in rainforest environments. In this paper we test the hypothesis that dwarfism is a response to forest habitats, using macaque ( Macaca fascicularis ) fossils from the well-stratified archaeological sequence at the Ille site in the Philippines. Our results show that changes in size may affect general conformations in forested environments, and therefore support the hypothesis put forward on the evolution of pygmy hominin populations in tropical rainforest habitats.
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Ingicco et al. (2014) studied this question.
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