Barozzi Veiga - Museum of Fine Arts, Lausanne 2019. Photos © Simon Menges.

island dwarfism is actually just one half of a whole phenomenon, the flip side of this coin is called island gigantism and this story really can’t be told without it! 

basically, island dwarfism/gigantism is a descriptor of the effect on animal populations when they get stranded on an island for a few million years and evolve to fit their new limited biome! when this happens, large animals tend to become smaller (due to the limited resources on an island) and small animals tend to become larger (due to the lack of natural predators). 

island gigantism and island dwarfism sort of work together in this way to force animals into an equilibrium state. this effect has given some truly bonkers results over the eons, including pygmy mammoths on the channel islands off california:

and giant rabbits on an island in the mediterranean:

my favorite example of island dwarfism in particular though is the dwarf elephants of cyprus, believed to be the source of the legend of the cyclops.

these 3-foot-tall humans were descended from a population of homo eructus that went and got themselves island-locked on the indonesian island Flores for 100,000 years or so, and reduced in size in order to compensate for the limited resources.

they were indeed true humans, being in the same genus as modern humans, homo! aside from the size difference, they probably weren’t all that different from you, except that social media hadn’t been invented yet. like you, they understood abstract concepts and had hopes, fears, and dreams for the future.

<art src: Valeria Peters>

unfortunately though homo floresiensis was ultimately also a casualty of a volcanic eruption, disappearing from the fossil record some 50,000 years ago during an island-leveling event and leaving only bones and tools behind.