Floresiensis Paper

A new paper in Biology Letters asserts that Homo floresiensis followed the "island rule." From a news report:

"It stipulates that because food on a small island is limited, smaller species do well and get bigger over time, sometimes becoming relatively gargantuan.
"But larger species, facing fierce competition for a small amount of food, become smaller, because those members that eat less have an advantage.
"Lindell Bromham and Marcel Cardillo trawled through published journals and online databases to see how primates performed when subjected to the "island rule".
"True enough, small primate species (ones weighing less than 5kg) all pumped up compared to their mainland relatives - but all the larger primates became smaller, in a range of between 52 and 80 per cent.
"That fits in well with H. floresiensis, who was around 55 per cent of the mass of a modern Indonesian and probably 52 percent of an H. erectus.
"So the evidence backs the idea that the hobbits were an insular dwarf race - humans who became smaller, possibly after the island separated from the mainland and left them marooned with diminished food resources."

The paper is:
Primates follow the ‘island rule’: implications for interpreting Homo floresiensis
Lindell Bromham and Marcel Cardillo
Biology Letters
Issue: FirstCite Early Online Publishing

Abstract:
When the diminutive skeleton of Homo floresiensis was found on the Indonesian island of Flores, it was interpreted as an island dwarf, conforming to the ‘island rule’ that large animals evolve smaller size on islands, but small animals tend to get larger. However, previous studies of the island rule have not included primates, so the extent to which insular primate populations undergo size change was unknown. We use a comparative database of 39 independently derived island endemic primate species and subspecies to demonstrate that primates do conform to the island rule: small-bodied primates tend to get larger on islands, and large-bodied primates get smaller. Furthermore, larger species undergo a proportionally greater reduction in size on islands.