New research suggests that the tiny human species – that survived until about 18,000 years ago, later than any human species other than our own – evolved its small size remarkably quickly while living on an isolated island.

Research involving a non-invasive scan of living human embryos shows that some muscles, thought to have been abandoned by our mammalian ancestors 250 million years ago, are still present before birth. They’re among the oldest, albeit fleeting, remnants of evolution yet seen in humans.