The Emperor

A Tiny Step For A Hobbit

This is a piece I wrote from Fortean Times issue 191. It can also be accessed on the Fortean Times website.

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A tiny step for a “hobbit” but a giant leap for palaeoanthropology

Shocking new finds from an Indonesian island suggest tiny early humans have survived in isolation until relatively recently

Emerging from the Liang Bau rock shelter in northern Flores comes a group of tiny hominids like nothing we have seen before and even more surprisingly a variety of dating techniques have shown that they survived until relatively recently. They have been playfully nicknamed “Hobbits” by some of their discoverers because they were small hairy creatures who hid from large ‘dragons’ in caves¹.

The island of Flores in Indonesia lies beyond the Wallace Line which marks the zoological separation of Asia and Australia – dividing species that could migrate freely back into Asia from those, isolated on islands, which followed their own evolutionary trajectories due to restricted gene pools and finite resources. It has been of great interest to archaeologists and palaeontologists because, for over 30 years, it has yielded fascinating finds of dwarf Stegodons (relatives of the elephant) as well as giant rats, komodo dragons and even larger species of extinct lizards. Even more critically, stone tools have also been found². More recent excavations in the Soa Basin of central Flores have found these tools in well-defined layers dating back 800,000 years³. These finds rather lurked in the shadows of mainstream archaeology⁴, although Robert Bednarik (a very Fortean archaeologist) has used them, and other evidence, in his discussions of early hominid sea-faring abilities⁵. But who these people were and how they got there has been a source of conjecture until now.

The ‘Hobbit’ remains currently described consist of a nearly complete skeleton (LB1 or less formally Flo given the skeleton’s sex) and an isolated premolar further down in the levels⁶. However, there is a total of seven individuals which proves that this wasn’t just a one off but a member of a very distinct population of humans (also, if the scientists hadn’t run with the ‘Hobbit’ idea they could easily gone down the Snow White route). The skeleton, which provides most of the information that has so far been gleaned from these fascinating finds, was not fossilised and has been described as the consistency of “mashed potato”⁷. One of the critical factors is that these hominids seem to have evolved in the same ways as other fauna from Flores. As palaeoanthropologist Tim White says "Darwin and Wallace would be pleased. What better demonstration that humans play by the same evolutionary rules as other mammals?"¹, which rather counters Creationist arguments. It would also tend to imply that they were isolated for a considerable time and that any sea faring was rare. Chris Stringer from the National History Museum in London also highlights that, while the skull and face resemble early Homo erectus, its cranial capacity may have to make us change our ideas about the importance of brain size in cognition. While hominid brain size climbed into the range of modern humans (1,000 to 2,000 ccs) around 600,000 years ago the capacity of the skull from Flores is 380 ccs, the size of a grapefruit. This is at, or even below, the lower end of the range of the Australopithecines, the group which contains ancestors to H. erectus and is dated to the Pliocene (between 2 and 7 million years ago). In fact their brains are closest in size to the chimpanzee⁸. As well as the very small size, the long arms would suggest a return to some kind of existence in the trees (not a bad strategy when you have rats who are nearly as tall as you are)⁹ and, while the skeleton was clearly bipedal, some features of the pelvis and teeth resemble those of the Australopithecines¹⁰. This does appear to imply that it is a descendant of an early group of Homo erectus, although there are scientists who say that this underlines their concerns about some of the definitions and classifications used. Jeffrey Schwartz, a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, has said "This specimen is so out of the ballpark, even with this very sloppy conglomeration that we call genus homo, that it would be foolhardy, I think, to stick it into the genus because you don't know where else to put it."¹¹

A battery of dating techniques have been used on samples from the site¹², showing that the sequence of sediments date back to at least 95,000 years with the lowest hominid remains believed to date to around 74,000 years. The really surprising results come from the levels in which Flo was found. Both radiocarbon and luminescence dating suggest that she may date to only 18,000 years. Interestingly the Stegodon remains and the “big game” stone tool technology stretch from the lowest layers to a volcanic layer dated to 12,000 years ago, which may suggest that both the hominids and the elephants were wiped out in the same catastrophic event. We know humans were in Australia by 50,000 years ago¹³ and in Melanesia by 33,000 years ago¹⁴ and, while controversial, some dates have suggested a late persistence of Homo erectus in Indonesia to around 27,000 years ago¹⁵. This, along with evidence that Neanderthals may have persisted in southern Spain until 30,000 years ago¹⁶, suggests long periods of co-existence between distinct groups of early humans.

Extraction of ancient DNA from hominids and comparison with existing hominoids (us and other primates and apes) has been successful with late Neanderthals, especially those younger than 50,000 years old¹⁷. Flo’s lack of fossilisation combined with the rock shelter’s environment and her age would suggest that viable samples may be a possibility. Richard Roberts, one of the main team of investigators, points out even more intriguing discoveries. “We did find lumps of dirt with black hair in them this year in the Hobbit levels, but don't know yet if they're human or something else. We're getting DNA testing done, which we hope will be instructive."¹⁸

These finds have large implications for theories on modern human origins (and human evolution in general) which can be divided into two main camps within the scientific establishment:

• Continuity - where the main driving force was the flow of genes and advocates emphasise a small number of species.


• Replacement - in which modern humans emerged from Africa around 100,000 years ago and pushed other members of Homo into extinction.

Clearly, the emergence of a radically different species, assigned to Homo floresiensis, would tend to support the ideas of Replacement and leading lights of the theory were first to add their comments. Chris Stringer helped bring the Replacement theories back into the spotlight and Marta Lahr and Robert Foley, who have both contributed considerably to the debate, have emphasised the ‘bushiness’ of our family tree¹⁹. However, proponents of the Continuity theory will be sure to offer their interpretations and analysis, so the debate is far from over.

There are also important implications for cryptozoology, so important that Henry Gee, one of Nature’s senior editors, penned an article on the implications for yeti hunters, and specifically the potential existence of the orang pendek, entitled “Flores, God and Cryptozoology”²⁰. Interestingly, Adam Davies and Andrew Sanderson, who have been in Indonesia searching for the orang pendek, have announced that they have found more footprints that match those they found three years ago, when they also found hairs that analysis showed belonged to an unknown species²¹. Demonstrating this new level of acceptance, Roberts points to tales from Flores of a tiny "murmuring" people, the Ebu Gogo (it means “grandmother who eats everything”), who could mimic any human speech they heard. There are many stories going back at least as far as the first Dutch settlers but, in the most intriguing, a baby was snatched by an Ebu Gogo. The villagers smoked it out of the cave it was hiding in and it ran off towards the Liang Bau cave. In fact, Roberts reckons the only difference between the folklore and the evidence unearthed is that the Ebu Gogo have never been seen with stone tools¹⁸. Gee goes as far as to suggest that “Now, cryptozoology, the study of such fabulous creatures, can come in from the cold.”

This is only the start of what looks to be a long and fascinating investigation into a possibly unique branch of our human family but one which will have large repercussions in all sorts of fields. Underlining exactly how shocking this find is Peter Brown, the main physical anthropologist, summed it up nicely: "If you told me an alien space craft had landed in a field in Flores I would have been less surprised". He continued "This overturns everything I have thought. It begs the question -- what else are we going to find?”²²
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