700,000-Year-Old Tiny Humans Found at Hobbit Homeland

Reconstruction of Homo floresiensis by Atelier Elisabeth Daynes.

Remains of at least three tiny humans dating to 700,000 years ago have been found on the Indonesian island of Flores, which was the homeland of Homo floresiensis, aka "Hobbit Humans," according to two new papers in the journal Nature.

The newly found early humans, represented by a partial right jaw and some isolated teeth, predate the Hobbits by more than half a million years, the papers report. Their presence on the island suggests that the small individuals were part of a population that later gave rise to the Hobbits, whose fossils were previously discovered at Flores' Liang Bua cave.

"We cannot be sure about their actual body size because we only have the mandible and teeth," Yousuke Kaifu, co-author of the first paper, told Discovery News, "but their sizes suggest that these 700,000-year-old hominins (early members of the genus Homo) were as small as Homo floresiensis from Liang Bua."

The Hobbits were about 3.3 feet tall.

Partial right jaw excavated on the island of Flores, Indonesia.

700,000-year-old tooth from a member of the genus Homo and excavated from the island of Flores, Indonesia.

Kaifu, an anthropologist at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Japan, along with lead author of the first paper Gerrit van den Bergh and their colleagues, analyzed the new remains. They were excavated from layers of sedimentary rock at a site called Mata Menge, located approximately 43.5 miles away from Liang Bua. The researchers believe that the fossils came from early Homo floresiensis and belonged to at least one adult and two children.

When the Hobbit remains were first found in 2003, many scientists were completely baffled by the population's diminutive size. Some even thought that the individuals were members of our species who were pathologically dwarfed or diseased.

Van den Bergh, however, said that the latest discovery "quashes once and for all any doubters that believe Homo floresiensis was merely a sick modern human."

The second paper, with research led by Adam Brumm of Griffith University and the University of Wollongong, describes the geology of Mata Menge and confirms that the Hobbit predecessors lived at least 700,000 years ago. It said that stone tools were also found at Flores and date to approximately 700,000 to 1 million years ago.

Taken together, all of the finds suggest that a population of small individuals lived perhaps continuously as a lineage on the island from about a million years ago to at least around 38,000–60,000 years ago. As for where they came from before settling on Flores, Kaifu suspects that "a large-bodied Homo erectus population got there and dwarfed on the island."

A model of the face of an adult female Homo erectus.

He added, "Rather than claiming that such extreme body and brain size dwarfism cannot occur (on a widespread scale), we now have accepted that that happened and can shift to the next question as to why that happened and on what mechanism."

Aida Gómez-Robles, a scientist at George Washington University specializing in human evolution, explained that one theory about the Hobbits says they shrunk in size by a process called island dwarfing. This refers to an extreme reduction in size due to the absence of predators and to resource scarcity that is typical of island ecosystems.

When the Hobbit remains were first found, the researchers also discovered evidence for a pygmy elephant, suggesting that a pachyderm also underwent island dwarfing at Flores.

Gómez-Robles told Discovery News that the two new papers are important because "they demonstrate that the origin of Homo floresiensis is very old, which confirms that this is a totally valid species with old evolutionary roots."

Read more at Discovery News