A Tiny Hobbit Bone Has Appeared in Indonesia—and It Could Redefine Human Evolution
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The discovery of an “astonishingly small adult limb bone” in Indonesia rekindles debate about modern humans’ ancient relative, the Homo floresiensis.
Dubbed the “Hobbits of Flores,” findings date the species’ existence to as late as 700,000 years ago, up until about 50,000 years ago.
The new discovery opens fresh theories on the evolution of Homo floresiensis and just how small the group really was.
A human fossil discovery on the Indonesian island of Flores is physically extremely tiny. But in the grand scope of history, it is monumentally large.
Scholars are rekindling the debate surrounding the ancestral history of Homo floresiensis, dubbed the “Hobbits of Flores,” after the discovery of a new adult arm bone, pegged to be roughly 700,000 years old, on the Indonesian island. The humerus bone is 9 to 16 percent shorter and thinner than specimens dated to 60,000 years ago. A team of archaeologists wrote in the journal Nature Communications that the “astonishingly small adult limb bone” offers fresh insight on the evolution of the diminutive Homo group.
Archaeologists believe, based on remains found in 2003 and in 2014 at the Indonesian island’s Liang Bua cave, that the Hobbits lived on the island from 700,000 years ago until roughly 50,000 years ago, alongside Homo sapiens at some point in the timeline.
Theories on Homo floresiensis range from them being a dwarfed descendant of early Asia inhabitants Homo erectus to the Hobbit being a late-surviving remnant of a more ancient hominin from Africa, pre-dating even Homo erectus. With the ancient fossils only appearing on Flores—two separate locations on the same island—the data from which to build theories has proven limited.
With the previous finds consisting of skulls and teeth, researchers knew the group had small heads. But the discovery of the humerus in particular helps shed some more light on the body size of Homo floresiensis.
“This 700,000-year-old adult humerus is not just shorter than that of Homo floresiensis,” Adam Brumm, professor from Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution and co-author of the paper, said in a statement. “It is the smallest upper arm bone known from the hominin fossil record worldwide. This very rare specimen confirms our hypothesis that the ancestors of Homo floresiensis were extremely small in body size; however, it is now apparent from the tiny proportions of this limb bone that the early progenitors of the Hobbit were even smaller than we had previously thought.”
The team also found two additional hominin teeth similar in shape to early Homo erectus, but smaller in size, leading the researchers to believe that the latest evidence does not support the hypothesis that Homo floresiensis evolved from an earlier and more primitive type of hominin, which had never been found in Indonesia.
The study authors believe that Homo erectus may have come to the island as much as 1.2 million years ago and that Homo floresiensis descended from them, gradually getting smaller along the way. In fact, the paper explores how “extreme body size reduction occurred in some extinct Homo species,” including how the new bone is “exceptionally small” when compared to other fossils.
“The Homo floresiensis lineage most likely evolved from early Asian Homo erectus and was a long-lasting lineage on Flores with markedly diminutive body size since at least [about] 700,000 years ago,” the study authors write.
The reason there was a change in body size is up for debate. Estimated at no more than 3.6 feet tall, some experts believe the species shrank when limited by the island’s resources. Still, how the Homo floresiensis may have gotten to the island remains a true mystery.
“The evolutionary history of the Flores hominins is still largely unknown,” Brumm said. “However, the new fossils strongly suggest that the Hobbit story did indeed begin when a group of the early Asian hominins known as Homo erectus somehow became isolated on this remote Indonesian island, perhaps one million years ago, and underwent a dramatic body size reduction over time.”
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