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Scientists Unearth Species of Hobbit-Sized Ancestors

Posted on: Thursday, 28 October 2004, 09:00 CDT

SCIENTISTS have uncovered the remains of an entirely new species of human on a remote Indonesian island in what could be the most important discovery for a century to aid the understanding of our origins.

The partial skeletal remains belonged to a dwarf species no more than a metre tall, marooned for hundreds of thousands of years while modern man rapidly colonised the rest of the planet.

One tiny specimen, an adult female about three feet tall, is described as the "most extreme figure" to be included in the extended human family.

Roughly the size of a hobbit - the fictional race in JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy - the species appears to have lived as recently as 12,000 years ago on the island of Flores, overlapping for tens of thousands of years with modern humans in the region. Experts have not ruled out the possibility of descendants still hiding in the impenetrable forests and cave systems of south- east Asia. Mythical tales abound in the region of a race of little people who dwell on the islands of Indonesia, known as the "ebu gogo".

Dr Henry Gee, senior editor of the scientific journal Nature, said the scientists who made the discovery were having to think again about the source of these stories.

The female's remains are the best example of a treasure trove of fragmented bones that account for as many as seven individuals of the species, given the name Homo floresiensis, or Flores man. Although the specimens lived between 12,000 and 95,000 years ago, Homo floresiensis evolved from Homo erectus, one of our direct ancestors, about 800,000 years ago.

With a wealth of evidence - reported today in Nature - that the scientists have already unearthed, and more expected to be discovered, the skeleton cannot be some kind of "freak", according to one of the archaeological team.

Flores man was hardly formidable. His grapefruit-sized brain was about one quarter the size of those of our modern species, Homo sapiens - closer to the brains of transitional pre-human species in Africa more than three million years ago. Yet in spite of this, evidence suggests that Flores man made stone tools, had mastered the art of making fire and organised group hunts of small prehistoric elephants also unique to the island.

Exactly how the primitive species managed to cling on to life and whether it crossed paths with modern humans is less certain. Geologic evidence suggests that a massive volcanic eruption could have sealed its fate 12,000 years ago, along with other island species.

However, scientists say the discovery of Flores man obliterates the conventional wisdom that modern humans began systematically to smother out other bipedal species 160,000 years ago and have dominated the planet alone for tens of thousands of years. It also demonstrates that Africa, the acknowledged crucible of humanity, does not hold all the answers to questions of how and where we came into being.

Bert Roberts, one of the authors of the papers detailing the discovery, said: "It's rare, extremely rare, to find a hitherto unknown species of human living in the recent geological past. In fact, the remains of our most recent human relatives - Neanderthals in Europe and Homo erectus in Java - were discovered in the 19th century, so the discovery of the Flores species is the first report for more than a century of a new species of human overlapping in time with Homo sapiens."

Dr Robert Foley, a reader in evolutionary anthropology at Cambridge University, said: "Discoveries simply don't get any better than this."

Researchers from Australia and Indonesia found the partial skeleton 13 months ago in a shallow limestone cave known as Liang Bua. The cave, which extends into a hillside by about 130ft and is described as being "like the inside of a cathedral in size", has been studied since 1964.

Near the skeleton were stone tools and animal remains, including teeth from a young Stegodon, or prehistoric dwarf elephant, as well as fish, birds and rodents. Some of the bones were charred, suggesting they were cooked.

It is suspected that Flores man is a Homo erectus descendant "squeezed" by evolutionary pressures. Nature is full of mammals, including deer, squirrels and pigs, which, when living in marginal, isolated environments, gradually shrink over generations when food and predators are scarce.

Graphic: A small piece of the evolutionary jigsaw

Source: Scotsman, The

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