Homo floresiensis, the diminutive humanoid species affectionately known as “hobbits” due to their size and appearance, died out far earlier than previously believed, and our ancestors may be to blame, according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
First discovered 13 years ago in Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, the species stood approximately 3.5 feet (1.1 meters) tall and weighed about 75 pounds. They were nicknamed in honor of the mythical creatures from J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings based on their size and appearance.
Previous research indicated that Homo floresiensis lived as recently as 12,000 years ago, which means that they could have survived longer than Neanderthals and may have made contact with modern humans. However, the authors of the new study returned to the location where their fossils were originally discovered, and their analysis found that it is the hobbits actually died out more than 50,000 years ago, according to BBC News and the Sydney Morning Herald.
The initial dating of the species was based on chemicals in the soil around fossils, which were used to determine the age of sediment layers and the items within. However, the authors of the new study found that the sediment layers in the cave were not evenly distributed, Nat Geo explained.
No direct evidence of human-hobbit encounters
In light of that discovery, the researchers concluded that there had to be a wide variation in age, even at similar depths. Based on their analysis, they concluded that the bones discovered in the cave were actually between 100,000 and 60,000 years old, and that the tools were from no more than 50,000 years ago – about the same time modern humans arrived there.
“At the time of the initial discovery, not enough of the older deposits had been exposed, and this led to an error in the interpretation of how the dates obtained at that time applied to the sediments that contained the hobbit remains,” study co-author Matthew Tocheri, a paleoanthropologist with Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario told Nat Geo.
Professor Richard “Bert” Roberts from the University of Wollongong, Australia, added that the discovery finally solves the mystery of how Homo floresiensis would have been able to survive for 30,000 to 40,000 years after humans first made their way to Indonesia: they didn’t.
“Well, it now seems we weren’t living alongside this little species for very long, if at all. And once again it smells of modern humans having a role in the downfall of yet another species,” he told BBC News. “Every time modern humans arrived somewhere new, it tended to be bad news for the endemic fauna. Things would go pear-shaped pretty quickly.”
Unlike previous expeditions to the cave, which focused only on the cave’s central and eastern walls – where erosion caused a slope to form from younger sediments to form – the authors of the new study expanded their excavation to other areas and used five different dating techniques to ensure accuracy, said Nat Geo. Despite their theories, however, the researchers reported that they did not find any direct evidence of interactions between this species and modern humans.
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Image credit: Phys.org
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