12 questions · Science
When a skeleton surfaced in Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, the excavators first took it for a child. Then the worn wisdom teeth and fused cranial sutures showed otherwise: this was an adult woman: about 1.06 metres tall, with a brain of roughly 420 cubic centimetres, about the size of a chimpanzee's. The press christened her "the Hobbit", science named the new species Homo floresiensis, and one of palaeoanthropology's fiercest disputes began: was this simply a pathologically small individual of our own species? After twenty years of debate almost everything speaks against the disease hypothesis: wrist bones, jaw and foot structure are archaic, and remains of at least a dozen individuals are known. The likelier explanation is island dwarfism: on isolated islands with limited food and no large predators, big species shrink over generations while small ones grow. Flores duly held dwarf elephants and giant rats, with a 1.8-metre stork overhead. Despite their tiny brains, these humans made stone tools and hunted. They lived on Flores until about 50,000 years ago and disappeared around the time modern humans reached the region. In 2019 the Philippines added a second small island human, Homo luzonensis; the pattern was evidently no one-off.
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Foto: Rosino · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
On Flores in Indonesia
In Liang Bua cave, in 2003. The species is named after the island and to this day it is known from nowhere else.
Foto: Ryan Somma · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
The Hobbit
For its small stature and relatively large feet: a nod to Tolkien's creatures that caught on worldwide at once.
About 1.06 metres
As small as Lucy: but three million years later and with tools. She was about 30 when she died.
About 420 cubic centimetres
About the size of a chimpanzee's, a third of ours, and still this species made tools. That shook the equation "big brain = capability".
Island dwarfism
On isolated islands with scarce food and no large predators, big species shrink over generations: a known pattern, as with dwarf elephants.
That they were diseased modern humans
Microcephaly, Down syndrome and cretinism were all proposed. But archaic wrist bones and multiple individuals speak against it: illness does not shape a whole population alike.
Until about 50,000 years ago
Earlier figures of 12,000 years were corrected downwards in 2016: those young dates came from a different layer of the cave.
Dwarf elephants and giant rats
The stegodons shrank to island size while rats grew: plus a 1.8-metre stork and Komodo dragons. An island like a counter-proposal to the mainland.
They made stone tools
The same layers hold flakes, blades and cut marks on the bones of butchered dwarf elephants: despite a chimp-sized brain.
Homo luzonensis
From the island of Luzon in the Philippines, known from teeth and hand and foot bones. Again: archaic features in an isolated island world.
From Homo erectus
It had reached Southeast Asia long before. Because of very archaic traits, some specialists even consider an earlier ancestor possible.
The tale of the Ebu Gogo
Local legends tell of small, hairy beings living in the forest. A charming thought: but useless as evidence, since the species died out tens of thousands of years earlier.
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