WASHINGTON (AP) — Twenty years ago, on an Indonesian island, scientists discovered fossils of a primitive human species which were around 1.07 meters tall – which earned them the nickname “hobbits”.
Now, a new study suggests ancestors of the hobbits they were even a little shorter.
“We did not expect to find smaller individuals at such an ancient site,” study co-author Yousuke Kaifu of the University of Tokyo said in an email.
The original hobbit fossils date back to 60,000 to 100,000 years ago. The new fossils were excavated at a site called Mata Menge, about 72 kilometers from the cave where the remains of the first hobbit were discovered.
In 2016, researchers suspected that the earlier relatives might have been shorter than the hobbits after studying a jaw and teeth collected from the new site. Further analysis of a small fragment of arm bone and teeth suggests that the ancestors were just 6 centimeters shorter and existed 700,000 years ago.
“They convincingly demonstrated that these were very small individuals,” said Dean Falk, an evolutionary anthropologist at Florida State University who was not involved in the investigation.
The findings were published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
Researchers have debated how hobbits – named Homo floresiensis after the remote Indonesian island of Flores – evolved to become so small and where they fit into human evolutionary history. They are believed to be among the last human species to go extinct.
Scientists still don’t know whether hobbits shrank from an earlier, taller human species called Homo erectus that lived in the area, or from an even more primitive human predecessor. More research — and fossils — are needed to determine hobbits’ place in human evolution, said Matt Tocheri, an anthropologist at Lakehead University in Canada.
“This question remains unanswered and will continue to be a focus of research for some time,” Tocheri, who was not involved in the research, said in an email.
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