The newly discovered teeth also look like smaller versions of those of Homo erectus
Paris, France:
The discovery of a small arm bone suggests that ancient humans nicknamed “hobbits” only shrank to their diminutive size after arriving on an Indonesian island a million years ago, scientists said Tuesday.
Much about little Homo floresiensis has been shrouded in mystery since the first fossils suggesting its existence were found on the island of Flores in 2003.
These tool-using hominids are believed to have lived on the island around 50,000 years ago, when our own species, homo sapiens, was already roaming the Earth, including in neighboring Australia.
From 60,000-year-old teeth and a jawbone found in an island cave, scientists had previously estimated that hobbits were about 1.06 meters (3.5 feet) tall.
But the discovery of part of an arm bone, as well as some teeth, on an open-air island on the island suggests that some hobbits were just a meter tall around 700,000 years ago, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications.
The bone was so small that at first the international team of researchers thought it must have belonged to a child.
Study co-author Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia, told AFP it was the smallest fossil humerus of an adult hominid ever found.
‘Truly epic’
The discovery could tip the scales in a heated debate among scientists about how H.floresiensis became so small.
One side argues that hobbits – named after the little heroes of JRR Tolkien’s fantasy novels – descend from an already small, earlier hominid that arrived on Flores about a million years ago.
Others believe it was our ancestor Homo erectus, which was about our size and spread throughout Asia, that became trapped on the island, only to later evolve into the smaller H.floresiensis over the next 300,000 years.
The researchers behind the latest discovery believe it strongly supports the latter theory.
These ancient humans “dramatically reduced their body size in accordance with a well-known evolutionary phenomenon known as island dwarfism,” Brumm said.
Under this process, larger animals tend to shrink over time to adapt to their limited environment.
The tropical island was home to other smaller-than-normal mammals, including a cow-sized relative of the elephant.
The newly discovered teeth also look like smaller versions of those of Homo erectus, the researchers said.
“If we are correct, it appears that Homo erectus was somehow able to cross formidable deep-sea barriers to reach isolated islands like Flores,” Brumm said.
“We don’t know how they were doing it,” he said, adding that “accidental ‘rafting’ on tsunami debris” was a possibility.
After these ancient humans were trapped on the island, they managed to survive for hundreds of thousands of years, evolving into “strange new forms,” Brumm said.
Mark Moore, an archaeologist at the University of New England in Australia not involved in the study, said the discovery means “we can now confidently say” that the Homo erectus theory is the most likely scenario.
Moore, who has studied the stone tools used by hobbits, told AFP that this “technology did not protect our cousin species from the forces of biological evolution.”
The fact that hobbits changed so much in just 300,000 years was “a reminder of the power of natural selection,” he added.
“The evolutionary story of this group of hominids is truly epic.”
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