I got the idea to write this post because I was talking to
Jim a couple of weeks ago and he didn’t believe me that hobbits were real. I
tried to prove to him that hobbits were real by googling Homo floresiensis, but he didn’t seem that interested.
H. floresiensis was
a species of mini-hominids that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores from
about 190,000 to 50,000 years ago. The Tolkien Estate would prefer that we not
call them hobbits.
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| Which is fair, since they probably looked like this. Image from Wikimedia Commons by Cicero Moraes et alii |
In 2003, the remains of a female individual, who would have
been about 3’7” or 1.1 meters tall, were discovered in a limestone cave known
as Liang Bua. The remains were discovered by a group of Australian and
Indonesian scientists who were looking for evidence of Homo sapiens’ migration from Asia to Australia. Instead, they
discovered what is now widely believed to be a whole new species of human.
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| The cave in question. Image from Wikimedia Commons by user Rosino |
The discovery of this almost-complete skeleton was shortly
followed by the discovery of the remains of seven other individuals, as well as
the discovery of a number of small, primitive stone implements. The scientists
also uncovered the bones of an extinct elephant, Stegodon florensis insularis, a species descended from the
full-sized S. florensis florensis which
experienced island
dwarfing, a phenomenon in which a large species confined to an island or
other isolated area evolves to a smaller size over time.
So, were these tiny humans originally regular-sized humans
who shrank over generations of life on Flores? Perhaps; the Wikipedia page on
insular dwarfism lists Flores Man as an example of the phenomenon in primates,
putting it in such illustrious company as the Nosy Hara dwarf lemur (named
after an island called Nosy Hara, not after a guy called Hara who couldn’t mind
his own business) and the early inhabitants of the island nation of Palau, who
may or may not have been unusually small members of the species Homo sapiens, depending
on who you ask.
It’s possible that H.
floresiensis is not a discrete species at all, but is instead a smaller
version of Homo sapiens. Some
scientists point
to the modern-day existence of a light-skinned pygmy people in the Flores village
of Rampasasa as proof that the specimens labeled H. floresiensis could in fact be early examples of this same modern
tribe. Others argue that the small individuals found in the cave are
not early examples of modern pygmy peoples, but a separate species. H. floresiensis is a full foot smaller
than the average height of most modern pygmy peoples, and possesses other
physical features that are very different from those of modern humans. The
structure of the arms, shoulders, teeth, and especially the wrists are such
that scientists think this hominid was more closely related to great apes and
early hominids, like Australopithecus, than
to modern humans or even earlier human species like Homo neanderthalensis or Homo
erectus. Some scientists believe that H.
floresiensis evolved from the same hominid ancestor as Homo habilis, making it an older species than Homo erectus; if this theory was correct, it would mean that Homo erectus was not the first human
species to leave Africa.
However, others believe that H. floresiensis was descended from Homo erectus. Still others believe that the unfortunate individuals
found in the cave were normal, garden-variety Homo sapiens who had the misfortune to live a long time ago and
suffer from debilitating illnesses like Down’s syndrome, microcephaly, Laron
syndrome, or endemic cretinism, a condition in which one is born without a
thyroid. Researchers including Dean Falk argue that, despite having a brain the
size of an orange, H. floresiensis possessed
cognitive powers sufficient to make and use the stone tools found in the cave (which
are technologically on par with the more sophisticated tools made by Homo sapiens of the Upper Paleolithic or
Late Stone Age), to use fire, and to hunt cooperatively to bring down
admittedly small elephants, although I suppose even a cow-sized elephant would
be as big as an elephant-sized elephant if you’re three-and-a-half feet tall.
Scientists attempted to extract a DNA sample from the teeth of one of the
specimens in 2006, which would have presumably settled the debate and revealed
the nature of the specimens, but the attempt failed, so the debate rages on.
