Twenty years ago, on an Indonesian island, scientists discovered fossils of an early human species that measured about 1.07 meters, earning them the nickname “hobbits.”
A new study suggests that hobbits’ ancestors were even slightly smaller.
“We did not expect to find smaller individuals at such an ancient site,” Yousuke Kaifu, a study co-author at the University of Tokyo, admitted in an email.
The earliest hobbit fossils date back 60,000 to 100,000 years. The new fossils were unearthed at a site called Mata Menge, about 70 km from the cave where the first hobbit remains were discovered.
In 2016, after studying jaws and teeth collected from the new site, researchers suspected that the earliest relatives may have been smaller than the hobbits. Further analysis of a tiny fragment of arm bones and teeth suggests that the ancestors were about six centimeters shorter and existed 700,000 years ago.
“They’ve convincingly demonstrated that these are very small individuals,” said Dean Falk, an evolutionary anthropologist at Florida State University who was not involved in the research.
The results were published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
Scholars have debated how hobbits ― named Homo floresiensis from the remote Indonesian island of Flores ― have evolved to become so small and their place in human evolutionary history. They are thought to be among the last early human species to go extinct.
Scientists do not yet know whether hobbits shrank from an earlier, larger human species, called Homo erectuswho lived in the region, or to an even more primitive human predecessor. According to Matt Tocheri, an anthropologist at Canada’s Lakehead University, more research ― and fossils ― are needed to determine the place of hobbits in human evolution.
“This question remains unanswered and will continue to be researched for some time to come,” Tocheri, who was not involved in the study, said in an email.