(Washington) Twenty years ago, on an Indonesian island, scientists discovered fossils of an early human species that stood about 1.07 meters tall, 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 kilometers 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.
Researchers have debated how hobbits ― named Homo floresiensis after the remote Indonesian island of Flores ― evolved to be so small and their place in the story of human evolution. They are thought to be among the last early human species to go extinct.
Scientists don’t yet know whether hobbits shrank from a larger, earlier human species called Homo erectus that lived in the region, or from an even more primitive human predecessor. Matt Tocheri, an anthropologist at Canada’s Lakehead University, says more research ― and fossils ― are needed to determine the hobbits’ place 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.