First discovered in 2003, H. floresiensis has been nicknamed the hobbit because of its small size, averaging around 3 feet, 6 inches (106 centimeters) tall, along with its small brain, large teeth and big feet. But archaeologists also found stone tools, animal bones with cut marks, and charred bones that seemed to add up to sophisticated behavior common within our genus, Homo. The hobbits disappeared around 50,000 years ago as Homo sapiens began spreading around Southeast Asia.
The researchers looked at fossil bones of Stegodon florensis insularis, an extinct dwarf species of elephant relative discovered at Liang Bua cave, where bones from H. floresiensis and stone tools have also been found, to determine whether the cut marks were from hunting Stegodon meat or from scavenging the remains of the feasts of the only other carnivore on the island: the Komodo dragons (Varanus komodensis).
An extinct species of dwarf elephant called Stegodon florensis insularis inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores. (Image credit: Alamy)
The researchers then investigated the ancient Stegodon bones for evidence of cut marks made by H. floresiensis' stone tools and tooth marks from Komodo dragons. They found 54 cut marks on the Stegodon bones and nearly twice as many Komodo dragon tooth marks. More importantly, they discovered that the Komodo dragon marks were focused on meaty areas, while the human cut marks were made primarily in areas without a lot of meat, suggesting H. floresiensis did not hunt and kill the Stegodon.
A lack of hunting and fire-making technology suggests that the hobbits were not as behaviorally sophisticated as previously thought and raises questions about their ancestry, the researchers said.
The Komodo dragon (Varanus komodoensis) lived on the island of Flores and was the only other carnivore along with Homo floresiensis. (Image credit: Alamy)One hypothesis for the origin of the hobbits is island dwarfism, which occurs when a large species' average body size evolves to be smaller over generations due to the limited availability of natural resources. Another theory is that hobbits descended from an earlier Homo species that was already small-bodied.
But the new study has not entirely settled the debate about the hobbits' ancestry, because very little is known about the behavior of early hominins in Southeast Asia, such as Homo erectus on Java and other areas of Sunda or Sundaland, a landmass between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean that has been exposed off and on over the past 2.6 million years.
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"Flores was clearly a wild card in the story of early human evolution, the sort of place where almost anything could have happened — including, potentially, the loss of deeply-rooted hominin behaviours, such as hunting and fire use," Brumm added.
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