But with a more primitive walking style than modern humans and lack of hunting and cooking, the species still differs significantly from Homo sapiens — so with the new findings, the mystery of the hobbits' origins has only deepened.
Lewton and colleagues closely studied the pelvic bones of LB 1, an adult female hobbit who was about 3.5 feet (1 meter) tall when she died between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores. They looked for clues as to whether members of H. floresiensis were more similar to other Pleistocene human species or to earlier australopithecine species, such as the iconic "Lucy". Their study was published Aug. 25 in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology.
One physical characteristic that experts have identified in H. floresiensis is known as iliac flare, or the degree to which the hip bones are flared out from the center of the trunk. A large degree of iliac flare has been linked to australopithecine anatomy and, functionally, to less efficient bipedal walking than is seen in humans. But a problem that Lewton and colleagues encountered was that different methods used to quantify the "iliac flare" of humans' relatives often produced contradictory results.
"These results suggest that H. floresiensis likely used a form of bipedal walking that would have been markedly similar to those of humans," the researchers wrote in the study.
Caley Orr, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Colorado Denver who was not involved in the study, said "their results are consistent with a more limited quantitative comparison among fossil pelvises that my team published last year." In that work, the LB 1 pelvis also popped out as being mostly human-like, Orr told Live Science.
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"Most evidence points to one of the two following hypotheses," Lewton said. "Either H. floresiensis evolved from a population of H. erectus that arrived on the island of Flores and experienced insular dwarfism, or H. floresiensis derived from a small-bodied, earlier radiation of a different species of Pleistocene Homo." In other words, they may have been H. erectus that shrank over time because they lived on an island, or may have evolved from a smaller, unknown Homo species.
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