HUMAN EVOLUTION

Homo floresiensis: the Hobbit

~700,000 to 50,000 years ago

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Pleistocene · Chibanian

Homo floresiensis is a human lineage from the island of Flores, in Indonesia, that shrank to about a metre in height, with a brain the size of a chimpanzee's, and kept making stone tools for at least 140,000 years.

Homo floresiensis is a human lineage that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores and is known from skeletons found at the site of Liang Bua. The lineage shrank to about a metre in height, with a brain the size of a chimpanzee's, and kept making stone tools for at least a hundred and forty thousand years. The elephants of Flores also became smaller, and its rats became larger. This pattern is the island rule: on islands, large mammals tend to become smaller and small mammals larger, because resources are limited and predators few. A jaw fragment and six teeth from another site on Flores are seven hundred thousand years old, and smaller still than the Liang Bua remains. They indicate that the lineage shrank early and then stayed small.

Why it matters

The island rule applies to a human lineage as it does to the elephants of Flores. The brain of Homo floresiensis shrank along with its body, and this conclusion is harder to accept than the shrinking of the body itself.

Dating & uncertainty

The skeletons from Liang Bua, a site on Flores, were first dated to 18,000 years ago. Sutikna and colleagues (2016) restudied the layers of the site and dated the skeletons to between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago. With the first dates, the lineage survived long after modern humans arrived in the region. With the revised dates, it is uncertain whether the two ever met. The oldest date for the lineage, seven hundred thousand years ago, rests on a jaw fragment and six teeth from another site on the island, smaller still than the Liang Bua remains.

Earth history as one day

23:59:4613.3 s before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day