PEOPLING

The Hobbits of Flores

~100,000 to 50,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

In Liang Bua cave, on the Indonesian island of Flores, lived a human barely a metre tall, with a brain the size of a chimpanzee's, who knapped stone tools and hunted pygmy Stegodon: Homo floresiensis, promptly nicknamed the hobbit. The species drops out of the record by about 50,000 years ago, along with the island's giant stork and vulture, just as modern humans were reaching the region; a shift in tool stone at the cave around 46,000 years ago may mark the newcomers.

Why it matters

Flores shows how wide the human family was: while our species spread out of Africa, at least four other kinds of human still walked the Earth, and one of them was a metre-tall islander whose ancestors had crossed open sea. Its disappearance on the eve of our arrival poses, in miniature, the question that shadows Neanderthals and Denisovans too: the others end soon after we appear, and nothing in the record yet shows that we were the cause.

Dating & uncertainty

The dating is itself the drama: the skeletons were first placed between 95,000 and 12,000 years ago, which implied tens of millennia of overlap with modern humans. Revised stratigraphy moved the skeletal remains back to about 100,000 to 60,000 years and the species' stone tools to no later than about 50,000, right around the time modern humans reached the region. Whether the two ever met on Flores is an open question.

Sources

1. Sutikna et al. (2016), Nature · Revised stratigraphy and chronology for Homo floresiensis at Liang Bua in Indonesiadoi:10.1038/nature17179
2. Sutikna et al. (2018), Journal of Human Evolution · The spatio-temporal distribution of archaeological and faunal finds at Liang Bua (Flores, Indonesia) in light of the revised chronology for Homo floresiensisdoi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2018.07.001
3. Morley et al. (2016), Journal of Archaeological Science · Initial micromorphological results from Liang Bua, Flores (Indonesia): site formation processes and hominin activities at the type locality of Homo floresiensisdoi:10.1016/j.jas.2016.06.004

Our species’ history as one day

20:11:253 h 49 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day