Return to Flores: "Hobbit" Hominin Ancestor Discovered

First found in 2003 — a likely second site was just announced — Indonesian hominin Homo floresiensis stood a mere meter tall. Reconstruction by Atelier Elisabeth Daynes. (Credit: Kinez Riza) A partial jaw, a bit of skull and half a dozen teeth: this handful of fossil finds from Indonesia might not seem like much, but at 700,000 years old they have delivered a definitive smackdown to Hobbit haters (and I'm not talking about Gollum). The small assemblage of fossils, belonging to at least three individuals, proves once and for all that Homo floresiensis, popularly known as "the Hobbit," was a distinct species. What's more, these fossils, described today in Nature, refine the evolutionary timeline of H. floresiensis and shed some light on the pint-sized hominins most likely ancestors. You may recall that a dozen years ago, researchers announced the discovery of a diminutive hominin that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores up until about 50,000 years ago. (When the fossils were first discovered, researchers believed they might have been a mere 17,000 years old. But results using more precise dating methods, published this March in Nature, established a range from 5o,000 to 190,000 years ago for the fossils of multiple individuals and associated tools.) Usually I have to work a bit to fit in a Tolkien reference but this one comes ready-made: The meter-tall hominin was instantly nicknamed the Hobbit and made an outsized splash in pop culture thanks to the popularity of The Lord of the Rings movies at the time (for some of us those movies, and the books which begot them, are still popular. Yesssss, precioussssss). With its small stature and a brain half the size of that of Homo erectus (the only other archaic hominin known from the general area, and the most likely candidate for its ancestor), H. floresiensis inspired a lot of theories, some more reasonable than others. One camp of researchers, for example, believed Shorty might have been an isolated example of pathological dwarfism or other abnormality. Without fossils from sites other than the initial finds at Liang Bua, the debate about whether H. floresiensis was a distinct species raged on.