This tiny arm bone fossil sheds light on the early human species known as the 'hobbit' (2024)

In short:

The remains of the smallest adult arm bone in the fossil record and two teeth, found on the Indonesian island of Flores, were dated to be 700,000 years old.

According to a new study, the discovery sheds light on how the tiny, now-extinct human Homo floresiensis, dubbed the "hobbit", evolved.

What's next?

Archaeologists hope to find further fossils to explain why this ancient hobbit individual was so small.

A 700,000-year-old fragment of arm bone has shed light on the origins of the early human species known as the "hobbit".

The tiny piece of bone is from an early hobbit (Homo floresiensis) individual, which researchers estimate was just 100 centimetres tall.

This was 6cm smaller than its descendants, which lived 60,000 years ago.

While this change in height was unexpected to archaeologists, the discovery of the bone and some new teeth do solve the long-standing question of where H. floresiensis came from.

The study, published in Nature Communications, found distinctive features of the teeth connect the hobbit's lineage to a taller Javanese Homo erectus ancestor, rather than the shorter African Australopithecus — also known as Lucy — or Homo habilis.

Recent hobbit discoveries

H. floresiensis made its first appearance in the archaeological record with the 2003 discovery of a nearly complete, 106-centimetre female skeleton in Liang Bua, a cave on the western side of Flores Island in Indonesia.

That find was dated to around 60,000 years old and, along with subsequent discoveries of more fossils in the same cave, raised questions about where these small early humans came from.

In 2016, archaeologists unearthed more fossils — this time, some teeth and part of a jawbone — in a different part of the island called Mata Menge.

Dated to 700,000 years old, these remains also bore the hallmarks of H. floresiensis, but the absence of bones from elsewhere in the body made it difficult to draw conclusions about the size of these older specimens.

Now the discovery of a partial upper arm bone, the smallest adult human arm bone in the fossil record so far, and two more teeth at Mata Menge has revealed that this H. floresiensis individual was only around 100cm tall when they died.

This tiny arm bone fossil sheds light on the early human species known as the 'hobbit' (1)

This came as a surprise to archaeologists.

They had expected earlier specimens of H. floresiensis to be taller than their more recent counterparts, reflecting their H. erectus ancestor, Griffith University archaeologist Adam Brumm said.

"Instead, what we seem to have found is a much older variant of the hobbit itself, of Homo floresiensis."

The small stature of all H. floresiensis fossils has been explained by what's called "island dwarfism" or "insular dwarfism".

It's an evolutionary pattern evident in island-dwelling life forms that sees typically small species such as birds and insects get much bigger, while larger ones, including humans and elephants, shrink.

But that doesn't explain why the hobbit appears to have shrunk relatively soon after diverging from its larger H. erectus ancestor — which inhabited Java around 800,000 to a million years ago — and then grew slightly larger over the subsequent hundreds of thousands of years isolated on Flores.

"This is what we're still trying to get our head round," Professor Brumm said.

"It could just be some natural size variation within the population. It could be a male and female thing, the males being probably a bit bigger than the females in body size."

He speculates that the environment on the island at the time the older specimens lived might have made smaller size an advantage, and perhaps those conditions had changed slightly by the time the younger fossils were found.

This tiny arm bone fossil sheds light on the early human species known as the 'hobbit' (2)

That question is unlikely to be answered until more fossil specimens are found from the period between the 700,000- and 60,000-year-old discoveries, he said: "We just have to keep digging in the hope that we're going to find more complete remains."

Teeth's ancestry clues

Something the new discovery does is tie H. floresiensis more definitively to H. erectus.

When the original younger H. floresiensis fossils were found in Liang Bua in 2003, there were hints that the early human might have been descended from African hominids, such as Australopithecus, said Susan Larson, professor of anatomy at Stony Brook University in New York, who was not involved with the study.

"This was remarkable, because we don't know of any dispersal events out of Africa that early.

"There didn't seem to be many features that really made Homo erectus a better ancestral form."

But these new findings, specifically the teeth, show clear evidence of the hobbit's H. erectus ancestry.

"It is very fortuitous that teeth and jaws seem to fossilise pretty well, because they are pretty clearly reflective of taxonomy," Professor Larson said.

This tiny arm bone fossil sheds light on the early human species known as the 'hobbit' (3)

"Teeth have lots of goofy little grooves and peaks that seem to probably serve some purpose, but also seem to be very species-specific so that you can gather a lot of information about heritage as well as function."

An enduring mystery is how the ancestors of H. floresiensis, whatever their size, made it to the island of Flores in the first place. Huge stretches of water separated the South-East Asian mainland and Flores, Professor Brumm said.

"Somehow, these early humans were able to get across to these islands, whereas most other non-flying land mammals were not."

There's no evidence of any of these early humans made boats or rafts, so, he said, perhaps some individuals were swept out to sea clinging to floating vegetation, "then very, very rarely, some of them survived and ended up on these remote oceanic islands where they effectively became marooned".

There are also questions about if and how H. floresiensis might have interacted with early Homo sapiens in the region, Professor Brumm added.

"Our species could well have come face to face with these with the late surviving remnants of these early hominins when they first landed on these islands on the way to Australia."

There is evidence in the genetic makeup of modern humans in the region which suggests there may have been some genetic intermingling between these two species.

"It's a fascinating part of the world and it's a very poorly known chapter in the human story," Professor Brumm said.

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This tiny arm bone fossil sheds light on the early human species known as the 'hobbit' (2024)

FAQs

This tiny arm bone fossil sheds light on the early human species known as the 'hobbit'? ›

The discovery of a tiny arm bone suggests that an ancient human dubbed "hobbits" only shrank down to their diminutive size after they arrived on an Indonesian island a million years ago, scientists said on Tuesday.

What genus and species of human fossil is known as hobbit? ›

The fossils represent a small-bodied and small-brained hominin, named Homo floresiensis, but better known as the "Hobbit." The position of these fossils on the human evolutionary tree remains unclear. In fact, since the 2004 discovery, there has been an unending series of controversies surrounding these specimens.

What ancient hobbit sized human species was discovered? ›

(CNN) – An ancient tiny human species that lived in Indonesia until about 50,000 years ago is baffling scientists. The extinct species nicknamed “hobbit” was first discovered nearly 21 years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores.

Where were the hominins known as hobbits found? ›

Until some 60,000 years ago, petite early humans standing just over three feet tall lived on Flores Island in what is now Indonesia. These individuals—called Homo floresiensis and nicknamed the “hobbits” after J.R.R. Tolkien's small Middle-earth inhabitants—were shorter than today's average human 4-year-old.

How old are the hobbit fossils? ›

Along with bones from other individuals found in the cave, dating to between about 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, LB1 showed that the hobbit skull had characteristics more like our close human relative Homo erectus, though the rest of its body seemed to align with more primitive species such as Australopithecus ...

What are humans called in the hobbit? ›

In his writings, J.R.R. Tolkien uses the term Men, in place of "mankind" or "Man", to refer to human males and females collectively.

What is the species name for hobbit? ›

Remains of one of the most recently discovered early human species, Homo floresiensis (nicknamed 'Hobbit'), have so far only been found on the Island of Flores, Indonesia.

What is the ancient giant human species? ›

There are few signs that ancient humans ever grew much taller than we do. While anthropologist Lee Berger once claimed that some members of a species of archaic hominin, H. heidelbergensis, grew to over 7 feet tall, there's little evidence that's true. If anything, ancient humans were shorter than we were.

What species is the hobbit in real life? ›

Homo floresiensis was very short compared to the average modern human, standing at about 1.05 metres tall. This is what earned Homo floresiensis its nickname 'the hobbit', after a fictional group of short, human-like creatures created by author J R R Tolkien.

What is the name of the ancient human species? ›

They named it Homo habilis – identifying it as the first true human species to evolve. From the fragmentary fossils found, H. habilis seemed to have had a brain substantially larger than an australopith and more like that of later human species.

Which human species nicknamed hobbit could still be alive today? ›

An early human species that was believed to have gone extinct thousands of years ago may still be alive today, an expert has suggested. Homo floresiensis is often nicknamed 'the hobbit' due to their height being an average of 3ft 6ins.

What was the new early human species found? ›

When these remains were excavated and studied, the results were even more spectacular than first thought: they belonged to roughly 15 individuals of an entirely new species of 300,000-year-old human, which was named Homo naledi. The skeletons revealed that the new human species had a curious mix of features.

Where was the hobbit skeleton found? ›

'Hobbit' bone from tiny species of ancient humans found on Indonesian island. The remains of a member of the smallest ancient human species on record, who stood at just 1m tall, have been discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores.

How old is a 50 year old hobbit in human years? ›

The time at which a young Hobbit "comes of age" is thirty-three. Thus, a fifty-year-old Hobbit would only look 26–30 years by human standards.

How old is the youngest fossil? ›

The youngest fossils are around 10 Thousand (10,000) years old, and were alive at the end of the last Ice Age. How small can the fossils be? The fossils can be very small. Sometimes they can't be seen with your own eyes!

Who is the oldest Hobbit? ›

Gerontius Took reached the impressive age of 130, which made him the oldest Hobbit until his grandson Bilbo Baggins celebrated his 131st Birthday.

What is a human hobbit? ›

Homo floresiensis ( /flɔːrˈɛziːˌɛn.sɪs/ also known as "Flores Man" or "Hobbit" after the fictional species) is an extinct species of small archaic human that inhabited the island of Flores, Indonesia, until the arrival of modern humans about 50,000 years ago.

What is the genus and species of the oldest human-like fossil? ›

H. erectus is the oldest known species to have a human-like body, with relatively elongated legs and shorter arms in comparison to its torso.

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