Brilio.net/en - The mystery began with the discovery of hobbit bones in Liang Bua limestone cave in 2003 on Flores, one of the lesser Sunda Islands of Indonesia. According to researchers, it was a unique species that before had not been discovered. But thats when the debate really began. Researchers couldnt agree as to the origins of the skeleton - whether it was related to our ancient forefathers, the homo sapien, or whether it was an entirely different species that eerily resembled modern humans.
Discoverer Mike Morwood proposed that it was a shrunken Homo erectus, the same species that eventually evolved to become us; others suggested the Hobbits were descended from smaller, more primitive early humans such as Homo habilis or Australopithecus.
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And now, Morwood might have some evidence to back his theory. A partial lower jaw and six teeth, belonging to at least one adult and two children and dating to around 700,000 years ago, were discovered in a stream. And they appear to belong to the creatures ancestors. Unfortunately for Morwood, he passed away in 2013, three years before he could have the research that supports his claims.
Image by Kinan Riza
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The recent discovery show how the Hobbits' regular-sized ancestors "rapidly" shrank to around 3.2 feet (one meter) high. The creatures had quite small brains, about the size of modern humans but they were still using stone tools half a million years before the modern human existed. Among the remains they also found pygmy elephant bones.
From the age of the bones, scientists are presuming that that a group of Homo erectus arrived on Flores about one million years ago, and due to a shortage of resources, had to rapidly shrink over the course of 700,000 years. Gerrit van den Berg, who published two papers on these findings, cites elephants and other animals that have also rapidly shrunken in size due to environmental factors, which could also explain the pygmy elephants.
Adam Brumm at Griffith University in Queensland, who co-led the excavations, said: The island is small and it has limited food resources and few predators, other than komodo dragons, so large-bodied mammals that wound up on this rock would have been under immediate selective pressure to reduce their body mass. Being big is no longer an advantage when youre trying to survive in such an isolated and challenging environment.
The findings are inconclusive but to suggest that dwarf humans were roaming the once wild island. No doubt one of their main predators must have been the native komodo dragons, but that theory can surely be examined later.
While all these findings are still in the theoretical phase, with some scientists not fully believing the hype until more evidence is uncovered, its fascinating to see the development of species now long gone.