In this episode, Ashley Judd tells the story of a startling discovery on the island of Flores. Deep inside a remote, limestone cave with a high, arched ceiling, researchers uncovered fossils of an ancient human species unlike any other. This discovery added a new member to the human family tree and shook up our understanding of human evolution.
In this episode, Ashley Judd tells the story of a startling discovery on the island of Flores. Deep inside a remote, limestone cave with a high, arched ceiling, researchers uncovered fossils of an ancient human species unlike any other. This discovery added a new member to the human family tree and shook up our understanding of human evolution.
Further reading:
About The Leakey Foundation
The Leakey Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and sharing discoveries. The Foundation was established in 1968 to fund work at the forefront of fossil and primate studies and provide opportunities for a global community of scientists. Learn more at leakeyfoundation.org.
Discovering Us: 50 Great Discoveries in Human Origins
In 50 lively and up-to-the-minute essays illustrated with full-color photographs, Discovering Us: 50 Great Discoveries in Human Origins presents stories of the most exciting and groundbreaking surprises revealed by human origins research.
Prepared in consultation with leading experts and written by Evan Hadingham, senior science editor for NOVA, Discovering Us features stunning photographs, some taken at the actual moment that groundbreaking discoveries were made. The book presents a highly accessible account of the latest scientific insights into the ultimate question of humanity’s origins. Discovering Us was published by Signature Books.
Find Discovering Us at your local library, bookstore, or amazon.com.
Show Credits:
Discovering Us was made possible by generous support from Camilla and George Smith, the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, and the Joan and Arnold Travis Education Fund.
Meredith Johnson:
This is Discovering Us from The Leakey Foundation and Signature Books … an audio companion to the book Discovering Us: 50 Great Discoveries in Human Origins. Written by Evan Hadingham and read for you by Ashley Judd.
I’m your host, Meredith Johnson.
In today’s installment of Discovering Us, we’re going to the island of Flores where scientists made a startling discovery in 2003.
Deep inside a remote, limestone cave with a high, arched ceiling, researchers uncovered fossils of an ancient human species unlike any other. This discovery added a new member to the human family tree and shook up our understanding of human evolution.
Here’s Ashley Judd…
Ashley Judd:
The Hobbit
The island of Flores is the biggest in a chain of rugged volcanic islands strewn across the world’s deepest seas, half-way between mainland Asia and Australia.
Some 100,000 years ago, it was home to some very odd creatures: Stegodon, an extinct species of pygmy elephant about the size of a buffalo; giant rats as big as rabbits; the fearsome Komodo dragon, today’s largest land reptile; a six-foot-high carnivorous stork; and Homo floresiensis, (floor-EHZ-ee-en-sis) a tiny ancient human around three and a half feet tall, whose discovery in 2003 created an immediate sensation.
Nothing like its peculiar features had ever been seen in the fossil record—not least, its huge feet.
Three-quarters the length of its thighbone, they immediately suggested its nickname, the Hobbit, inspired by the character in
J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
What was it doing here on a remote Indonesian island together with such a bizarre bestiary of other extinct species?
The Hobbit’s tale begins in the 1990s, when Mike Morwood, an archaeologist based in Australia, decided to look on Indonesian islands for traces of early modern humans who first arrived in Australia at least 60,000 years ago.
On Flores, he first visited a site called Mata Menge (mat-eh MEN-gay), where a Dutch archaeologist in the 1960s had reported 750,000-year-old stone tools alongside Stegodon bones, a claim that few had taken seriously. Moorwood’s team found more tools, confirmed the early date, and then moved on to Liang Bua (lee-ANG boo-uh)—the “Cool Cave”—a cathedral-like limestone cavern.
Here, just as the dig was due to close in 2003, local excavator Benyamin Tarus unearthed the complete skull, pelvis, both upper and lower limb bones, and parts of the hands and oversized feet of a tiny human, known as LB1.
Its fragile bones had the consistency of wet paper. The femur was slightly shorter than that of Lucy the australopithecine, indicating a height of just 42 inches.
Eventually, the team recovered a second jaw and isolated teeth and bones belonging to at least 14 other individuals.
It was at first estimated that the Hobbit had survived to the astonishingly recent date of 12,000 years ago.
LB1’s most controversial feature was its miniscule brain. Smaller than a chimpanzee’s - it was about as big as two tennis balls and around a third the size of our own brains.
This startling fact launched a bitter academic debate: was Homo floresiensis a valid ancient species or simply an anatomically modern human suffering from a pathological condition?
The skeptics drew attention to various abnormalities that result in small brains, such as microcephaly, congenital hypothyroidism, and Laron syndrome. Others rebutted the argument by pointing to the shape of the brain as revealed by casts of the skull’s interior.
From this evidence, it seems that the brain was arranged in a surprisingly advanced manner, including a well-developed prefrontal cortex normally associated with high-level thinking and forward planning.
That was perhaps not so surprising, since the Liang Bua dig showed that the Hobbit was a competent stone toolmaker, and was smart enough to have hunted down intimidating beasts such as Stegodon and Komodo dragons for its supper.
In 2016, two important new discoveries finally settled this acrimonious debate. A major reinterpretation of the soil layers at Liang Bua led to new dates for LB1, now thought to have occupied the cave between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago.
While the timing of Homo sapiens’ arrival on Flores is still unknown, the idea that the Hobbit was a deformed modern human seems even more unlikely.
The second discovery emerged from renewed excavations at Mata Menge (mat-eh MEN-gay), where new human remains were found: part of an adult jaw and milk teeth from two different children.
According to some reports, the Mata Menge jaw is even smaller than LB1’s, although it is too fragmentary to be sure if it really does belong to the Hobbit’s species. Nevertheless, it looks like more traces of the diminutive hunter and toolmaker remain to be found in Flores’s spectacular volcanic landscape.
The peculiarity of Homo floresiensis and the other creatures that flourished on Flores can partly be explained by their isolation.
Even during periods of low sea levels, the island was never connected to mainland Asia or Australia; reaching it involved crossing treacherous currents and deep channels, one at least 15 miles wide.
Only birds and bats could easily cross that gap; other species may have rafted across on vegetation in a fluke event such as a tsunami.
Did the Hobbit reach Flores accidentally or on a deliberately constructed raft? Until its discovery, it was widely assumed that only modern humans had the skills and intellect to plan an ocean voyage.
In any case, once on Flores, the new arrivals were subject to the special evolutionary pressures of remote islands, which tend to favor oversized versions of ce tain species and miniature forms of others.
No one can be sure if the Hobbit was already tiny when it first arrived, or whether it progressively shrank due to the “island dwarfing” effect that produced the pygmy elephant Stegodon.
So where did the Hobbit come from? Close to Lucy’s size and sharing some of her ancient tree-climbing adaptations, LB1 hints at the possibility of a previously unknown exodus from Africa perhaps 2 million years ago, long before the mastery of fire and the advent of big brains once thought to be essential for our ancestors to leave their African cradle.
A contrary theory proposes that they were, in fact, descended from the later big-brained Homo erectus, but owe their distinctive features to the pressures of isolation and island dwarfing.
Whatever the case, new evidence suggests that the Hobbits were not a solitary, one-off evolutionary experiment. Since 2007, fossil remains of another tiny human have been unearthed in a cave on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, nearly 2,000 miles from Flores.
The discoverers argue that it represents a new species, Homo luzonensis (loo-zon-en-sis), although so far the evidence consists of just 13 fragmentary fossils, including hand and foot bones and part of a femur from three different individuals. Like the Hobbit, the hand and foot bones show some of the tree-climbing adaptations of Lucy and other australopiths.
Dating to at least 50,000 years, the cave dwellers from Luzon may turn out to be an offshoot of the same population as Homo floresiensis, colonizing Asia’s Pacific islands at an astonishingly early date.
This recent discovery suggests that other traces of an unknown migration, spanning vast distances across southern Asia, are waiting to be found.
[MUSIC rises and then ducks under closing credits]
Meredith Johnson:
Discovering Us: 50 Great Discoveries in Human Origins was written for The Leakey Foundation by Evan Hadingham. It was published by Signature Books. The stories are read for you by Ashley Judd.
All the episodes of this audio-companion are available to listen to right now! Make sure to subscribe and share this series with a friend.
You can buy a copy of Discovering Us at your local bookstore or wherever you buy books. There’s a link in the shownotes.
The Leakey Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding human origins research and sharing discoveries. The science you heard about today was made possible by Leakey Foundation supporters. Visit our website to learn how you can get involved. Go to leakeyfoundation.org. That’s l-e-a-k-e-y foundation dot org.
This project was made possible by generous support from Camilla and George Smith, the Joan and Arnold Travis Education Fund, and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation