Fossils show that 700,000-year-old Indonesian hobbits were smaller than thought

Two decades ago, scientists discovered fossils of an early human species nicknamed “hobbits” that stood just 3.5 feet (1.07 meters) tall. However, a new study suggests that the ancestors of these “hobbits” were much shorter.

“We did not expect to find smaller individuals in such an ancient site,” Yousuke Kaifu, a professor at the University of Tokyo and the study’s lead author, said in an email to The Associated Press.

The original hobbit fossils date back to between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago. The new fossils were unearthed from a site called Mata Menge, 45 miles from the cave where the first hobbit remains were found.

In 2019, researchers discovered jawbones and teeth at the new site, leading them to suspect that these early humans might have been shorter than the hobbits. Further analysis found that these ancestors, who lived 700,000 years ago, were about 2.4 inches (6 centimeters) shorter than the hobbits.

“They show convincingly that these were very small individuals,” said Dean Falk, an evolutionary anthropologist at Florida State University who was not involved in the research.

The 700,000-year-old fossil remains belong to Homo floresiensis, an extinct species of tiny humans that once lived on the Indonesian island of Flores, according to a study published Aug. 6 in the journal Nature Communications.

“It is not necessarily our destiny to have a large body size and a large brain and to be smart,” Kaifu told Live Science. “Not only animals have a variety of different ways to evolve depending on the natural environment, but humans do as well.”

Cave explains that the Matamonga fossils show that the extremely small size of Homo floresiensis evolved within the first 300,000 years of their presence on the island and was maintained for more than 600,000 years. The cause of this long-term small size remains a challenging question.

“We tend to think of humans as special among animals. But the evidence from Flores suggests that we, like other animals, are subject to natural selection and can evolve in unexpected directions,” Cave added.