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WASHINGTON (AP) — Two decades ago, scientists discovered fossils of an early human species on an Indonesian island that stood about 4 feet tall and earned them the nickname “the Hobbit.”
Now, a new study suggests that the ancestors of these “hobbits” were slightly smaller.
“We did not expect to find smaller individuals at such an ancient site,” Yosuke Kaibe of the University of Tokyo, one of the study’s co-authors, said in an email.
The original hobbit fossils date back to between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago. The new fossils were found at a site called Mata Menge, about 72 kilometers from the cave where the first hobbit remains were found.
In 2016, researchers suspected that the first relatives might have been shorter than the hobbits after studying jaws and teeth collected at the new site. Subsequent analysis of a small arm bone and teeth showed that these ancestors were just 6 centimeters shorter and lived 700,000 years ago.
“They show convincingly that these individuals were very small,” says Dean Falk, an evolutionary anthropologist at Florida State University who was not involved in the research.
The findings were published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
Researchers have debated how the “hobbits” – named after the remote Indonesian island of Flores – evolved to be so small and what place they occupy in human evolutionary history. They are thought to be one of the last early human species to go extinct.
Scientists still don’t know if the hobbits were descendants of an earlier, taller human species that lived in the area, Homo erectus, or a more primitive human ancestor. Matt Tocheri, an anthropologist at Lakehead University in Canada, said more research and fossils are needed to determine the hobbits’ place in human evolution.
“This question remains unanswered and will be the subject of an investigation for some time,” Toceri, who is not involved in the investigation, said in an email.
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