Our little cousins from island shire

I have already written on the excavations in 2003 at Liang Bua, a cave on the island of Flores, Indonesia, that caused a sensation among archaeologists and the wider public. Now we have some important new finds.

This is a huge cavern, and as they dug deep into the deposits there, they came across the bones of a human that almost defy the imagination. The person stood barely a metre tall, and had a brain smaller than that of the chimpanzee. Yet stone tools littered the layer where the bones were found.

More excavations at other sites on the island have now shown that this tiny human, nicknamed the Hobbit, must have crossed by sea to the island at least a million years ago, and survived there until the arrival of modern humans 50,000 years ago. Initial examination of the associated finds suggested that the hobbits, who real name is Homo floresiensis, used fire and hunted the indigenous pygmy elephants and Sarus cranes. They lived alongside a particularly unpleasant creature, the Komodo dragon, whose sharply serrated teeth inject a poison into the flesh of the animals it hunts down. They can smell decay from kilometres away, and when their prey dies, they congregate and feast on the carcass.

Who were those hobbits? Some have suggested that they were descendants of Homo erectus, the first humans to migrate from Africa nearly two million years ago, who managed to reach Flores and then, isolated there, evolved into their minute size. Others think that they represent an even earlier expansion out of Africa by a really remote ancestor of ours known as Homo habilis. In either case, using fire and hunting elephants were really unexpected.

A new study just published has involved a detailed analysis of the bones of those pygmy elephants that the hobbits are thought to have hunted and eaten. It begins with observing the bite marks that are left on the bones by Komodo dragons, for those reptiles have razor sharp teeth that rip flesh off the bones and, evidently, leave distinctive cut marks behind. It is not straightforward to distinguish between the cut marks from dragons’ teeth and those from the use of a sharp stone tool. However, this particular code has now been cracked. It was the Komodo dragon, and not the Hobbit, that hunted pygmy elephants. Only when they departed the kill site did the tiny humans descend on the abandoned carcasses and cut off any remaining meat for themselves.