On the island of Flores, which is now part of Indonesia, a small early human lived between 700,000 and 60,000 years ago. Homo floresiensis, known as the "hobbit" because it was tiny around 3 feet, 6 inches (106 cm) tall, was an unknown toolmaker with a small brain and huge feet.
A skull of Homo floresiensis, a species nicknamed hobbits (Image credit: Universal History Archive / Contributor via Getty Images)
One anthropologist is now claiming that H. floresiensis may still exist in the present day and that it is not certain that it became extinct. Gregory Forth, a retired anthropologist from the University of Alberta, makes the case in a new book that stories of a "ape-man" on Flores may actually be sightings of the extinct human progenitor that is still alive today.
"We simply don't know when this species became extinct or indeed, dare I say — I did dare to say — we don't even know if it is extinct," Forth told Live Science. "Therefore, there is a chance that it is still alive."
This is a dramatic allegation, so it goes without saying that H. floresiensis researchers are dubious.
John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, described the island of Flores as having roughly the same area as Connecticut and home to two million people today. He said, "The population is dispersed throughout the island."
The likelihood of a huge primate living unnoticed on this island and in a community that can support itself is practically zero, according to Hawks, who spoke to Live Science.
An estranged relative
Forth has a different viewpoint. Since he began conducting anthropological study on the island in 1984, he has heard local lore about little, hairy, humanoid beings that dwell in the jungle. Up until the discovery of H. floresiensis in 2003, he wrote about these stories in his research. He told Live Science that's when he realized the connection.
In a place called Lio, Forth remarked, "I heard about these similarly small human-like creatures that were said to still be alive and people were giving accounts of what they looked like." A man claims to have disposed of the body of a creature with straight, light-colored hair on its body, a well-formed nose, and a stub of a tail. This claim is made in an excerpt from Forth's new book, "Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominoid," which will be published by Pegasus Books in 2022. Forth gathered 30 eyewitness testimonies of species over the years that, in his opinion, fit the H. floresiensis description.
Naturally, there are numerous eyewitness stories of mysterious animals from all over the world, such as Sasquatch in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest, according to evolutionary anthropologist Mark Collard of Simon Fraser University in Canada. According to Collard, who spoke to Live Science, humans are good at telling and believing stories, and such stories may quickly take on a major role in people's beliefs.
Forth stated that since non-human apes have never existed in North America, the stories of these "ape-men" on Flores are distinct from those of Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest. However, he asserted that H. floresiensis unquestionably did exist in Flores.
How long did they last, though? In 2003, bones of the H. floresiensis were discovered in Flores' Liang Bua cave. According to Elizabeth Veatch, a zooarchaeologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History who studies the species, the earliest indication of the hobbits using the cave dates back to 50,000 years ago. According to Veatch, modern humans didn't arrive on Flores until 47,000 years ago, and there is no proof that the two species coexisted at Liang Bua cave. In actuality, she claimed, H. floresiensis was barely using the location after 60,000 years ago.
"Based on faunal evidence, there was probably an environmental change around 60,000 years ago that changed the landscape around Liang Bua and forced Homo floresiensis to migrate elsewhere on the island to forage in more appropriate habitats," Veatch said.
A fossilized hominin's mandible and teeth were found in 2014 in Mata Menge, a different location on Flores, which dates back roughly 700,000 years. These bones are assumed to come from an H. floresiensis population that is much older. The location also contained stone tools.
These results imply that H. floresiensis, which has only been discovered in Flores, has a lengthy history there. But neither anthropologists nor archaeologists have discovered any proof that the hobbit coexisted with contemporary people.
According to Thompson, it's plausible that they did for a while. And if that's the case, the tales told in Flores' Lio region may represent a very old cultural memory. Indigenous Australians have tales that unmistakably match historical occurrences that took place thousands of years ago, including a catastrophic meteor strike. According to Thompson, something like might be taking place on Flores.
"What we might have is a situation where [H. floresiensis] potentially persisted in mythology for a really long time," she said to Live Science.
But Thompson shared the same skepticism about how a 3-foot-tall ape could have survived on Flores to the present.
Science does, she remarked, "bring up species that we thought were extinct, but it's minor stuff. It wouldn't be something that would stand out much.
Collier concurred. He remarked, "I just think we have to be extremely careful with oral history. "I believe it has value, but one must approach it with caution."
Unknown ancestor
That does not negate the mysticism surrounding H. floresiensis. There is a significant gap in history between the two sites where the primate's bones and tools were found because they are thousands of years apart in time. According to Hawks, scientists do know that hobbits used cobbles to fashion sharp stone flakes into knives that they may have used to slice meat or vegetation or to carve other tools from wood. It is unknown if H. floresiensis hunted big game or used fire.
Where the species originated is arguably the biggest unanswered question regarding H. floresiensis. Anatomically, the "hobbit" resembles other Homo species like Homo erectus and Homo sapiens in having teeth. H. floresiensis lived in Indonesia between 700,000 and 800,000 years ago, arriving far earlier than H. sapiens.
However, 1.8 million years ago, H. erectus fled Africa and appeared in the fossil record before H. floresiensis on what is now the island of Java. This opens the door to the theory that the hobbit descended from Homo erectus and may have developed a tiny body size due to island life, a condition known as island dwarfism.
However, there are issues with that premise. For one thing, according to Thompson, H. erectus lived on other Southeast Asian islands until about 115,000 years ago at its normal size, so it would be strange if island dwarfism only happened on Flores and nowhere else over hundreds of thousands of years. Additionally, H. floresiensis differs from its Homo relatives in numerous anatomical ways, such as the way its shoulders and wrists look more like those of early hominin forebears like Australopithecus.
Hawks claimed, "The anatomy doesn't make it clear."
According to Collard, the anatomical data implies that H. floresiensis may have descended from a human progenitor who left Africa before H. erectus. If so, archaeologists have not yet discovered any evidence to indicate who or when that ancestor may have been.
Whatever the journey's history, it had to have been extraordinary. reach get reach the island of Flores, little H. floresiensis or its predecessors had to travel across continents into choppy open water. Even though sea levels fluctuated over thousands of years, according to Collard, there was always open ocean there. Homo luzonensis, a primate from the Philippines discovered in 2019 on the island of Luzon, and other early hominin remains imply that humans' forebears were far more advanced than anthropologists and archaeologists ever imagined.
"Was it an unintentional rafting incident? Was the rafting situation intentional?" stated Collard. "Were they able to use boats, despite the odds?"
One of the caves where bones of the species Homo floresiensis were found. (Image credit: The Sydney Morning Herald / Contributor via Getty Images)
Multiple populations?
The interactions between the earliest populations of the Homo species were incredibly complicated, as experts studying the origins of humans are already discovering. It is now widely accepted that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred and that modern humans still contain some Neanderthal DNA. Additionally, a different human progenitor known as the Denisovans, about which little is known, interbred with people in Oceania and East Asia. Hawks noted that it is remarkable that groups in east Indonesia still carry Denisovan DNA, indicating that these human relatives once resided on these islands. However, no Denisovan fossil remains have yet been discovered in eastern Indonesia.
The oldest known cave painting, a red pig painted on the island of Sulawesi 45,500 years ago, is also from Indonesia.Homo sapiens may have created this work of art.
There is no proof that H. floresiensis and humans have ever interbred. There are no previously known genes in the contemporary Indonesian genome that could be traced back to the little hominid. According to Hawks, the dating of the discovered fossils indicates that the hobbit may have been contentedly residing on Flores when modern people arrived and accidentally—or not—wiped it out.
"It's extremely likely that contemporary humans are to blame for the demise of this species", he said.
Or possibly there are fresher fossils of H. floresiensis that will show that the two Homo species coexisted. According to Hawks, the past ten years have been a "golden age" for Indonesian archaeology and cross-national scientific collaborations. There will probably certainly be additional discoveries in the future.
The fact that we only have a small number of sites that collectively represent almost a million years of human occupation in some of these locations, according to Hawks, indicates that there is still much more to be discovered.
