Homo floresiensis, the 'Hobbit' of Flores

Date

c. 100,000 – 50,000 years ago

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

Island Southeast Asia (Flores, Indonesia)

Era

Prehistory

Significance

In 2003 a joint Indonesian-Australian team excavating Liang Bua cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia uncovered a partial skeleton, announced in 2004, of a tiny adult hominin standing about 1.06 metres tall with a brain of only around 400 cubic centimetres — comparable to a chimpanzee's.

Named Homo floresiensis and nicknamed the 'Hobbit', the species combined a very small body and brain with relatively modern features and was associated with stone tools and the remains of hunted dwarf elephants (Stegodon). Revised dating now places the Liang Bua fossils between roughly 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, with the species disappearing around 50,000 years ago, about the time modern humans were spreading through the region. Its small size is widely attributed to insular dwarfism, the evolutionary shrinking of large animals isolated on islands, though its exact ancestry — whether a dwarfed Homo erectus or a relic of an even more primitive lineage — remains debated. Homo floresiensis demonstrated that the human family tree was far bushier than once thought, with archaic species surviving on isolated islands into very recent times.

Related science, technology & invention events

• Discovery of the Denisovans and archaic-modern interbreeding
  c. 100,000 – 40,000 years ago (interbreeding); identified 2010
• Australopithecus afarensis ('Lucy' and relatives)
  c. 3.9–2.9 million years ago
• Domestication of maize from teosinte in Mesoamerica
  c. 7000 BCE (c. 9,000 years ago)
• Domestication of rice in the Yangtze River basin
  c. 8000–6000 BCE
• Domestication of the dog, humanity's first domesticated animal
  c. 16,000 – 14,000 years ago
• Earliest Controlled Use of Fire by Homo erectus
  c. 1,000,000 BCE

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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