The Loom » Hobbits (Homo floresiensis)

Small Girls with Sharp Rocks

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 15:13:28 +0000

When we speak of the Hobbit, let us not forget her tools.

Last year, scientists reported discovering fossils of a three-foot-tall hominid that they named Homo floresiensis, and which I can’t keep myself from calling the Hobbit. Its bones turned up in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, dating from 97,000 to 12,000 years ago. The scientists argued that the Hobbit represented an ancient lineage of hominids, perhaps descending from Homo erectus, a human-sized species that existed in Asia 1.8 million years ago, or perhaps belonging to even an older lineage, known as australopithecines. Critics argued that the Hobbit was probably a fellow Homo sapiens. They generally focused their attention on Homo floresiensis’s skull. Only one skull has yet been found, from an adult female. It’s an odd skull at that, one that would have housed a strangely shaped brain a third the size of a normal adult human brain. As I wrote last week, the critics suggest that the Hobbit might have had a genetic disorder called microcephaly, which leads to very small heads. (The full repository of my Hobbit obsessions can be found here.)

With all ...

Jakob the Hobbit?

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 18 May 2006 19:01:33 +0000

It’s been a little over a year and a half now since scientists announced the disocvery of the most controversial fossil in the field of human origins: Homo floresiensis a k a the Hobbit. Scientists found bones of a dimunitive hominid on the Indonesian island of Flores, and estimated that it lived there as recently as 12,000 years ago. It stood about as high as a normal three year old human child and had a brain the size of a chimpanzee’s. But its bones were also found with stone tools. The scientists declared the bones were not human. Instead, they belonged to a species of their own–one that branched off from much older hominids. Later, the scientists offered brain scans and more bones to bolster their case.

I’ve been chronicling the adventures of Homo floresiensis, trying to keep an eye out for new developments. My hobbit posts can be found here. In recent months the scientific reports have tapered off. That may be in part because of the ugly spat between rival paleoanthropologists over access to the bones and the site where they were found. Critics have been putting together attacks against the ...

Hobbit As Monkey?

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 14:37:09 +0000

Well, here’s an idea I haven’t heard of before…

Last year scientists found the bones of what they recognized as a new species of hominid that lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. They named it Homo floresiensis, and its three foot stature earned it the nickname the Hobbit. All of the reconstructions I’ve seen until now have shown the Hobbit standing upright–which you might expect of a hominid that descended from upright ancestors (perhaps Homo erectus or even the more primitive Australopithecus).

But in the November issue of the Dutch science magazine Natuurwetenschap & Techniek, paleontologist and Hobbit team-member Gert van den Bergh offers a new vision: the Hobbit on all fours.

Van den Bergh makes his case based on the long, strangely shaped arm bones of Homo floresiensis, which were recently described in the journal Nature. “The humerus of Homo sapiens (modern man) and Homo erectus (our ancestor) has a significant twist in the connection to the shoulder,” van den Bergh said in a statement issued from the magazine. “In the Hobbit, however, the humerus is connected to the shoulder without twist. You don’t see this ...

Whose Brain Is It Anyway? (The Further Hobbit Adventures)

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 15:14:40 +0000

Finally, more brains.

On Tuesday I wrote about how the second batch of Homo floresiensis bones had at last seen the scientific light of day. Today the critics who don’t think the Hobbit is a new species are making their way into scientific journals as well. They’re saying that the Hobbit brain looks an awful lot like a human brain.

Last year, as I described here, Dean Falk of Florida State University and her colleagues reported on a scan they had made of the braincase of Homo floresiensis. They compared it to the braincase of normal humans, of a human born with a congenital defect called microcephaly, and the braincases of other hominid species. Falk concluded that the brain did not belong to a human. While the Hobbit brain is small (about a third the size of a normal brain) it had several key differences in shape compared to the microcephalic brain.

In today’s issue of Science, a neursurgeon and two anthropologists from Germany published a "Technical Comment" on last year’s scan. The researchers had access to a collection of microcephalic brains, and they analyzed 19 of them. One brain drew ...

Hobbits again

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 13:08:32 +0000

Finally: more bones.

Last October the world marveled at the announcement of the discovery of a new species of hominid, Homo floresiensis, in a cave called Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores. One conclusion was more shocking than the next. First, this hominid stood only three feet high, earning it the nickname The Hobbit. Second, it lived as recently as 18,000 years ago, which was some 30,000 years after our own species had already been in southeast Asia for 30,000 years or more. The scientists argued that Homo floresiensis was a separate species that might have descended from Homo erectus of East Asia–which would mean that the last common ancestor of the Hobbits and us lived perhaps two million years ago.

Homo erectus fossils have been found on Flores, dating back 800,000 years. The oldest H. floresiensis bones dated back 90,000 years. The researchers suggested that during the intervening period Homo erectus on the island might have dwindled from about six feet tall to three. And despite the Hobbit’s distant relation to our own species, not to mention its small brain (a third the size of a human’s, and about ...

Look! Up in the Sky! Flying Hobbits!

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 15:22:09 +0000

In October 2004 Australian and Indonesian announced they had discovered a three-foot tall species of hominid, Homo floresiensis, that was still alive no earlier than18,000 years ago. As I’ve detailed in previous posts, this claim has inspired a lot of debate, much which revolves around whether the fossils, found on the Indonesian island of Flores do in fact represent a new species, or whether they were human pygmies. This week a new study was published in the journal Biology Letters (link to come) that puts this debate in the proper evolutionary frame. The paper is not about hominids, however, but about bats.

Before I get to the bats, let me dwell a little longer on these Pleistocene hobbits. A great deal of the controversy has focused on the one Homo floresiensis skull found so far, which held a brain less than a third the size of a human’s and about the size of a chimpanzee’s. If Homo floresiensis really does represent a separate species, then its ancestors may have undergone a drastic evolution, which not only shrank their bodies but also their brains. One hypothesis for the origin of Homo floresiensis holds that it ...

Return to Hobbit Limbo

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 15 Jun 2005 15:20:57 +0000

So let’s recap: It’s been almost eight months now since scientists announced the discovery of Homo floresiensis, the diminutive people that some claim belong to a new branch of hominid evolution and skeptics claim were just small humans. We seem to have entered a lull in the flow of new scientific information about Homo floresiensis. The last thing we heard from its discoverers came in March, when they published scans of the Homo floresiensis braincase, which bolstered their case that the skull they found didn’t happen to belong to someone with a birth defect. The skeptics have made various noises about evidence that the fossils are indeed pathological, and thus can’t be the basis for recognizing a new species. They have told reporters about their visits to pygmies who live near the fossil site on the Indonesian island of Flores. But they have yet to publish any of this in a scientific journal, where their claims could be put to some serious scrutiny. For example, you can’t refute the claim that the fossils are a separate hominid species by showing that living pygmies on Flores are very short. You also ...

Hobbits Alive?

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 18:20:06 +0000

The feud over Homo floresiensis, the little people of Indonesia, centers on whether they were an extinct diminutive species that evolved from some ancient hominid, such as Homo erectus, or whether they were just pygmy humans, perhaps suffering from some disease. The leading skeptic, paleoanthropologist Teuku Jacob, has claimed that there are pygmies living not far from where the fossils were found, on the island of Flores. I came across a short item at Japan Today about a scientific expedition to study the pygmies, which was based on an article in Kompas, an Indonesian publication. The original article is here, and my intrepid brother Ben, expert on Indonesian anthropology (cultural, not paleo-), did an on-the-fly translation for me, which I’ll run below. The team got back from Flores on April 25. While there, they went to a village called Rampasasa, made up of 77 families. About 80% of the people were pygmies. They measured 10 people who were a bit taller, with a height of 155 cm and 2 measuring 160 cm. Homo floresiensis was 130 cm. The researchers claim that these tall villagers got some extra ...

Trouble in Middle Earth?

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 16:54:54 +0000

I’ve been catching up on my online reading, and a couple days ago John Hawks offered this tantalizing hint that Homo floresiensis a k a the Hobbit may be a pathological specimen. Such claims have been made before based on the small skull of the hominid, but they’ve been pretty powerfully rebutted. But Hawks is claiming that the rest of the skeleton is sickly. He seems to be basing this contention on having seen the bones, and on research by others that will be coming out soon. Now, normally I wouldn’t put much stock in this sort of off-hand remark, but Hawks has been so good on his blog that I have to say I’m intrigued. Adding to my interest is the fact that he now retracts his suggestion that the Hobbit represented a very early migration out of Africa by australopithecines.

Stay tuned.