Tiny survivors
On the remote Indonesian island of Flores, the Ngada people tell stories about a group of tiny people who lived in caves: mysterious folk with long arms, oddly sloping foreheads, and lots of body hair. It's been easy to dismiss these as mere tales, like the yarns about elves, sprites, or trolls.
Then, last week, scientists announced that they'd apparently found a skeleton of one.
The adult woman, with a mix of modern and primitive features, stood a shade over 3 feet tall, with a brain only a quarter the size of modern humans'. She and her kind--researchers have found six others--lived in a fantastic world, using sophisticated spears to hunt pygmy elephants and fight off giant Komodo dragons. They seem most closely related to Homo erectus, our ancestral cousin thought to have lived between about 2 million and 300,000 years ago. But this woman lived only 18,000 years ago, at the same time and place as modern humans.
"I was completely gob-smacked when I saw the bones," says Bert Roberts, a geologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia and part of the research team. "We were actually looking for modern humans, so this was completely out of the blue. What this does is make us just another species of human, not the only one." Our recent family tree, it seems, is not a single branch but something closer to a bush.
"They've really done the job," says Philip Rightmire, an anthropologist at SUNY-Binghamton, appraising the find. "At first I thought the size was pathological, some kind of disease. But it's not. It's a tiny, dwarfish erectus." (It couldn't simply be a modern pygmy, he notes, because those small people have modern-size heads.) And the dating techniques used on the bones "seem pretty much bulletproof," says Paul Renne of the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California. The size and recent age prompted Henry Gee, the paleontology editor at Nature, which published the finds, to cheerily describe the new creatures as real-life "hobbits," possibly inspired by his new book, The Science of Middle Earth . His journal formally dubbed them a new species, Homo floresiensis.
"We've found a child!" Excavators on Flores stumbled upon the bones last fall. "I was back in Australia when I got a phone call from Flores," remembers Michael Morwood, an archaeologist from the University of New England in Australia. "They said, 'Hey, we've found a child!' . . . The next night I got another call: 'We've changed our minds. It's not a child. It's an adult woman. And it's definitely premodern.' The skull had a sloping brow and thick ridges above the eyes. And the arms were quite long."
But this was no knuckle-dragging brute, Morwood says. "We found cleverly made stone tools like spear points, as well as fireplaces. Scattered among them were bones of pygmy elephants, with butchery marks on them. We call them pygmy, but they weighed over 500 kilograms. You had to have your wits about you to hunt one."
The elephants and the Flores people probably got small for the same reason: isolation on a small island. Elephants are strong swimmers, but when they end up on islands, they shrink. There's limited food, so a smaller body size is a survival advantage. (A fossil elephant from Sicily is about the size of a large dog.) Larger erectus arrived in the area about 800,000 years ago. "But Flores is a cul-de-sac, and the little fellas got stuck and just got smaller and smaller," Roberts says.
Flores is not the only isolated spot in this archipelago north of Australia, of course. Given what they've already found, the team is now turning to neighboring islands, hoping yet more branches of our family tree will lie buried in their earth.
This story appears in the November 8, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.