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Experts split over human Hobbit remains

Hobbit bones

The major bones of the Hobbit laid out in the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology, Jakarta (Image: Mike Morwood)

The newly discovered Hobbit-like humans were not intelligent enough to have made the tools found with them, says an expert in human evolution. And they behaved more like chimpanzees.

Professor Colin Groves of the Australian National University said so after studying pictures of the tools excavated with the newly-discovered hominid Homo floresiensis.

Groves said the find, announced by Australian and Indonesian scientists in the journal Nature yesterday, was "the discovery of the century".

But his main concern was the size and sophistication of the tools. He said as the tools were up to 12 centimetres long they would have been too big for the metre-high Hobbits to have made and used, as the researchers had suggested.

"It is very worrying that these tiny little things with their tiny little cranial capacities were making and hafting [attaching a handle to] large complex flaked stone artefacts," Groves told ABC Science Online.

He said the tools were comparable in size to the tools made by H. sapiens found in Australia and other parts of Southeast Asia.

"Little people you'd expect would make little tools," he said. "Something with a cranial capacity of 300 cubic centimetres I'd say would make the sort of ad hoc tools that chimpanzees do."

He said the Hobbits also had other features that suggested they would have behaved more like chimpanzees than humans.

He said the earhole, palate, pelvis, tibia and femur of the Hobbit were more similar to another type of early human, Australopithecus, than Homo.

Where did Hobbits come from?

Groves also challenged the idea that H. floresiensis was a dwarf descendent of H. erectus, as suggested by the Australian-Indonesian team.

He said the brain size of H. floresiensis was too small. Instead he said it was probably descended from an ancestor somewhere between Australopithecus and Homo.

"This thing is more primitive than H. ergaster [the common ancestor of H. sapiens and H. erectus who lived in Africa around two million years ago] and possibly more primitive than H. habilis."

Leader of the team that made the Hobbit discovery, Associate Professor Michael Morwood, from the University of New England, said he also first thought the sophisticated tools had been made by modern humans.

"I just thought they're just so sophisticated; we've got blade technology, we've got a range of flaking techniques. This must be modern humans," he told ABC Science Online.

But he said there was no evidence of modern humans throughout the Hobbit site, dating from 95,000 to 13,000 years ago.

"The earliest evidence we've got for modern humans at that site is 11,000 and there is absolutely no evidence for overlap between the two species."

It's the association between the tools, the Hobbits and evidence for hunting the Stegodon pygmy elephant that formed his main argument for why the Hobbits made the tools.

"Some of the stone artefacts were literally inside the jaws and inside the skulls of Stegodon that were being butchered," he said.

Morwood also said the tools found with the Hobbits were more complex than most Australian and Southeast Asia stone artefacts.

He said modern humans didn't appear in the deposits until much later, around the time of a major volcanic eruption 12,000 years ago. At that time evidence of Stegodon disappeared and the tools became more like Australian stone artefacts, he said.

"So unless you've got biased preconceptions, clearly H. floresiensis is associated with this very distinctive Pleistocene stone artefacts," Morwood said.

But Groves was not convinced by the argument that Hobbits made the tools just because no remains of modern humans were found.

"There's all sorts of reasons why you don't find things," he said. H. sapiens could have lived and have been buried elsewhere.

He suggested that the tools may have been made by H. sapiens who could well have been around in Flores at the time, en route to Australia, where they have been for at least 50,000 years. H. sapiens could have made the tools and hunted Stegodons and even Hobbits themselves, he said.

Morwood said it was the team's top priority next year to start looking at other sites on Flores.

Tags: archaeology, computers-and-technology, palaeontology