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New bones add weight to 'hobbit' theory

New evidence: The latest bones add weight to the new species theory. [File photo]


Stephen Hird: Reuters

Australian scientists say they have discovered more remains of hobbit-sized humans, which belong to a previously unknown species that lived at the end of the last Ice Age.

Professor Mike Morwood, from the University of New England in New South Wales, stunned the science world last year when he and his team announced the discovery of 18,000-year-old remains of a new human species called Homo floresiensis.

The partial skeleton was discovered in a limestone cave on the remote Indonesian island of Flores in 2003.

It was of a tiny one-metre high adult hominid, or early human, that would have walked upright and had a chimpanzee-sized brain.

Professor Morwood and his team said it represented a unique species of early humans that evolved to a naturally small size because of environmental conditions and the isolation of the island.

The island was also home to exotic creatures such as miniature elephants and Komodo dragons.

But critics suggested the small hominid was not a new species and was more likely a pygmy human or a creature that suffered from a form of microcephaly, a condition that causes an unusually small brain.

"The finds further demonstrate ... (it) is not just an aberrant or pathological individual but is representative of a long-term population," Professor Morwood and his team said in a report in the science journal Nature.

The newly found remains, dug up in 2004, consist of a jaw, as well as arm and other bones which the researchers believe are from at least nine individuals.


The scientists say a jaw bone reported last year and the latest one were probably from the same species.

Both share similar dental features and lack chins.

The new species, dubbed "Flores man", is thought to be a descendent of Homo erectus, which had a large brain, was full-sized and spread from Africa to Asia about 2 million years ago.

"Although the original skeleton is estimated to be 18,000-years-old, a child's radius (arm bone) was found in deposits estimated to be 12,000 years old," Daniel Lieberman, of Harvard University in Massachusetts, said.

He adds that if the remains are from a population of short microcephalic humans they would have had to survive a long time or been susceptible to a high frequency of dwarfism.

"Such possibilities strain credulity," Mr Lieberman said.

CAT scans of the inside of the skull found in 2003 suggest it was a normal adult and not a diseased or mutant species.

The brain could have been advanced enough for tool-making.

But Robert Martin, provost and vice president of academic affairs at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois is unconvinced.

"Whatever else is true, that brain is simply too small for an 18,000-year-old hominid," he told Reuters.

- Reuters

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