Scientists Find Skeletons of Miniature People
By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: October 27, 2004

Once upon a time, but not so long ago, in a tropical island midway between Asia and Australia, there lived a race of little people, whose adults stood just three and a half feet high. Despite their stature, they were mighty hunters. They made stone tools with which they speared giant rats, clubbed sleeping dragons, and hunted the packs of pygmy elephants that roamed their lost world.

Strangest of all, this is no fable. Skeletons of these miniature people have been excavated from a limestone cave on Flores, an island 370 miles east of Bali, by a team of Australian and Indonesian archaeologists. Reporting their find in today's issue of Nature, they assign the people to a new human species, Homo floresiensis.

The little Floresians lived on the island until at least 13,000 years ago, and possibly to historic times. But they were not a pygmy form of modern humans. They were a downsized version of Homo erectus, the eastern cousin of the Neanderthals of Europe. Their discovery means that archaic humans, who left Africa a million years or so earlier than modern people, survived far longer into the modern period than was previously supposed.

The island of Flores is very isolated and, before modern times, was inhabited only by a select group of animals that managed to reach it. These then became subject to unusual evolutionary forces that propelled some toward giantism and downsized others.

The carnivorous lizards that reached Flores, perhaps on natural rafts, became giant-sized and still survive, though now confined mostly to the nearby island of Komodo; they are called Komodo dragons. Elephants are excellent swimmers; those that reached Flores evolved to a dwarf form the size of an ox.

Previous excavations by Dr. Mike J. Morwood, a member of the team that found the little Floresians, showed that Homo erectus had arrived on Flores by 840,000 years ago, to judge from the evidence of crude stone tools. Presumably the descendants of these Homo erectus became subject to the same evolutionary forces that downsized the elephants.

In a written commentary accompanying the article, two anthropologists not connected with the find, Dr. Marta Mirazon Lahr and Dr. Robert Foley of the University of Cambridge, say it is "among the most outstanding discoveries in paleoanthropology for half a century."

The first little Floresian, an adult female, was found in September 2003, buried under about 20 feet of silt that coats the floor of the Liang Bua cave in Flores. A team of paleoanthropologists headed by Dr. Peter Brown, of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, identifies the skeleton, which is not fossilized, as a very small but otherwise individual, similar to Homo erectus. Because the downsizing is so extreme - smaller than modern human pygmies - they assign it to a new species.

In a companion report Dr. Morwood, an archaeologist who is also at the University of New England, estimates that the skeleton is 18,000 years old. He has since found the remains of six more individuals in the cave, with dates ranging from 95,000 to 13,000 years ago, he said in an interview.

Also buried in the cave are a number of objects that illustrate how the little Floresians lived. There are bones of Komodo dragons, beasts 10 feet in length, and of an even larger lizard. The dragons can eat animals the size of deer, but as cold-blooded animals they are sluggish at low temperatures and not so hard to kill.

There are bones of the pygmy elephant, giant rat, fish and birds. There is evidence the Floresians knew the use of fire. And there is a suite of stone tools, considerably more sophisticated than any yet known to have been made by Homo erectus. The tools include small blades that might have been mounted on wooden shafts.

If the stone tools were made by the little Floresians, as Dr. Morwood believes, that is striking evidence of their cognitive abilities. Dr. Morwood says they must have hunted cooperatively to bring down the pygmy elephants. To conduct such hunts, and to fabricate such complex stone tools, they almost certainly had some form of language, he said.

This will be a surprising finding, if true, because the little people have brains slightly smaller than a chimpanzee and similar in size to Australopithecenes, the apelike ancestors of the human line.

Dr. Foley said he would not rule out Dr. Morwood's suggestion but noted that chimpanzees hunt cooperatively without using language. Modern humans are known to have reached Australia by at least 40,000 years ago and were probably in the general neighborhood of Flores at the same time, so it is plausible that they could have been the makers of the stone tools. "I think it's a big jump" to assume the Floresians had language, Dr. Foley said.

Dr. Morwood said he has found no sign of modern humans in Flores before 11,000 years ago so has no basis for associating them with the tools in the Liang Bua cave. Dr. G. Philip Rightmire, a paleoanthropologist at Binghamton University in New York, said he was convinced that the tools were made by the little Floresians.

"It's a wonderful demonstration of apparently 'archaic' humans adapting to the special conditions on Flores," Dr. Rightmire said. "I wouldn't have supposed that such small-brained people descended directly from Homo erectus would be capable of producing these artifacts, but the evidence is pretty compelling."

The new findings add to the rapidly emerging picture of Homo erectus, long overshadowed by the better-known Neanderthals of Europe.

Like the Neanderthals, Homo erectus generally disappears from the scene just before modern humans arrived in its territory. The little Floresians not only survived long into the modern period but, unlike most of the other archaic human populations, managed to coexist with them. They also demonstrate the adaptability of the human form and how readily humans conformed to the same pressures for pygmification that affected other island species.

Most of the extraordinary finds in paleontology have been surprising because they were so old.

"What's exciting about this one is that it's so late, telling us about the processes and patterns of evolution in a way that's deeply informative," Dr. Foley said.



Edited by - Indy11 on 10/27/2004 5:28:20 PM

I was wondering how quickly you'd post this up Indy.
Very exciting isn't it? 10 bucks says that the sapiens wiped them out.

I just LOVE this stuff!

I do take issue with article, however, in typifying homo erectus (a/k/a Peking Man) as the eastern variant of homo neanderthalis . Someone did a little bit too much speed reading on anthropology, I'd say.

Homo erectus is the immediate precursor to homo sapiens . Whereas
it pretty much is the consensus today that homo neantherhalis was a dead end and most certainly was not the same as homo erectus .

The other odd thing is that before this find, it was widely accepted that the average height of homo erectus (hence its name) was about 5' 10". Who'd-a thunk these guys could downsize to 3' at maturity?!!!

Wouldn't take much of a club to wipe 'em out.

wow if it weren't for the lack of spelling errors, gramatical mistakes and sheer length and in-depthness of this post, i wouldnt have believed it lol.(it is true right?)

You can run, but run fast.... 1 shot is all I need.

Interesting. Are they the genus that has recently been termed "Hobbits"?

Didn't Hobbits just eat loads of buttered cakes and biscuits?

<Edit>

OK. I protest too much. I guess you could say that neanderthal and erectus are cousins and they were sort of contemporaries to a point. And although it is true to that erectus disappears when sapiens emerges, they are rather more connected in most views as a line of progression whereas neanderthal, while intelligent, is seen as a dead ender with no direct ancestral connection to sapiens.

Edited by - Indy11 on 10/27/2004 7:31:11 PM

I read somewhere a couple of months ago that sapiens were thought to have been in direct competition with neanderthalus, and with our superior intellect we wiped their stupidity from existence.

I have as well and it is very plausible as there are somewhat "contemporary" finds of sapiens and neanderthal remains within geographic proximity of each other (in the Middle East and also in Spain) but there is no find, yet, of the aftermath of a pitched battle between the two. The likelihood of such a find appears now to be even slimmer as it looks like the neanderthals also looked after their dead.

Neanderthals may have been more intelligent than originally thought. First of all, the knuckle dragging stooped hulk image that originally was ascribed to neanderthal was based upon that first find. More recent analysis of that find and comparison to other finds indicates that the specimen suffered from a serious case of osteo arthritis and was advanced in years. Neanderthal's posture was as good as our own but they definitely were better muscled and more durably boned.

It is possible that rather than sapiens outwitting them, we out-adapted them.
Environmental change, loss of primary food prey, or whatever, may have had more to do with neanderthal's disappearance than sapiens' brainpower directed against them.

Just saw it on the news! Prett interesting stuff. Could it be there was a huge "pre stone age war" that wiped them out or something?

that would make the 1945 world war, the WW3.

we could relate this to LORT much. hobbits can be the floresians, the orcs the neanderthrals. humans the sapiens. there. all we need is the evil eye and the good guys.

Most interesting. Do you think this has any connnection to the shortness of Australian Aborigines?

___Corsair~MMIV
Truth, justice freedom and all that other nonsense

Well, if you mean that they are genetically related to each other directly .... if the finds on Flores Island are confirmed to be a variant of homo erectus then, no (it seems very likely that this is confirmed). The native Australians are homo sapiens like the rest of us.

If, on the other hand, the question is whether environment can influence the overall stature of a group of people, the answer vaguely is yes although genetics has as much to do with it as well (note the pygmies in Africa as an example of genetics rather than environment).

there are several parallels for this in other mammalian evolution, for example the pygmy mammoth remains found off the coast of Siberia. Isolated island communities do tend to go down strange evolutionary divergences and its not uncommon for a species to develop dwarfed aspects as a result of the limited space and food supple, as nature tries to balance out size and available resources.

i heard that the brain size was much smaller than homo sapiens, but this doesnt mean they were less intelligent, as their bodies were smaller in proportion. their teeth are the surest indicator that they were human and not apes, but apparently their hips and pelvis are very different in some important ways

edit - humans of course being apes, but you know what I mean. same genus as us.

Edited by - Tawakalna on 10/28/2004 1:27:05 PM

I've not been able to dig more deeply so I didn't know that there are some issues with the pelvis. Erectus pretty much looked like modern man in skeletal form, including the pelvic area. If the Floresians have pelvic differences from erectus then they might be a separate strain altogether.... which in itself raises even more fascinating speculations.