Hobbits Really Existed

In 2003, some fossils were found on the Indonesian island of Flores. When pieced together, they seemed to form tiny humans, standing only 3 feet tall, with a likely weight of 65 pounds. Dubbed "Homo floresiensis" by the scientists (and "Hobbits" by fans of the creatures), the remains date back 18,000 years. They have been the center of a debate, which two new studies in Nature seek to resolve.

The so-called Hobbit seems in many ways to be a tiny descendant of Homo erectus, the ancient predecessor to Homo sapiens, or modern-day humans. However, detractors have claimed that the chimpanzee-sized brain, about a third of the size of a human's, was too small for the Hobbit to have been descended from Homo erectus. The claim was that a process called insular dwarfing, an evolutionary shrinking of the creature only on the island, would not account for such a disproportionately small brain.

William Jungers, along with his team at Stoney Brook University on Long Island, has just published his study of the Hobbit in Nature. Their study of the Hobbit's foot concluded that, while the joints and toes might seem more human than ape, the foot itself was more primitively constructed than fossils found that were over 1.5 million years old. Since reverse evolution is highly unlikely, Jungers concluded that the Hobbit descended from a more primitive humanoid creature, which isolated itself on the small Indonesian island over 1.5 million years ago.

The Journal of Human Evolution also published some corollary studies of the Hobbits, all of which has made the Hobbits' species officially a separate and unique one. The proposal they are making is that the Hobbits likely descended from an ancestor common to humans, Homo habilis, whose fossils date back 2.5 million years. Homo habilis is said to be the most ancient ancestor of Homo sapiens, looking least human and most ape-like of our proposed predecessors. A study in 2007 has even claimed that Homo habilis and Homo erectus coexisted, which would make the lineages deriving from both totally separate.

To keep things interesting, a new study of ancient hippos from the island of Madagascar found that insular dwarfing, the process by which most scientists agree the Hobbits became such tiny creatures, had indeed shrunk the brain of the hippos far more than previously predicted. As such, the possibility still exists that Hobbits descended from our ancestor, Homo erectus. Only more study of more fossils will solve the mystery.

First-Ever Casts Of 'Hobbit' To Be Unveiled At 7th Annual Human Evolution Symposium At Stony Brook University, Stoney Brook University