Tool-Making Hobbits

A recent study supports the discovery of a new Hobbit-like species that lived 12,000 years ago.

Courtesy of Kirk E. Smith, Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University School of Medicine Virtual model of the Hobbit's brain encased in a transparent image of its skull.

In 2004, the remains of ancient, Hobbit-like people were found on the island of Flores in Indonesia. The discovery was made by Australian archaeologists who claimed that these people represented a new branch in the human family tree and called them Homo floresiensis. Some hailed this as the most significant fossil discovery in a century, but a few scientists disagreed - claiming that they weren't a new species but merely modern humans with microencephaly, a congenital disorder that stunts brain growth.

Recently, a team of researchers from Australian National University lead by Adam Brumm published a paper in Nature supporting the view that the Hobbit is a new species. They have linked flint tools found on the island to the Hobbit species, showing that they were not humans with a brain disease but people with a unique culture and the ability to make tools despite their small brain.

This skill may have been passed down to the Hobbit from its ancestors. Homo floresiensis (who existed 70,000 to 12,000 years ago) appears to be the descendant of an unknown species that became isolated in Flores over 800,000 years ago and made stone tools. The large number of flints found directly associated with the hobbit are the same as those found at the 850,000 year old Mata Menge site in central Flores where their ancestors lived. "This suggests that hominids on Flores were making the same kinds of tools on the island for hundreds of thousands of years," Brumm says.

But there is some debate as to whether the tools are really the work of the Hobbit. Some scientists claim that the Hobbit and modern humans (Homo sapiens) could have co-existed on the island for over 30,000 years - and hence that the tools could have been crafted by our own species.