© Smithsonian Digitization Program Office/Liang Bua TeamThe “hobbit” fossils were discovered in 2003 in the cathedrallike Liang Bua cave, on the Indonesian island of Flores.
In 2003, scientists made
a startling find in a remote cave on the Indonesian island of Flores: The skull and skeleton of an adult female hominin, a group consisting of modern humans and extinct human species, who stood only about a meter tall. That discovery sparked a fierce debate about whether the hominin—officially dubbed
Homo floresiensis but often called the "hobbit"—was a separate species or a diseased modern human. Now, many of the same scientists who made the discovery have radically revised their estimate of the fossils' age, based on an exhaustive new analysis of the cave's geology.
Instead of living 18,000 years ago, as they originally reported, the hobbit lived between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago—some 10,000 years before H. sapiens arrived in the region.That new, much older date range for H. floresiensis makes it "impossible to argue that it is a pathologically-dwarfed modern human," says Russell Ciochon, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Iowa in Iowa City who was not involved in the study. "In my opinion, this paper drives the final nail in the coffin" of that hypothesis.
A chief argument underpinning the diseased
Homo sapiens hypothesis was the original 18,000-year age of the fossils—long after
H. sapiens arrived in southeast Asia and Australia. However, that
18,000-year-old date was based on only a geological analysis of the fossils' surroundings and not on direct analysis of the bones themselves. And the complexity of the cave's geology initially misled the scientists, says Matthew Tocheri, a paleoanthropologist at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada, and a member of the discovery team.
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