5 Interesting Facts About Hobbit Humans Found in Indonesia

JAKARTA – Homo floresiensis alias Hobbit Man absolutely real. Their remains have been found in Flores and several other places in Indonesia. They lived at least 17,000 years ago and are believed to still exist today.

Scientists discovered the first hobbit fossils, along with stone tools and animal remains, in 2003 in Liang Bua cave on Flores. The first specimen, a 30-year-old adult female about 1 meter tall, called LB1 — consists of a skull and skeleton, as well as a partial pelvis.

“The associated skeleton is one of the things that makes this specimen quite interesting,” said Mark Collard, a biological anthropologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. “We don’t have a lot of associated skeletons from hominins other than Neanderthals.”

LB1’s small stature gave the species the nickname “The Hobbit,” inspired by the small creature in JRR Tolkien’s books of the same name.

In addition to LB1, archaeologists have also found jaw and skeletal remains of at least eight other small individuals, according to a 2009 article in the Journal of Human Evolution. The small stature of these specimens suggests LB1 was no oddity.

Early dating of hobbit remains estimated they lived between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago. However, hobbit bones and teeth found at separate sites indicate hobbits were present on Flores at least 700,000 years ago.

How H. floresiensis relates to the hominin family tree — which includes species that evolved after the human lineage (of the genus Homo) split from chimpanzees — remains unclear. Some recent arguments suggest the hobbit specimen may have evolved from pre-Homo erectus hominins.

In fact, scientists are trying to learn more about the evolution of these hobbits, looking for clues, for example, about the ancestors of the hobbits on other Indonesian islands.

In a 2016 study in the journal Nature , researchers looked for such clues on the island of Sulawesi. There, they found stone tools that were estimated to be 118,000 years old, suggesting that several species of hominins lived on the island before modern humans appeared about 50,000 years ago.

The study’s researcher, Gerrit van den Bergh, a paleontologist and zooarchaeologist at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia, isn’t sure who made the tools, though there are three possible candidates: hobbits, H. erectus, and Denisovans, close relatives of Neanderthals.

Regardless of the debate about whether they still exist or are extinct, here are a number of interesting facts about hobbit humans as reported by Live Science, Monday (12/8/2024).

1. Physical Appearance

Based on LB1, experts estimate H. floresiensis weighed between 16 and 36 kg (33 and 77 pounds). Newly discovered bones and teeth from a separate site on the island of Flores suggest the creatures may have been shorter on average, standing 0.9 meters (2.3 feet) tall.