Revealed, The Body of the Hobbit in Indonesia is Actually Very Tiny

JAKARTA – Species hobbit man who once lived in Indonesia turned out to be shorter than previously thought. Initially, scientists thought they were over 1 meter in size. However, in fact, they were 6 centimeters shorter.

This conclusion is based on a study of the remains of hobbit human skeletons found in 2003 on the island of Flores. The adult Homo floresiensis species that lived 50 thousand years ago is estimated to be only about 38 inches or less than one meter tall. Uniquely, this mini size turned out to be the key to the success of hobbit humans surviving for hundreds of years.

This miniature size also establishes the Indonesian hobbit as a much shorter species compared to similar species in other parts of the world.

Quoted from Ancient Origins, Wednesday (7/8/2024), in an article published in the journal Nature Communications, this conclusion is based on a study by a research team that reported the results of an analysis of teeth and bone samples of Homo floresiensis from an early Middle Pleistocene paleoanthropological site known as Mata Menge.

Located 70 kilometers southeast of Liang Bua Cave, where the hobbit fossils were first discovered in 2003, Mata Menge has yielded artifacts and skeletal remains dating back to ancient times.

The hobbit bone collection found there has been dated to 700,000 years ago, which is about 300,000 years after the H. floresiensis settlers are believed to have arrived on Flores Island.

Dating of the Mata Menge fossils confirms that H. floresiensis survived on the island for a very long time, only going extinct 50,000 years ago. Interestingly, the ancestors of H. floresiensis were not that small when they first arrived on Flores.

The species is believed to be a descendant of Homo erectus, a hominin that lived between two million and 250,000 years ago and was about the same size as modern humans.

According to the researchers involved in the new study, it was actually H. erectus that arrived on the island around one million BCE, and it was H. erectus that began to shrink in size after this migration. Within a few hundred thousand years, the H. erectus settlers had evolved into a new, very small species, which is only found in this isolated location.

“Having a big body and a big brain and being intelligent is not our destiny. It all depends on the natural environment, there are various ways of evolution not only for animals in general but also for humans,” said lead author Yosuke Kaifu, a paleoanthropologist affiliated with the University Museum at the University of Tokyo.