Homo Floresiensis: An Update on "the Hobbits" of Flores Island

H.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbits were smallish creatures with many human features. Sometimes they were called halflings because they are clearly much like humans but also very different. They are some of the most popular characters in The Lord of the Rings and other works by Tolkien.

So imagine the surprise of the paleontologists digging about in a 12,000 to 18,000 year-old cave dwelling when they discovered the nearly fossilized and nearly complete skeleton of a three-foot tall creature whose anatomy was in some ways just what you would expect of a halfling hobbit! Who would have thought that an obscure Indonesian island called Flores would have once been inhabited by Hobbits? Eventually, during that expedition in 2003, the bone-collectors found the remains of several more such creatures.

Three of the most popular movies at that time were The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). It was inevitable that this new creature would be nicknamed "the Hobbit." (After all, the reason Donald Johansen's famous Lucy fossils got their name in 1974 was that while celebrating that find the paleontologists kept playing recent Beatle's albums. The favorite song they played was "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." and thus it was that Lucy got her name.) Lucy's official scientific name is Australopithecus afarensis; the Hobbit's official name is Homo floresiensis, but no matter what the scientists say those two landmark fossil discoveries will always be known as Lucy and the Hobbit.

So here we are in late summer 2009, and the paleontologists have been studying and writing professional papers for six years. They have been tussling and wrestling with one another as they try to decide where this interesting creature lies on the ladder, tree, or bush of evolution. To put it simply, although figuratively, for half a decade, guys and gals who reliably can tell a common stone from an extinct hippo's fossilized tooth have been trying to decide whether the Indonesian Hobbit is our ancestor, our brother, our cousin, or our first or second cousin. (Listen! Can you tell whether a quarter-sized bit stone is actually a part of the fossilized remains of a crushed T-Rex skull? The scientists who are studying this critter can do stuff like that on a regular basis.)

Clearly this three-foot-tall creature (depicted by a reconstruction at the left of this paragraph) with a skull the size of grapefruit is not our ancestor. Homo sapiens was already here before the Hobbit appeared. What appears to be the fact is that somewhere in the past, perhaps at the genus level, Homo sapiens shares a common ancestor with Homo floresiensis.

As far as I can tell there is no ironclad agreement among paleontologists about what species might be man's most direct ancestor, but over the years the number of species assigned to the genus Homo has continued to increase: Homo neanderthalis; Homo erectus; Homo habilis; Homo ergaster; and quite a few others. Half a century ago when I was in college, professors used to tell us that the fossil record was very sketchy and thin. Since those days, the number of hominid fossils discovered all over the world has increased by at least fifty times.

In case you have forgetten all your high school or college biology, let me put all this in plain English: The basic unit of life is the species. A species is a group of organisms who have a workable system of reproduction. If a boy one gets together with a girl one and they make a fertile offspring, then they are members of the same species. If the two critters can't make a live off-spring which is fertile, then they are -- willy-nilly -- members of different species. Obviously all living human beings are members of the same species. Whether we like it or not, negros, Mexicans, wild Irishmen like me, and all the other races of man are from the same species.

Some species are so similar that they obviously had a common ancestor and are grouped together in a genus. That means that all of the species in a genus had at some level a common ancestor.

The exact relationship we have with the Hobbit is still being debated by the experts, but we know this much is true so far. The Hobbits of Indonesia are our first or second cousins, perhaps even removed a couple of times. Welcome them into the genus Homo with caution. Distant relatives who show up without being invited are always a pain in the neck.

Please remember this as well: There are at least three dozen Ph.D. dissertations still to be written on the Hobbit. Ph.D. dissertations are also a pain in the neck. Candidates for doctorates can easily write 100 or more pages which easily could be condensed to a page and a half. Keeping up with this story requires me and you to plow through mounds and stacks of incomprehensible doctoral theses.

And, here at the end, Gentle Readers, of my uninvited diatribe, let me throw in this bit of Indonesian mythology. Modern residents of the islands around Flores have legends of tiny creatures with which they shared their islands in history. They tell stories about tiny old people who at night would creep into human villages from the surrounding forest and steal food or anything else that was lying around unguarded. I think that's way cool!