Until about 60,000 years ago, the island of Flores was home to diminutive hominin cousins, Homo floresiensis (affectionately nicknamed Hobbits for obvious reasons), alongside Komodo dragons, pygmy elephants, and giant rats. The presence of hominin and pygmy elephant bones in the same layers of cave sediment initially led researchers to believe that the Hobbits had hunted and butchered dwarf elephants—an impressive feat for such a tiny hominin.
However, according to University of Tübingen anthropologist Elizabeth Veatch and her colleagues, it was actually the Komodo dragons that were the hunters. The Hobbits only showed up to scavenge what was left behind.
The study involved feeding a nearly whole goat carcass to a Komodo dragon at Zoo Atlanta. Researchers found that the marks on the Stegodon bones from Liang Bua matched those made by a Komodo dragon’s serrated teeth and head-shaking behavior. They also noticed that the zoo’s Komodo dragon went straight for the meatiest parts of the body, which happened to be the same areas where archaeologists found tooth marks on the Stegodon bones at Liang Bua.
Veatch and her colleagues’ findings challenge some of the assumptions we’ve made about Homo floresiensis—and about which hominin species was the first to venture into the wider world beyond Africa. The study may add an interesting angle to an ongoing debate about where Homo floresiensis came from and which hominins were the first to migrate out of Africa.
The most widely accepted origin story for the Hobbits is that they’re descendants of a species called Homo erectus, which first appears in the fossil record around 1.9 million years ago in Africa. Within a few hundred thousand years, Homo erectus fossils show up everywhere: the Levant, Georgia, China, and Indonesia. In Indonesia, it may have been scattered among the islands in isolated pockets that eventually evolved into separate species, like Homo floresiensis and Homo luzonensis.
However, stone tools tell a different story. Stone tools from two sites in China seem to be older than Homo erectus. At Shangchen, a site on the southern edge of China’s Loess Plateau, archaeologists unearthed stone tools from a 2.1-million-year-old layer of sediment. And at the Xihoudu site in northern China, stone tools date to 2.43 million years ago.
So either Homo erectus is older than we thought, or some other hominin species got there first. If that’s the case, then an even older member of our genus, like Homo habilis or Homo rudolfensis—species that anthropologists previously surmised weren’t adaptable enough to gain footholds in so many different parts of the world—may be the real ancestor of the Hobbits.
Veatch and her colleagues’ study, along with several previous studies of Homo floresiensis‘ anatomy and behavior, may lend some support to that idea. “Evidence for behavioral complexity in Homo floresiensis, including complex tool and fire use, have weakened considerably over time,” wrote Veatch and her colleagues.
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