Analysis shows that the diminutive Homo floresiensis, died out at least 50,000 years ago, making competition with modern humans a likely cause

Ancient “hobbit-like” humans who lived on an island in Indonesia thousands of years ago died out far sooner than thought, and modern humans could have been to blame.

First reported in 2004, and officially named Homo floresiensis, the fossilised remains of the hobbit-like hominins were unearthed in the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. Just over a metre tall, the long-lost species had elongated feet and a brain the size of a grapefruit.



The original studies of the remains and the deposits around them suggested the creatures could have lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. But new research now overturns that idea, proposing instead that our long-footed cousins disappeared at least 50,000 years ago - and hints that humans might have played a role in their demise.



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“The new understanding of the dates make a lot more coherent sense in terms of the evidence of what we know about modern human dispersal,” says Matthew Tocheri, an author of the study from Lakehead University, Ontario. Over the past 100,000 years, extinction events followed modern humans wherever they went, he said. “It is not always the case the humans are the sole factor,” he added. “But they are often in the right place at the right time to at least be a part of the reason.”



The idea that Homo floresiensis was alive and kicking until 12,000 years ago arose from the team’s previous work. Carbon dating of charcoal remains in the cave suggested a range of dates between 19,000 and 12,000 years ago, while other evidence from the site pushed the dates further back - a tooth from a dwarf elephant-like creature, Stegodon florensis insularis, found with the remains was dated to around 74,000 years ago. When all the evidence was analysed, scientists concluded that Homo floresiensis disappeared between 95,000 and 12,000 years ago.

Since modern humans arrived in Australia around 50,000 years ago, the dating suggested that Homo floresiensis could have been rubbing its hairy shoulders with our ancestors for up to 40,000 years.

But the new research paints a rather different picture.



Writing in the journal Nature, the international team of scientists have revealed that new excavations and analysis at Liang Bua date the Homo floresiensis remains to between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, meaning that the species disappeared much earlier than previously thought.

The revelation came as the team delved deeper into the nature of the sediments forming the cave floor at Liang Bua. They discovered that the layers in which the fossils were found had been eroded to the north of the cave, producing a slope where younger material built up.



“They were unknowingly excavating a mixture of much older and much younger sediment,” said Professor Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.



As a result, the charcoal samples previously used to date the fossils were in fact deposited long after the diminutive creatures died. By analysing uneroded layers of the cave floor where Homo floresiensis was found, together with the remains themselves, the scientists discovered that the remains are far older than previously thought. Other evidence supported their conclusions. In the same deposits in which Homo floresiensis was found, the team recovered thousands of stone tools, said Tocheri, which have been dated to between 190,000 and 50,000 years old.

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While the new results overturn the notion that modern humans and Homo floresiensis might have lived side-by-side for around 40,000 years, the study raises an intriguing possibility. “If modern humans had reached Australia by 50,000 years ago, they didn’t jump over the islands - they would have been in south-east Asia a little bit earlier than that,” says Tocheri. That, he says, raises the question of whether the arrival of modern humans had something to do with the demise of their hobbit-like relations. “The timing of that, with modern humans potentially at least moving through the area, is quite suspicious,” he said.

Stringer agrees. “That population, we think, has lasted there potentially for more than a million years. So what changes? What changes is modern humans coming to the area, we believe, about 50,000 years ago,” he said. “It is probably economic competition - they are not necessarily conducting warfare or hunting floresiensis,” Stringer added. “But even hunting the same animals, eating the same plant resources, wanting to live in the best environments, that will remove the resources that the floresiensis needed.”



Whether or not modern humans turn out to be the guilty culprits of the hobbits’ demise, Tocheri believes the remains are a poignant reminder of our place in the world. “Even if they went extinct on their own they are an important reminder of how much diversity, morphologically, behaviourally and genetically, our human family has lost in the past several hundred thousand years,” he said. “We are the only ones remaining.”

