The found skull of the “hobbit” has radically changed the understanding of scientists of human history

Indonesian archaeologist Thomas Sutikna was battling a fever in a hotel room on September 2, 2003, when a colleague shared the news of what turned out to be a once-in-a-generation tells CNN.

Earlier in the day, a colleague’s scapula came across a tiny human-like skull embedded in sediment 6 meters deep at Lang Bua, a large cave in the highlands of the Indonesian island of Flores that Sutikna and his colleagues have been excavating since 2001. Suthikna’s fever immediately passed, and after a restless night’s sleep, he and his team set off for the site at dawn.

Scientists were delighted to find even more bones – some still attached to each other – in the same location in the high-ceilinged cave.

“There were leg bones, a hand, a tibia, a femur, grouped there in one context. Given the very fragile state of the bones, it was impossible to immediately remove them from the ground,” recalls Sutikna, now an archaeologist and researcher at the Indonesian Center for Archaeometric Research at the country’s National Research and Innovation Agency.

To strengthen the fragile exposed bone, he applied some acetone nail polish remover bought from a makeup store, mixed with glue the team had on site. The team then delivered the crushed sludge blocks containing the bones back to the hotel in a minibus.

Wahyu Saptomo, one of the field archaeologists who first told Sutikna about the find, recalls that they placed the clods of soil in their laps, the safest place during the bumpy minibus ride down the dirt road.

At first, the team thought that perhaps the tiny skull and other bones belonged to a child, but when Sutikna cleaned the fossil at the hotel, he saw that it had adult molars. Apparently, it was a completely new kind of human, a female with an amazing combination of features, who was only about 1 meter tall and weighed about 30 kilograms.

“We were all surprised by this fossil, because after cleaning it became clear that all the teeth had grown and were intact. The skull bones also showed that they were the remains of an adult and not the skull of a child,” said Sutikna, who later took the fossil to Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.

Now, 20 years later, scientists are still trying to definitively locate this enigmatic piece of the evolutionary puzzle. But the journey brought about by its discovery has led to revelations that challenge what is known about the human family tree.

The team and its international collaborators knew from the start that what they found had groundbreaking significance, and they worked hard to keep their discovery secret for over a year so the remains could be studied in detail.

When they published their findings in two papers published in the respected scientific journal Nature just over a year later, the results shocked the field of paleoanthropology and attracted a wider audience, making headlines around the world.

Dubbed the “hobbit” — the first film in the Lord of the Rings franchise just hit theaters in late 2001 — led by excavation leader Mike Morewood, a now-deceased Australian archaeologist, the Liang Bua specimen looked like something from the realm of Middle-earth from the movie, CNN notes.

The volume of his meninges, measured using mustard seeds smuggled in from Australia through Indonesian customs, was about 400 milliliters, similar to that of a chimpanzee. (The volume of the meninges of modern man is 1500 milliliters.) The legs of the prehistoric creature were short, with disproportionately large feet, and the arms were long, like those of a primate.

Initial carbon dating in sedimentary rocks put the remains at 18,000 years old, which was a startlingly young date, placing the previously unknown species closer in time to us than the Neanderthals. (The dates were revised in 2016, instead it was estimated that the Hobbit was between 50,000 and 60,000 years old.)

Liang Bua’s team named the species Homo floresiensis after the island where the fossils were found. (Two other names were considered: Homo hobbitus – but was discarded because it was believed that it vulgarized the find, and floresianus – rejected after realizing that it was translated as “flowering anus”).

The discovery cast doubt on the idea that humans evolved along a clear line from primitive to complex and highlighted how much remains unknown in human history.

“The pattern was just wrong in about five different ways and unexpected to the point where people thought it was impossible,” says Paige Madison, paleoanthropological historian and science writer who is working on a book about the “hobbit” called Strange Creatures to which there is no number”, which will be published in 2025.

Some human evolution experts have vehemently argued that Liang Bua’s bones belonged to modern humans with growth disorders such as microcephaly, a condition that results in an abnormally small head, small body, and some cognitive impairments. This claim sparked a fierce debate that took years to resolve.

The team that discovered the “hobbit” disagreed and put forward two theories. Most likely, according to the team members, their find was a dwarf offshoot of Homo erectus – the first human species to leave Africa and migrate around the world, the remains of which were found in Java and elsewhere in Asia.

The shape of the teeth and the morphology of the skull were similar, although Homo erectus was much taller. The researchers thought it was entirely possible that Homo erectus did what some other animal species living on the outlying islands did—shrank over time in response to resource constraints.

However, the tiny skull and chimpanzee-like carpal bones suggested that the “hobbit” was a relative of the small-bodied Australopithecus hominins best known from the famous Lucy fossil that roamed Africa over 2 million years ago. This potential connection raised the possibility that Australopithecus also once migrated out of Africa millions of years ago.

According to Chris Stringer, head of human evolution research at the Natural History Museum in London, the question of how exactly the hobbit appeared is still open. However, according to him, the idea that the “hobbit” was a sick modern man has been largely dismissed.

The subsequent discovery of two other relatively recent, small-bodied, brained hominins – Homo naledi in South Africa and Homo luzonensis in the Philippines – and the much larger Denisovans led to a wider acceptance by paleoanthropologists that there were many diverse human species, including several, that coexisted with our own species, Homo sapiens. Prior to the discovery of The Hobbit, many experts on human evolution believed that, in fact, only one kind of human evolved over time, with regional variations.

Matt Tocheri, Chair of Canadian Human Origins Studies at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, first saw casts of the hobbit Liang Bua around 2006 during a presentation on fossil preservation at the Smithsonian Institution. An expert on the evolution of carpal bones, he was immediately stunned to see that the wrists more closely resembled those of an African ape than a human, and this observation led him to believe that Homo floresiensis was more closely related to Lucy and her relatives than the smaller Homo. erectus.

In 2014, a partial jawbone and teeth of Homo floresiensis were found elsewhere on Flores called Mata Menge and dated to 700,000 years ago – well older than the original specimen. They were similar in size, if not smaller, to those found at Lang Bua, suggesting that the Flores hobbits acquired their extremely small body size by this early point, contradicting the idea that the hobbits were some sort of evolutionary dwarfs.

However, other experts argue that dwarfism may have manifested even more deeply in the past or on another island.

Tocheri noted that it’s also possible that the hobbit’s small stature is the result of sexual dimorphism – where the two sexes have different physical characteristics. The working hypothesis is that the “hobbit” from Liang Bua is female due to the wider shape of his pelvis, and it is not clear what a male hobbit might have looked like. Although over 100 Homo floresiensis fossils have been discovered to date, probably belonging to six or seven individuals, there is only one relatively complete skeleton and only one skull, which is the most informative part of the body.

Tocheri, who is now closely associated with the archaeological work on Flores, has an open mind. “There are still so many unknowns; we have to be very careful,” he said.