The Ancients - Homo floresiensis: Early Human ‘Hobbit’

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

An extinct species of archaic human, Homo floresiensis has been discovered solely in one, very specific location - the Indonesian island of Flores. Nicknamed 'the hobbit' due to its diminutive stature (and discovery coinciding with a certain film franchise), this hominid is something of an enigma in the story of human evolution. Both amazing and confusing experts in equal measure since it's discovery more than a decade ago - have we been able to learn anything new in recent years?In this episode Tristan is joined by leading paleoanthropologist Dr Adam Brumm from Griffith University in Australia. Looking at how Homo floresiensis came to be so much smaller than it's ancestors, their role in human evolution, and Adam's own experiences excavating in the wilds - how has their discovery challenged our understanding of our own shared past, and what can we expect to find next?Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.For more Ancient's content, subscribe to our Ancient's newsletter here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. And in today's episode, well, we're going back to human origins. We're talking about another archaic human. We've done Homo naledi, we've

covered Australopithecus recently, but also Homo erectus, Neanderthals. Now we're talking about an extraordinary hominin that has been discovered solely on one specific Indonesian island, the island of Flores. It's been dubbed Homo Floresiensis and what's so striking about it is that it almost seems to be this dwarf species of human. It's incredibly small, so much so that it's been nicknamed the Hobbit. And yet, despite its small size, it was actually living on this indonesian island quite late in the story of human evolution within the last 1 million years it is a big enigma it has amazed but also confused many paleoanthropologists since its discovery more than a decade ago

now to talk through what we know about Homo fluisiensis, the latest research and what the current state of research is, well, I was delighted to get back on the podcast after a long break, none other than Dr. Adam Brum from Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. Now, if you remember Adam, then hats off to you because he came on the podcast very early on in the days of the ancients to talk about a striking discovery of cave art, 45,000 years old, discovered in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, which was dated to be the oldest known depiction of an animal in cave art anywhere in the world it depicted three warty pigs adam was our guest for that very special discovery episode and i've

always wanted to get him back on and this is the episode where he returns because adam has also done a lot of work on the island of flores around homo floresiensis. I really do hope you enjoy, it's always great fun doing one of these archaic hominin homo species episodes. And without further ado, here's Adam. Adam, wonderful to have you back on the pod, my friend. It is, it's been a long time, Tristan. It has been a long time, hasn't it? Last time was it 2021, early 2021, with that amazing cave art, rock painting discovery in Indonesia. But we're going back to that part of the world now, talking about a species of human, a little species, but a big

mystery surrounding it. Yes, correct. The Homo floresiensis, very exciting discovery made on the island of Flores in eastern Indonesia. Now, where in eastern Indonesia, set the scene for us, is the island of Flores? Flores is a small island located on an island chain, a few islands east of Bali. Most people who, when you mention the island, have not really heard of it, but they've certainly heard of Bali if not been there, especially Australians. But if you get to Bali and then hop a few islands to the east, if you like, you eventually reach this island called Flores. And it's located on the southern margins of an important biogeographical region known as Wallasea or the Wallasean Archipelago. And this is an extensive group

of islands that's situated between the continental land masses of Asia and Australia, New Guinea. So it consists of a series of long isolated oceanic islands. So these are islands that have never been connected to continental, any adjacent continental land masses and it's thousands of these islands and essentially this region represents the gateway to Australia. If you're an early human making your way from the Asian continental landmass down towards Australia, you have to pass through Wallasea and in some cases, probably through the island of Flores. So that's really interesting from the start, from what you mentioned there, because sometimes we've got islands today, I guess like the island

of Britain, which was originally connected to mainland Europe. But what you highlighted there, this seems important to stress, even a million years ago, Flores, it was an island. It was an island back then too. Yes, always has been an island. During the ice ages, when the sea levels were lower, Flores would have been connected to a couple of adjacent little islands that are now offshore satellite islands. But it's never been connected to either

the Asian landmass to the west or to the Australian New Guinea supercontinent to the south and to the east. So very different to a continental island like Britain. So a million years ago, Flores, it's an island, but have we got any idea about its ecosystem, what this island looks like so far back in prehistory. Most of the research so far into the ancient environment of Flores has been done in a part of the island, roughly in the centre. It's a large geological depression called the Soa Basin. And various paleoenvironmental studies that have been conducted in that region over the last several decades have inferred the existence of what at that time, a million years ago or so, around about 800,000

to a million years ago, would have probably consisted of tropical grassland savannah on the island. Not that dissimilar to what parts of the island look like today. Flores, I should note, is quite dry. It's quite a dry part of Indonesia. Most of Indonesia is high rainfall. Flores, I should note, is quite dry. It's quite a dry part of Indonesia. Most of Indonesia is high rainfall. Flores is located in quite a dry area. And we would have been talking tropical grasslands in this cell basin in the center part of the island. We have what seemed to be a lake or a series of lakes. Now there's nothing like that today in that region. Associated wetlands, certainly lots of volcanoes here and there. It's a very volcanically active island and always has been. And also that far back in time, there's a whole series of terrestrial land mammals that we don't have today that are now extinct,

at least on that island. And that includes a number of various species of pygmy stigodon. Stigodon are essentially a type of extinct elephant and you have the famous Komodo dragons they are still present in parts of the island but mostly now you'll find them just on the island of Komodo to the west these are very large lizards and also at that early point in time you had giant tortoises and a whole host of bird life so yeah it was a rich ecosystem located on this isolated oceanic island certainly important to highlight straight away because therefore what is the story behind the discovery alongside these really extraordinary fauna the discovery also of this amazing hominin species that almost no one seemed to see coming yeah yeah it was a

real yeah an amazing discovery made almost, yeah, 20 years ago, more or less, to this day, 2003, at least when the main discovery was made. And look, the story's been told lots of times before, Tristan, so I'm not going to repeat it in any detail. In fact, I'd refer your listeners to the wonderful book by Mike Morwood, Sadly Now Deceased, The Discovery of the Hobbit, published in 2007. And that really goes into a lot of detail about the initial discovery. But look, just a very brief summary. Leong Bua is a large limestone cave located in the west of Flores. Incredible site, just a huge, wonderful cave from an archaeological perspective. It had been excavated for quite some

time by, first of all, a Dutch Jesuit missionary, Father Verhoeven excavated it for quite a while, and then later an Indonesian-led team. But none of these previous teams had really dug below the depth of about four meters, as that below the surface, as that was quite dangerous to do. So everyone had stopped at that depth when they reached what they thought was bedrock, essentially the bottom of the cave. one had stopped at that depth when they reached what they thought was bedrock, essentially the bottom of the cave. So an amazing Australian archaeologist known as Mike Morwood, he started working at the site in the early 2000s, I think it was in 2001, with a team of Indonesian field archaeologists led by Thomas Sutikna, determined to dig deeper at this site. So they shored up the

trench walls and kept digging through that thick layer of rock at the bottom that had previously been interpreted as bedrock. And they punched their way through it, figured out it was just a layer of brufal blocks. And below it, they found this really deep sequence of clays with fossils and artifacts from extinct megafauna, stigodon, all these ancient looking artifacts, and really reached this sort of different world, if you like, below their feet. And so then they uncovered eventually this partial skeleton of what turned out to be a young adult female with really bizarre anatomical features. It was just this incredible, never-before-seen type of early human that they subsequently called Homo floresiensis, and at the time was popularly dubbed the Hobbit, owing to its very small body size.

They should recall that the last of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy had just come out at that time. And the team announced their findings. They presented this previously unknown, completely new human species to the world in the journal Nature in October 2004. And that set off just this massive media frenzy, front page news around the world, incredible find. Got to remember this was still in the time before Facebook and Twitter, yet it was still such a huge story. And then before long, this long and acrimonious scientific debate broke out among scientists as to the best interpretation of this new find. What you might call a pathology crowd emerged, a group of scientists who thought that this was not a genuinely new hominin species, but just a modern human, Homo sapiens, a member of our species that

had some sort of genetic condition that would explain its small size and various other bizarre features. It was quite a long and heated debate that went on for several years. Lots of scientists, I think at the time, sat on the fence and kind of waited for the dust to settle. But I think now most researchers in this field have long accepted that this incredible new fossil find really does represent this previously unknown type of human that lived on this island tens of thousands of years ago and is no longer with us today. That's the story, the standard story, if you like, of the hobbit. What are some of these defining features that makes Homo floresiensis such an extraordinary species?

The main specimen, if you like, is this partial skeleton of what seems to be a sub-adult female known to scientists LB1. She has this mosaic of very strange features. I mean, starting from the head, the primitive skull shape, thick cranial vault, the face projects forward, no chin. You've got a very small brain size, very small brain volume of around about 400 cubic centimeters, which is essentially one of the smallest omenid brain sizes known from the fossil record. A whole range of things down to strangely long arms,

weird shoulder shapes suggesting that they probably would have been poor throwers. strangely long arms, weird shoulder shapes, suggesting that they probably would have been poor throwers. The arms are so long that they're, you know, in proportion to the rest of the body that it's almost a bit like an ape-like body that she had in that regard, at least in terms of body proportions. Weird primitive hands and wrists that seem to be suited for stone tool manufacture, but also, strangely, for climbing trees, really uniquely adapted to tree climbing. And then, yeah, strangely, these remarkably long, really uniquely adapted to tree climbing. And then, yeah, strangely, these remarkably long feet relative to shin length, which suggests that the Hobbit probably would have walked in quite a strange way. I think I heard someone suggesting like

Ronald McDonald at one point. But look, overall, you're talking extremely small body size, around about 106 centimetres in total height. So these were taken together. These are very strange features to find in any individual hominid from the fossil record. And just to stress, so is this the only place in the world, the island of Flores, where this particular type of human species has been discovered? Yeah, look, currently Homo floresiensis has only been discovered in this limestone cave, Liangboa, in Western Flores.

The team that I work with, we've found a very small collection of much older hominin fossils from a site in the solar base in that part of Flores I told you about, roughly in the centre of the island. So this is about 50 kilometres, I think, to the east of Liangboa. This is an open site, not a cave. And we've excavated a small number of hominid fossils that date to around about 700,000 years ago. And they have features that we believe are Homo floresiensis-like. Okay, so there's unfortunately the remains are too few and too fragmentary to be able to reliably assign a species to these new remains. But they seem to

be from a creature that is rather similar to the hobbit from Liangboa, and we believe could have been directly ancestral to the famous Homo floresiensis. But apart from that, just these two sites, there is no early human skeletal remains known from anywhere else on the island of Flores. Well, let's delve into these sites that I know you and your team have done a lot of work on, if we focus in on almost the ancestry of Homo floresiensis and the origins of the evolution of this extraordinary hominin species. To start it all off, do we have any idea from any other sites, any rough estimate as to when either Homo floresiensis or the ancestor of homo floresiensis first reached the island of flores big question yeah as far as we can tell we're talking around a million years ago wow i know

it's incredible when you think of we're talking a million years ago it's almost impossible to imagine what the world was like then but so far the earliest evidence that we have known evidence for human occupation on the island, is at least a million years ago, based on excavations, the discovery of stone tools at a site called Wallosege. That's also located in this area called the Sol Basin, where we've been working for a long time. And it's an open air site. We first discovered it back in, oh God, during my PhD years in 2005. It's a site where we've excavated stone tools that are sealed beneath an ignimbrite, so essentially the deposit of a pyroclastic flow, so the hot ash cloud that comes out of a volcano during an eruption.

This is the deposit, for example, that buried Pompeii, that same sort of rock deposit. And so sealed beneath this ignimbride that we've dated to at least around about a million years ago, we have evidence that humans of some kind were on the island making stone tools, but unfortunately we have no fossils to go with them. So we really don't know who they were, but we do know that hominids were present on the island at least about a million years ago. And in fact, that seems to be the earliest evidence we have from anywhere in Wallasea for the presence of hominins. Do we know what these stone tools looked like? Should we be thinking really quite simple like or maybe more complex almost like the Acheulean kind of

technology that we associate with other species like Homo erectus? Yeah these are pretty simple stone tools I mean they require technical expertise and deep knowledge of stone tool manufacture to make I mean if you just start bashing rocks together, you're never going to produce anything like these artifacts. But in terms of the deep span of human stone tool technology, they're towards the simpler end, if you like. I mean, I'll get the cuts for saying simple nowadays, but they're technologically straightforward, what you might call least effort stone technology. So it's what they mostly picked up with these local river cobbles, usually of volcanic origin, of which there's no shortage on flores.

And they would use another stone or rock as a hammer to strike the edge of that other rock and that would knock off a sharp piece of stone that we call a flake. And then that flake itself would be used for cutting or scraping tasks. Sometimes they would do a little bit of retouching of the edge. They would sort of trim the edge of that sharp edged flake during use, I think, to resharpen it and to keep the edge in use. But generally we really don't see anything. Actually, you mentioned a shulian before. At Walloseghe we have excavated back in 2010, a couple of interesting looking artifacts that seem to have a little bit more, possibly a little bit more going on with them, if you like. These are large rocks that have been trimmed essentially on three sides to form what

archaeologists who are working on Acheulean sites in Africa would call a pick, an Acheulean pick, or a pick-like implement. And for those of you listeners who have some familiarity with Paleolithic archaeology, the Acheulean is this supposed cultural period that often associated with Homo erectus and Homo ergaster, during which hominins made these quite interesting looking, often teardrop shaped stone implements called hand axes. And there's been a lot of discussion about what these particular artifacts mean what they were used for and in particular whether or not they reflect the first real sign that early hominins were starting to impose form on their

tools if you like so they have this incredible symmetry to them in some cases and yeah the argument has been that this reflects this cognitive leap forward if you like in human evolution so we've got some artifacts that roughly fit within not these highly symmetrical teardrop shaped hand axes of vishulian fame but kind of the lower end if you like of that particular technology um if you found them in africa you'd call them pics but we've only got a few of them excavated at least a million years ago at Wallosega. You do find them sometimes lying about on the surface in the soil base and having eroded out of early deposits. But there's something interesting going on with those early tools. But pretty much for the rest of it,

it's all pretty straightforward and simple. But it got the job done, as far as we can tell. The reason I ask is these stone artifacts these tools can they shed more light on which human species made that water crossing to the island of flores some a million years ago and became the first humans to reach this island no short answer is no yeah it'd be great if they had a name a little name tag on okay, Homo erectus made this tool. Unfortunately, this is really not possible. It could be multiple human species. At this stage, the best evidence we have is the fossil record, the early human fossils.

And at least at Wallosege, we just don't have them yet. But you never know. I mean, we found them at, as I mentioned, alluded to before, we have found them elsewhere at one other site in the Sarl Basin. So it's possible that we, you know, and they seem to be the remains of some sort of homo floresiensis like creature so i suspect that it was the first ancestors of that hobbits that were making these tools at walosega but yeah we just need to keep looking and find those uh early million year old fossils spoken like a true professional my man in early human prehistory you know we don't know is absolutely a completely understandable and the right answer so many times.

Hi, it's Dan Snow here from Dan Snow's History Hit podcast. So we've got a massive conventional war on the European mainland, and there are ever more signs of climate breakdown. If you're trying to make sense of all the wild things we're living through, my podcast, Dan Snow's History Hit, is here to help. Our expert historians, thinkers and storytellers unravel the history behind the headlines, so you can navigate the news with confidence and clarity. Dan Snow's History Hit, so you can navigate the news with confidence and clarity. Dan Snow's History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. If we keep moving on, therefore, what is this other site that you just mentioned?

Okay, it's a site called Matamenge, and it's another open-air site in the Sower Basin. It's located only about 500 metres from Wallosege. And in fact, I should mention that the Wallosege site I actually found initially back in 2005 while I was excavating with the team at Matamenge. And I had actually, yeah, got lost. I was what you might call heavily refreshed, I suppose you would say, at a local village ceremony the previous night. You know, Flores is a place where there's lots of rituals and ceremonies which we attend. And I, you know, consumed lots of palm wine, which was offered to me probably unwisely.

And I was a little bit hungover while working on the dig site at Madame Engay the next day. And it was a little bit hungover while working on the dig site at Matamenge the next day and it was a very hot environment and you know during lunch I kind of wandered off to try to find some nice shady tree to lie under for a little while but got lost and was sort of blundering around this you know huge tropical grassland and going wandering down into all these various gullies I had no idea where it was didn't carry a GPS or anything in those days or a map. And eventually I sort of wandered down into this low point in the landscape where there was a kendang kerbau. And that's essentially, it's a natural enclosure that local people, local graziers use as a buffalo pen, if you like, a stock pen. So they'll put their buffalo inside it, wall one end and then you know keep them in there overnight and i wandered into this abandoned kandang kurbao and and saw all these

weird looking stone tools lying all over the surface these huge big chopper like implements older one like implements that i'd never seen before during the excavation at matamenge and i sort of looked up on the walls of this buffalo yard and there was some exposed strata in the walls that seemed to be from some sort of river deposit and then started to look at all these other interesting deposits and realized that these strange looking stone tools were eroding out all so yeah it was a really interesting site it was quite located quite deep down in the in terms of the topography of the basin. And in fact, below the level, far below the level, the lowest level at which we'd previously found stone artefacts

dating back to about 800,000 years ago. So essentially the lower you go in the topography of the landscape there, further back in time you go. So here we were finding these early, what seemed to be early stone tools. Eventually, you know, found my way back to Matamenge. No one had even noticed I was gone, actually. I kind of dramatically stumbled in like David Livingston, but got a team together, went back, excavated the site. And there we had eventually, after a long period of time,

we realized we had stone tools going back to a million, which was really exciting at that time. But the reason we were there at Matamenge, back in whenever that was, 2005, Mike Moore, one of my PhD supervisors at the time and co-leader of the team that found the Hobbit, almost as soon as that fossil, as the homophoresiensis came out of the ground, he was really interested to know where it had come from. And he'd been working already in the Soil Basin for several years prior to that, was aware of the presence of these ancient stone tools in association with the fossils of these extinct creatures

like the Stigodon, these dwarf elephants, and was certain that, or had this hunch that eventually, if they excavated enough of these sites, they would find the fossils to go with these very old stone tools and that would essentially provide some you know smoking gun evidence that would show us who the ancestor of the hobbit was so he sent me and a close colleague of mine Kurt Vandenberg as well as a group of Indonesian archaeologists led by Iwan Konawan to this site Matamenge in the Sower Basin and just said look start digging and then you know

hopefully you'll find hominid fossils eventually took 10 years of pretty serious digging in concrete like sediments and eventually we you know we started off small just with small teams you know chipping away at these sites and eventually realized that we needed to really increase the scale if you like of the excavations and we i think at one point we had over 100 people involved. Yeah, it took 10 years, but eventually in 2014, we found a handful of these little fossils and hominid fossils. And yeah, it's the only time anyone's ever found fossils outside of Liangbo.

It's a pretty exciting moment. And what do we know about these fossils? Can we say for certain that these also belong to Homo floresiensis? Or do they have slight differences, which suggests, as you mentioned, that they are a potential ancestor to homo floresiensis or do they have slight differences which suggests as you mentioned that they are a potential ancestor of homo floresiensis yeah the fossils i talk in an excited tone about them but you know you could hold them all in the palm of your hand and still have plenty of room for um but whatever else you wanted to put in there there's only a handful of them literally at this stage, a fragment of a lower jaw and six isolated

teeth. But, you know, when you have no other fossils from this entire region, they're, you know, they're obviously quite valuable. And these paleoanthropologists, these specialists in human fossils can tell you quite a lot from these few and fragmentary remains, quite an astonishing amount of data. So they've been analyzed by a famous Japanese paleoanthropologist, Kaifu, and he has studied all of the ancient hominid fossils all through Asia. He's studied homophoresiensis in detail, and he thinks based on the shape characteristics of a couple of the teeth that these early hominids in the Seoul Basin, around about 700,000 years ago, the fossil layer that we excavated from them. So

it's at least 10 times older than the almost complete Haemophoresiensis skeleton from Liangboa. Kai Fu believes that we have morphological traits that are most like Haemorectus in Asia, early Haemorectus, in fact found on the Indonesian island of Java to the west. So this is at least, you know, based on this very small number of fossil remains, is suggestive that we have some sort of dwarfing process going on with Homerectus, which was, you know, roughly similar in height to us. They were first hominids with fairly tall stature, similar to us. And it's thought that they might have got across the island of Flores, you know, perhaps a million years ago or so, and then essentially shrunk in size down to these

hobbit-like forms. And I should note that the fossils that we have from Metamengate are also quite small in size. For example, the jawbone fragment that we have, you know, scaled to the size of Homo frosiensis is actually slightly smaller than the hobbit, which is pretty amazing to think. So yeah, we have small size hominins making stone tools in the soil basin at least 700,000 years ago, is what this new evidence suggests to us. It's so extraordinary. And if we keep on that theory that it was Homo erectus that made that journey to Flores some a million years ago,

as you've highlighted, we don't know, but it is a potential theory from the evidence. it is a potential theory from the evidence. Do we know why these homonyms became so much smaller over the following 100,000 years? Well, yeah, there's quite a well-known, well-established biogeographical rule, which affects, governs to a degree, the evolution of animal species on isolated islands like Flores, which is known roughly as the island rule. And there's still debate as to exactly why this occurs. But the upshot is that when isolated on these small islands, small animals tend to evolve, tend to get bigger in size, and large animals tend to get smaller. We see that quite clearly with these elephant-like propocetians on the island, these Stigodon. In fact, on Flores, we have one of the smallest pygmy stigodon known in the world, Stigodon sundarii. And these were now extinct, obviously,

but they were really small. So, you know, stigodon would have been quite large in size when it first reached the island, but then it dwarfed down owing to this biogeographical principle known as the island rule. Now, it's quite well established, but this, you know, based on various studies of fauna on isolated islands but this is homo floresiensis is thought to be the first well is the first evidence that it also seems to have applied to hominins previously it was thought that humans that become isolated on islands would not be subject to these you know natural evolutionary processes because they have culture in a sense as a buffer from these natural processes. But at least in the case of Flores, it seems that if it is Homorectus,

if the theory is correct that the ancestor of Homo floresiensis is Homorectus, then it seems that they also shrunk down in size over time owing to this insular dwarfism. Are there other potential theories as to who the ancestor of Homo floresiensis was? Yes. The dwarf Homo erectus theory, if you like, is what was first published by the excavation team who found the hobbit back in 2004 in nature. But subsequently, there's been various arguments, including by the discovery team themselves, that the ancestor could have been an earlier and more primitive type of hominid than Homo erectus, a creature that was

small in size to begin with, roughly hobbit size, also with a fairly small brain size. Something, an early creature that the argument is that there would have been something rather like an Australopithecine or possibly even the very earliest member of our genus, Homo habilis, which are found at a very early period of time in africa and the argument there is that this very early primitive type of pre-erectus hominin that was small to begin with somehow made it out of africa i should note that creatures like this have never been found before outside africa anywhere between flores and africa so the argument is that this creature somehow got outside africa and found its way you know all the way down to Flores and reached the island a million years ago

or so, started making, you know, which would explain the presence of those stone tools on the island and then survived down through time, in fact, almost potentially to overlap with modern humans. It's an interesting theory and Debbie Argue has a great new book out actually called Little Species, Big Mystery. And she's one of the, it's a great book actually, one of the leading proponents of that theory, as well as the late Bill Jungers and also the late Colin Groves, two other greats of paleoanthropology who are involved in the Hobbit discovery. And they've made this argument that it's not homo erectus,

it's this earlier form, but that explains some of the bizarre features of the Hobbit. But yeah, look, I think at this stage, it's, you know, one of the obvious problems is that we just don't have any other evidence, you know, except for possibly Homo floresiensis for these Australopithecine or habilis-like creatures outside of Africa. So yeah, that's a fairly significant problem, I believe. But look, you know, at this stage, we really don't know until we have more diagnostic fossil remains, especially from these early sites in the Seoul Basin. We just really can't say. And I should note that this whole debate is scientists all arguing over the same anatomical features. It's looking at the shape of a bone and interpreting it entirely

different ways, which, yeah, it's kind of the way paleoanthropology works hopefully there'll be more finds in the future which will help us learn more about this enigmatic species on the island of flores before we really wrap up i must ask though if we go back to that cave site liam buang from the evidence that we currently have from the cave site but also from matamenge and wolosege. What do we know so far? What can we start to deduce about Homo floresiensis' lifestyle? That's a tough one at this stage Tristan. We know a lot about the stone technology. We know a lot about how they made their stone tools, where they got their rocks from, the particular gestures and methods they use for

reducing those rocks into usable stone tools. But then we don't really know what they were using those stone tools for at this stage. The analysis of residues on the edges of the tools or certain wear patterns is, we just haven't reached. There's been some studies on that, of course, suggesting some things, but definitive evidence is as yet elusive. The diet of the Homo floresiensis is also quite poorly known. There's certainly been lots and lots of skeletal remains of a stigodon, as well as other endemic animals from flores that are found alongside the remains of Homo floresiensis at Leongboa. But so far, it's not really clear the connection between the hominins and these animal bones,

whether, for example, they represent the meals, the leftovers, and, you know, whether they represent hunting, deliberate hunting, or scavenging, we just don't know. And it's the same for the cell basin sites, okay, these much older sites where we also have hominid fossils, albeit very few. We know a lot about their stone technology there, but we just don't know much about the rest of their behavior. So I think, you know, this is really crucial work the rest of their behavior. So I think this is really crucial work that needs to be done. And with time and with further research, hopefully we'll have a better picture of the lives of these early humans. As we completely wrap up, let's talk about the end

of Homo floresiensis question mark, because what do we potentially think happens to Homo floresiensis in the last 100,000 years? Oh God, yeah, we just don't know. The site is mostly being excavated now by a Canadian-based team led by Matt Tocheri, as well as with Thomas Utikna and the core Indonesian team. We've made some interesting new finds. For example, it seems to be the first evidence for the use of fire inside the cave, which based on their dating work is suggesting we first see controlled use of fire at around or any use of fire at around about 47,000 years ago inside Liangboa. And that's roughly coincides with at least one argument for when modern humans first

settled in that region around about 50,000 years ago, although there's now considerably earlier evidence for human occupation of Australia. But the argument is that we have modern humans arriving, you know, their presence is established inside the cave of Leonboe around about 47,000 years ago. Currently, there's no evidence for Homo floresiensis at around that time. So the suggestion is that we arrived and essentially wiped them out, much as we are thought to have done to the Neanderthals in Europe. There's been some claims, which you would have seen, which are quite interesting, about possibly the late survival of some sort of descendant of Homo floresiensis in parts of Flores. I mean, I'm talking late

survival to the point where they've made their way into local folklore beliefs of various people who live on flurries. And in fact, some claims made actually in a very interesting new book by the anthropologist Gregory Forth called Between Ape and Human, which is well worth a read. And there, you know, this is a detailed anthropological analysis of various folk beliefs pertaining to the existence of these small mysterious hominoid like creatures on flurries so you know i think they're interesting i think it's very unlikely that homo floresiensis survived much beyond the initial arrival of our species in the ice age you know 50 000 years ago or so i think it's certainly possible that they could have survived in remote parts of the island down into a more recent period but whether they then survived the initial arrival of the first Neolithic farmers on the island several thousand years ago,

yeah, it's unlikely. But Tristan, sadly, I think it was us that done it. It is extraordinary how, I guess, recent in the grand scale of things, Hummerphysiensis could have been alive on the island of Flores. To just think that, I think, is really mind-blowing. Adamblowing adam thank you so much taking the time to come back on the podcast to talk all about this because the story of homo floresiensis although it's still shrouded in so much mystery the whole discovery of it and the information we are starting to learn at the moment it is revealing such an extraordinary i don't want to say the word unique, but it is in the whole story of human evolution.

This one, it really stands out there as one of the great cases of this almost unique species on one of these islands and yet thriving for hundreds of thousands of years. It's an incredible find, Tristan. And I think we, you know, it's been almost two decades now. And I look back at it, you know, it's been almost two decades now. And I look back at, you know, reflecting on the discovery, it occurred to me that it's almost like the initial announcement was like the JFK moment of paleoanthropology, in the sense that hardened veterans of the field, you know, hardened paleoanthropologists and scientists involved in human origins research,

will often tell you stories about where they were and what they were doing the moment they first learnt of the announcement or the discovery of homo floresiensis. You know, they say, oh, I was, you know, yeah, I was driving back from so-and-so and, you know, this report came over the radio and I nearly drove my car into a tree or something like that. There's these yarns, you know, where I was and what I was doing at that moment. It was a real JFK moment, I believe, of paleoanthropology. And now we can look back and we have new finds, new incredible finds, such as Homo luzonensis, this other tiny-bodied, bizarre human creature, human species found on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. We have the remarkable new finds of Homo Naledi from a cave in South

Africa, another bizarre human creature that no one had ever imagined existed. But each time, it changes our understanding in one sense of the human evolutionary story. But it really was the hobbit discovery that paved the way for the acceptance of these extraordinary new finds. As the hobbit, it was a huge hullabaloo over the discovery of that creature. Now that the dust has settled, we can start to accept these other amazing breakthrough finds that would keep cropping up every now and then. Just looking forward to what's going to turn up next. Yeah, who knows where and what.

Well, exactly. Do you think it's almost certain that there will be more exciting finds found from the island of Flores about Homo floresiensis in the near future? Flores, yes. And other islands in the region, yes. There are thousands of islands in Indonesia, and the majority of them have never been systematically investigated for archaeological remains of this type. So there's a lot. Most of my work, as last time we discussed, is on the island of Siloesi, which is to the north, a large island to the north of Flores, the largest island in Wallasea. And there we have, again, dated stone tools, very, very ancient stone tools that almost certainly are pre-modern human in age and association. Yet currently there are no hominid fossils found with them. So we know that there was the presence of some form of archaic human,

or we strongly suspect on this island to the north of Flores. And in fact, there's a good case to be made that the Hobbit lineage itself came from Sulawesi and then that these early humans dispersed to the south to Flores a million years ago or so. So, you know, and we're still digging there. We're still searching for, in Sulawesi, we're still searching for these early human fossils, which, you know, and we're still digging there. We're still searching for, in Sulawesi, we're still searching for these early human fossils, which, you know, hopefully we'll find one day

or someone else will find, you know, at some point in the future. And I've spent a lot of time imagining what they're going to be like. Who knows? You know, no idea what they could be like, just something just undreamt of. So I'd hope to live for, you know, a couple more decades at least, touch wood, and I really hope to find something amazing or to be alive and witness someone else find it. Tristan, it's the excitement of archaeology, mate.

Well, keep in touch when you and your team do, because History Hip and myself will certainly be straight out there to watch your every move. But Adam, until that moment, it just goes to me to say best of luck. And thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today thank you so much tristan and i appreciate the invitation well there you go there was dr adam brum talking all things homo floresiensis aka one of the most exciting areas of paleoanthropology at this moment in time who knows what further discoveries will be made in the years ahead that's why it's so exciting that will reveal more about this enigmatic species of human that was on solely it seems the island of flores i hope you enjoyed the episode now last things for me you

know what i'm going to say but if you have been enjoying the ancients recently and you want to help us out well just leave us a lovely rating on apple podcast on spotify wherever you get your podcast from do it it really helps us as we continue our infinite mission and i mean infinite we're going to do it as long as we can to share these amazing stories from our distant past with you and with as many people as possible but that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.