Published in Nature: New evidence suggests that ancient pint-sized humans discovered at a cave site on a remote Flores island did not, as previously claimed, co-exist for long with modern humans.
University of Wollongong researchers co-led the study, which revealed problems with prior dating efforts at the Indonesian cave site. Instead of the previously claimed age of between 13,000 and 11,000 years, the researchers dated the youngest specimen of Homo floresiensis, dubbed the ‘Hobbit’, at around 50,000 years ago.
This suggests that the Hobbit disappeared soon after modern humans reached Flores.
Homo floresiensis was discovered at excavations in Liang Bua in 2003. The bones of the diminutive humans were unlike any people alive today.
The tiny cave dwellers appear to have evolved from an older branch of the human family that had been marooned on Flores for at least a million years. And it was thought that this previously unknown population lived on Flores until about 12,000 years ago. This would have meant that human floresiensis had survived on Flores almost 40 millennia after the arrival of modern humans
But the site is large and complex and the original excavators dug only a tiny portion of it.
After years of further excavations, the order of archaeological layers is now better understood, and the researchers now found evidence that when the original team collected samples for dating the main layer containing Hobbit bones they mistakenly took them from an overlying layer similar in composition, but far younger.
However, the mystery of what happened to these creatures remains. But it is plausible that if they encountered modern humans passing through around 50,000 years ago, they were simply out-competed within a few thousand years.
In addition to the University of Wollongong, the research also involved Macquarie University, Griffith University and the University of Queensland. The international collaborators were from Indonesia, US, Canada, Denmark and Norway.