Researchers Discover Very Small Human Ancestors

Twenty years ago on an Indonesian island, scientists discovered ancient bone remains of an early human species that stood about one meter tall.

These early humans became popularly known as “hobbits.” The name comes for the small humanlike creatures that appear in books by English writer J.R.R Tolkien.

Now a new study suggests ancestors of the “hobbits” were even shorter.

Yousuke Kaifu of the University of Tokyo was a co-writer of the study. Kaifu said in an email, “We did not expect that we would find smaller individuals from such an old site.”

The discoverers of the first hobbit fossils named them after characters in the The Lord of the Rings books. The fossils date back to between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago.

Researchers found the new fossils at a place called Mata Menge, about 70 kilometers from the cave where researchers found the first hobbit remains.

In 2016, researchers suspected the earlier relatives could be shorter than the hobbits after studying a jawbone and teeth collected from the new site. Additional examination of a small arm bone piece and teeth suggests the ancestors were 6 centimeters shorter and existed 700,000 years ago.

Dean Falk of Florida State University was not involved with the research. Falk said that the researchers in the study have “convincingly shown that these were very small individuals.”

The findings appeared recently in the publication Nature Communications.

Researchers have debated how the hobbits – named Homo floresiensis after the Indonesian island of Flores – developed to be so small and where they fall in the human evolutionary story. Homo floresiensis are thought to be among the last early human species to die off.

Scientists do not yet know whether the hobbits shrank from an earlier, taller human species called Homo erectus that lived in the area, or from an even more primitive human ancestor. Scientists need more study, and more fossils, to learn the hobbits' place in human evolution, said Matt Tocheri of Canada's Lakehead University.

In an email, Tocheri, who was not involved in the research, wrote, “This question remains unanswered and will continue to be a focus of research for some time to come.”

I'm John Russell.

Adithi Ramakrishnan reported on this story for the Associated Press. John Russell adapted it for VOA Learning English.

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species – n. a class of individuals having common attributes and designated by a common name

site – n. the place point of an occurrence or event; the spatial location of something

character – n. someone who appears in a book, play, etc