Indonesian 'Hobbits' 50,000 Years Old, Homo floresiensis Died Out Earlier Than First Thought
Published in the journal Nature this week, the group challenges reports that these inhabitants of remote Flores island co-existed with modern humans for tens of thousands of years.
They found that the youngest age for Homo floresiensis, dubbed the ‘Hobbit’, is around 50,000 years ago not between 13,000 and 11,000 years as initially claimed. The most complete ‘hobbit’ skeleton belonged to a young adult female that was only about a meter tall, and whose brain was roughly one-third the size of a modern adult female’s brain.
Recent discoveries suggest that the ancestors of ‘hobbits’ first arrived on Flores at least one million years ago. However, the identity of this founding population is a complete mystery.
“In fact, Homo floresiensis seems to have disappeared soon after our species reached Flores, suggesting it was us who drove them to extinction,” says Associate Professor Maxime Aubert, a geochronologist and archaeologist at RCHE, who with RCHE’s Director Professor Rainer measured the amount of uranium and thorium inside Homo floresiensis fossils to test their age.
“The science is unequivocal,” Aubert said.
“The youngest Hobbit skeletal remains occur at 60,000 years ago but evidence for their simple stone tools continues until 50,000 years ago. After this there are no more traces of these humans.”
Credit Griffith University
But the site is large and complex and the original excavators dug only a tiny portion of it. Years of further excavation has led to a much clearer understanding of the order of archaeological layers. It is now evident that when the original team collected samples for dating the main layer containing Hobbit bones they mistakenly took them from an overlying layer that is similar in composition, but far younger.
“This problem has now been resolved and the newly published dates provide a more reliable estimate of the antiquity of this species,” Aubert said.
But the mystery of what happened to these creatures remains.
Credit: Rosino
“They might have retreated to more remote parts of Flores, but it’s a small place and they couldn’t have avoided our species for long. I think their days were numbered the moment we set foot on the island.”
In the past decade, Asia has produced the 17,000 year old and highly enigmatic Indonesian Homo floresiensis (“The Hobbit”) and evidence for modern human interbreeding with the ancient Denisovans from Siberia.
Contacts and sources:
Deborah Marshall
Griffith University
RCHE is an initiative of Griffith University and is the world’s first academic centre specifically focused on the subject of human evolution in our region. Based within the Environmental Futures Research Institute, its mission is to foster research excellence through multi-disciplinary projects that bring together leading Australian and international scholars and institutions in the field of human evolution in Australia, Southeast Asia and elsewhere in the region.
Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2016/03/indonesian-hobbits-50000-years-old-homo.html
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Whistler Blowers, Insiders
50,000 years old huh?
How long ago did it die?
Great hidden history this, but your picture makes them out to be ankle height which is incorrect. They were the height ranging from a chimpanzee to the fictionous dwarfish oompa loompa.
Grrr Fictitious