Homo floresiensis – A million years old?

Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the ‘hobbits’ of human evolution, have been found only on the island of Flores, Indonesia, dating to 17,000 years ago. Are these fossil archaic humans the source of the Ebu Gogo legend on Flores Island and who was its ancestor? When and how did they get to Flores?

Everything we thought we knew about the hobbits is changing with the discovery of stone tools on Flores that suggests premodern humans were there a million years ago, at least 120,000 years earlier than previously thought. A research team said they found 45 stone tools in Wolo Sege in the Soa basin in Flores. Led by Adam Brumm at the Center of Archaeological Science in the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia, the researchers used new dating methods and found that the stone tools were about a million years old. “It is now clear, however, in light of the evidence from Wolo Sege, that hominins were present on Flores (a million years ago). This suggests that the non-selective, mass death of Stegondon sondaari and giant tortoise … could represent a localized or regional extinction,” they wrote in their paper.

Early on researchers speculated that “Flores man” was thought to be a descendant of homo erectus, who had a large brain, was full-sized and spread out from Africa to Asia about two million years ago. Previous stone tool discoveries showed that a yet unknown early human had arrived on Flores by 880,000 years ago, suggesting that this species might have exterminated some of the Flores’s indigenous animals, including the pygmy elephant-like Stegodon and giant tortoises, which both disappeared at around the same time. The new tool finds imply that some human ancestor, perhaps the Ebu gogo’s ancestors coexisted with these animals for much longer and their excessive hunting caused the disappearance of these indigenous species. “Whatever species made it to the island 1 million years ago, it was probably an ancestor of Homo floresiensis”, says William Jungers, an anthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York. And one has to ask are these proto-humans the progenitor of the Ebu gogo legend?

More importantly and more provocatively can the Ebu Gogo or Homo floresiensis still be alive in a remote corner of Indonesia? Stay tuned for more or go to the flores girl blog for new insights!