Homo floresiensis v Homo Sapiens: Humans believed to have killed off hobbit cousins

[Judi Lynn]

Homo floresiensis v Homo Sapiens: Humans believed to have killed off hobbit cousins

Karl McDonald 15:53 Wednesday September 21st 2016

On the island of Flores in Indonesia, between roughly 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, there lived real life “hobbits”.

Homo floresiensis was about 3 foot tall and similar to Homo sapiens (that’s us) in a lot of ways. It used tools, walked upright and cooked its food – including the long-lost delicacy of Stegodon, a pygmy elephant – although its brain was significantly smaller than ours.
Why did Homo floresiensis, known as “hobbits” in the scientific community, disappear? A discovery by a team from the University of Wollongong, Australia, has shed some light on the prime suspect: us.

Human teeth

Some 46,000-year-old human teeth has been discovered in the cave of Liang Bua on Flores, where Homo floresiensis was known to have lived. Given that floresiensis’s usage of the cave seems to have stopped not long before, it’s beginning to look a lot like our species arrived, kicked the hobbits out and took up residence themselves.

Read more at: https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/science/humans-prime-suspect-making-hobbit-relative-extinct/

[Judi Lynn]

1. Human remains found in hobbit cave

Human remains found in hobbit cave


Ancient teeth make Homo sapiens the lead suspect in the extinction of Homo floresiensis.
Ewen Callaway

21 September 2016

A pair of 46,000-year-old human teeth has been discovered in Liang Bua, a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores that was once home to the 1-metre-tall ‘hobbit’ species Homo floresiensis. The teeth are slightly younger than the known hobbit remains, which strengthens the case that humans were responsible for the species’ demise.

A team led by archaeologist Thomas Sutikna and geochronologist Richard Roberts, both at the University of Wollongong, Australia, reported the discovery of the teeth in a talk on 17 September at the annual meeting of the European Society for the study of Human Evolution in Madrid.

The 2003 discovery of H. floresiensis puzzled researchers, in part because some of the remains were carbon dated to 11,000 years ago1–3. By then, Homo sapiens had colonized southeast Asia, and few scientists could imagine them having co-existed with hobbits for thousands of years.

But this year, re-dating work in the cave pushed the extinction of hobbits back to around 50,000 years ago4. Roberts, who led that study, noted that humans were known to be already living in southeast Asia around that time. “It’s a smoking gun for modern human interaction, but we haven’t yet found the bullet,” he told Nature when the paper was published in March 2016.

More:
http://www.nature.com/news/human-remains-found-in-hobbit-cave-1.20656