Archaeologists Unearth 700,00-year-old fossils of human-like 'Hobbits'

A team of archaeologists has unearthed oldest human fossils on the island of Flores in Indonesia. The fossils are expected to reveal key details about how the island got inhabited by human-like "hobbits" thousands of years ago.

The fossils were actually discovered nearly 10 years ago from a cave called Liang Bua on the island. At the time of the discovery, the scientists proposed that the fossils belong to an entirely different species of humans, dubbed Homo floresiensis.

The species was given the nickname "hobbit" after its 3.5ft stature. But the researchers did not know how tiny humans could actually be.

A different team of researchers also suggested at the time that the fossils could actually belong to Homo sapiens only and not to any other species. May be, they hadn't grown to their full size. However, the more popular explanation suggests that they might have evolved from other archaic human species called Homo erectus.

The scientists believed that Homo erectus might have arrived the island and undergone an evolutionary process called island dwarfing. However, there was not enough evidence to test this hypothesis until now.

For all these years, scientists kept looking for more evidence on the same island and finally discovered a 700,000-year-old teeth and jaw bone at a different Flores site called Mata Menge.

The study of the fossils revealed that Homo floresiensis or Hobbits are indeed a dwarf form of Homo erectus. The researchers suggest that the Flores human probably underwent island dwarfism to become so small. Other animals, including elephants, are known to undergo this process too.

Apart from fossil bones, the researchers also recovered stone tools from the three different sites across the island. A comparison of the tools revealed that they differ from one site to another, indicating the presence of two different species at different sites.

The complete details of the fossils recovered from the site have been published in the journal Nature.