New theory of smallest human: Not a hunter, but eater of lizard leftovers
Strange 'hobbits' of Indonesia didn't hunt elephants after all, or cook them, says new paper, supporting theory of deeply archaic ancestry. How many hominins left Africa?
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Strange 'hobbits' of Indonesia didn't hunt elephants after all, or cook them, says new paper, supporting theory of deeply archaic ancestry. How many hominins left Africa?
Who exactly was Homo floresiensis, the strange miniature hominins that once lived on the Indonesian island of Flores? From whom did these humans, the smallest to ever exist, descend?
The riddle of their origin has been driving archaeologists crazy since their fossil remains were discovered in 2003. Initially, they were assumed to have descended from modern humans who reached the Sahel say 60,000 years ago and experienced radical island dwarfism. Then they were suggested as descendants from Homo erectus who shrank. A lot.
Then it turned out that Homo floresiensis had been on the island not 50,000 years, but over a million years. That's three times as long as our species has even existed. With us out of the picture, that left the erectus theory standing tall. Yet doubts persisted – it was just so small, so primitive ... but it used fire. Right?
Homo floresiensis, also known as Flores man and likened to hobbits for its short stature.Credit: Cicero Moraes/Wikimedia Commons
Homo floresiensis, also known as Flores man and likened to hobbits for its short stature.Credit: Cicero Moraes/Wikimedia Commons
Now new research that involved serving a beheaded goat to a Komodo dragon and a reanalysis of rat and other small animal bones in the cave suggests the erectus origin theory is wrong, too. The rat bones show that fire use in the cave wasn't associated with Homo floresiensis after all, but with modern folk who reached the island later, says an international team of researchers headed by Elizabeth Veatch of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and University of Tubingen with Matthew Tocheri, Thomas Sutikna and colleagues in Science Advances. As for the goat, wait for it.
Ergo, Homo floresiensis apparently ate its food raw, which argues against descent from an advanced hominin who hunted and cooked. It seems H. floresiensis was less a miniature representation of the Wonder that is We and more like a hyena, scavenging carcasses of animals that had been killed by the true alpha predator of Flores: the Komodo dragon, the new study suggests.
This somewhat less romantic vision of archaic mini-hominins gnawing on rotting lizard leftovers is based on a new analysis of animal bones found in Liang Bua, the cave on Flores where H. floresiensis remains were first discovered and set the world's imagination alight.
The limestone cave on Flores where the remains of Homo floresiensis were first discovered in 2003.Credit: Rosino
The limestone cave on Flores where the remains of Homo floresiensis were first discovered in 2003.Credit: Rosino
The way we weren't
Note that subsequent to the discovery of H. floresiensis, a different tiny human was found in the Philippines from at least 134,000 years ago. Also note that the hominins found in Dmanisi, Georgia from 1.8 million years ago may be widely referred to as erectuses, but they're also small-bodied and small-brained. Classic erectuses, they were not. What are we seeing? Hints that small archaic hominins were widely dispersed in Eurasia too, a very long time ago.
The initial suggestion for floresiensis' sapiens origin was colored by the mistaken belief that they survived on the island until 10,000 years ago. It was simplest to assume that their ancestors were among the first modern humans to reach southeast Asia, who then experienced extreme insular dwarfism, reducing them to just a meter in height.
Island dwarfism is a thing, and pygmy modern humans do exist; but they're four-plus feet tall, not three, and a key snag with that theory is that floresiensis' braincase was diminutive too – about orange-sized. Nor was its wrist-bone similar to that of humans, it has been pointed out. Ergo, at a glance in the midday sun, Floresiensis looked more like a chimpanzee than a dwarfed Englishman.
Moreover, they went extinct apparently 50,000 years ago. (Ignore reports that maybe they're still lurking out there until evidence appears – and there's none so far. Where's their garbage?)
H. floresiensis was roughly the size of a 4-year-old human.Credit: Emke Dnes/Wikimedia CommonsH. floresiensis was roughly the size of a 4-year-old human.Credit: Emke Dnes/Wikimedia Commons
Anyway, the hypothesis that these chimp-sized hominins descended from modern humans was shot out of the water by the discovery that Homo floresiensis had been on Flores for at least 700,000 years and apparently over 1.2 million – triple or quadruple the time our species has even existed. In fact, the hominins of Flores only vanished at about the same time that the Wonder that is We arrived in southeast Asia.
Did we meet and eat them? Out-compete them? Infect them? We do not know. Our species has no problem eating and outcompeting monkeys but a 2025 paper identified severe droughts on the island between 61,000 to 55,000 years ago. Both the hominins and animals would have suffered from terrible ecological stresses. Possibly when we got there, they were already dying out or were gone.
But if we were not its ancestor, who was? The next theory was that they descended from Homo erectus, that long-legged conqueror of continents, which spread from Africa to Eurasia starting at least 2 million years ago and who thronged Indonesia until some 100,000 years ago.
Then Rinca approached the corpse
No erectus remains have been found on Flores to date, but erectus could use fire and obtain elephants, so plausibly its descendants could too. That works out fine. What doesn't work out fine is that Homo erectus was big-bodied and big-brained, and H. floresiensis is very much not, insular dwarfism be damned – it was very small.
A replica of H. floresiensis' skull and teeth.Credit: Gerbil/Wikimedia CommonsA replica of H. floresiensis' skull and teeth.Credit: Gerbil/Wikimedia Commons
Yet in 2024 the paleontological pendulum swung away from mystery-archaic and back to erectus. An ulna found in another cave on Flores, Mata Menge, was the smallest adult human arm bone ever found. Theoretically, its size supported the archaic theory, but the researchers still supported erectus as floresiensis' ancestor based on jaws and teeth. One paper even argued that the small-brained H. floresiensis exhibited unusual expansion in the frontal polar region of the brain and, therefore, were capable of higher cognitive processing.
Lovely, but now the new research corrects wrong impressions. H. floresiensis didn't use fire, didn't cook rats and if its marks were left on stegodons, it apparently ate them raw.
Which leads to the hypothesis that Homo erectus was not the only peripatetic hominin that roamed out of Africa. Why not? No reason why not; and maybe they got very far, why not; they had feet; and maybe it is a small archaic hominin that birthed Homo georgicus in Dmanisi, Homo luzonensis in the Philippines and our beloved H. floresiensis.
Flores man, at least according to archaeological forensic facial reconstruction.Credit: Cicero Moraes et alFlores man, at least according to archaeological forensic facial reconstruction.Credit: Cicero Moraes et al
That is a very exciting theory – that hominins were trickling out of Africa maybe since the split from the chimp about 7 million years ago! Why not. They had feet and we monkeys are curious.
Then the new study nails it home by demonstrating who was the true alpha predator of prehistoric Flores: Komodo dragons. These lizards had "primary access" to big animals, leaving behind only low-utility elements for H. floresiensis to scavenge.
How do they know Komodo dragons were responsible for obtaining the island's stegodon elephants, not the hominins? Tooth marks. The dragon's teeth leave a distinctive pattern on animal bones, which the team proved (again) by feeding a headless dressed goat to a lady Komodo dragon named Rinca at Zoo Atlanta.
Life-size models of the now-extinct elephants that had tusks measuring 18 feet.Credit: Vjdchauhan/Wikimedia CommonsLife-size models of the now-extinct elephants that had tusks measuring 18 feet.Credit: Vjdchauhan/Wikimedia Commons
"The Komodo dragon slowly approached the carcass, smelling and investigating her next meal with caution," Veatch explains in a truly unique press release. "She then opened her mouth to latch onto the limb of a goat." She describes exactly what Rinca did next, which including rocking her head to "loosen the tissue, pulled back, and swallowed the first bite of her rather large meal for the evening."
How one dresses a goat for a reptile – anyway, "The goat was harnessed to a log inside the enclosure to ensure the Komodo dragon would not drag the carcass out of sight of the observers," they write. Indeed, that would have been terrible.
Then they compared the tooth marks on the bones with 3,155 randomly sampled Stegodon bone fragments from a layer associated solely with Homo floresiensis. They also checked 6,906 rodent skeletal elements from the floresiensis layer and from a Homo sapiens layer dating to around 11,000 years ago.
The island of Flores in Indonesia.Credit: Jakub HalunThe island of Flores in Indonesia.Credit: Jakub Halun
The bottom line is H. floresiensis does not exhibit the "arm, leg and foot" features necessary to run after and throw spears at elephants; the team doesn't think its behavioral repertoire was as diverse or as flexible as ours or that of Neanderthals. Their results suggest that "H. floresiensis was not as behaviorally advanced as originally suggested," the new team writes; and they stress that raises questions about its ancestry, which cannot be answered at this point.
"These behaviors have important evolutionary and ecological implications for the Flores hominins," Veatch said. "The fact that they survived isolated on an island until 50,000 years ago without needing to hunt or use fire to survive speaks volumes to the role that these hobbits played within an island (or insular) ecosystem."
Namely, after the reptiles had their lizardly fill, the floresiensises would get their chance to gnaw at the gristle.
"H. floresiensis clearly engaged in competition with larger predators like Komodo dragons for food," co-author Nico Alamsyah says, or at least with the flies that would also would have been attracted to the leftovers of the lovely lizard life of Flores. But it also does go to show that if we eschew inventing military-industrial complexes, human species – maybe very archaic ones – can get by in a closed environment for a very long time.
