Discovery of tiny bone sheds light on ‘hobbit’ humans

The discovery of a tiny arm bone suggests that an ancient human dubbed “hobbits” only shrank down to their diminutive size after they arrived on an Indonesian island a million years ago, scientists said on Tuesday.

Much about the pint-sized Homo floresiensis has been shrouded in mystery since the first fossils suggesting their existence were found on the island of Flores in 2003.

These tool-using hominins are believed to have been living on the island as recently as 50,000 years ago, when our own species homo sapiens was already walking the Earth, including in nearby Australia.

From some 60,000-year-old teeth and a jawbone found in an island cave, scientists had previously estimated the hobbits were around 1.06 metres (3.5 feet) tall.

But the discovery of part of an upper arm bone as well as some teeth at an open-air island site on the island suggests some hobbits stood just one metre tall around 700,000 years ago, according to a study in the journal Nature Communications.

The bone was so small, that at first the international team of researchers thought it must have been from a child.

Study co-author Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Australia’s Griffith University, told AFP that it was the smallest humerus fossil of an adult hominin ever found.

The discovery could tip the scales in a heated debate among scientists about how H.floresiensis became so small.

One side argues that the hobbits -- nicknamed after the little heroes in JRR Tolkien’s fantasy novels -- descended from an already small earlier hominin which arrived on Flores around a million years ago.

Others believe that it was our ancestor Homo erectus, which were roughly our size and had spread throughout Asia, that became trapped on the island, only to then evolve into the smaller H.floresiensis over the next 300,00 years.