Paleontologists have discovered a human hearth in the "hobbit cave" on the island of Flores, the presence of which suggests the possibility of coexistence of hobbits and humans 50 thousand years ago, according to an article published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.
“We recently learned that the 'hobbits' disappeared from the face of the Earth about 50 thousand years ago, and that the first modern humans appeared in Australia and southeast Asia about 50 thousand years ago. Our discovery narrows the time gap between the existence of the 'hobbits' in Liang Bua and its settlement by modern people,”said Michael Morley of the University of Wollongong (Australia).
Equatorial Hobbitania
One meter tall remains of ancient people, which the press almost immediately called "hobbits", were found in Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, and presented to the public in October 2004 by a team of paleontologists led by Michael Morewood, which included Morley.
Morwood and his colleagues announced their find as a new species, named Homo floresiensis. Initially, paleontologists believed that the Floresian people were the descendants of Homo erectus. Thanks to the phenomenon of the so-called "island dwarfism" over millions of years of isolation, these ancient people gradually degenerated and turned into "hobbits", whose brain was three times smaller than that of modern Homo sapiens.
The lack of new fossils has led many scientists to believe that "hobbits" were ordinary people who turned into dwarfs due to congenital deformities. Only recently have scientists presented convincing evidence that the "hobbits" were a separate species of people that appeared on the island of Flores at least 700 thousand years ago and disappeared about 50 thousand years ago, long, as it was thought earlier, before the arrival of man in Indonesia.
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Huge Neighbors
Morley and his colleagues found traces that, in fact, humans could have settled in Liang Bua almost immediately after the extinction of the "hobbits" or even before this event, studying the upper layer of sediments at its bottom. Scientists were especially interested in those layers that formed between 46 and 20 thousand years ago, at a time when no one lived in the cave.
Surprisingly, Morley's team was able to find traces of several hearths in these sedimentary rocks, which the inhabitants of Liang Bua could have used for cooking and heating between 50 and 20 thousand years ago. This radically changed the picture.
The fact is that the "hobbits", as scientists today believe and as the data from the excavations in Liang Bua show, where Homo floresiensis lived for at least 130 thousand years, did not know how to make a fire and use it. This means that 50-46 thousand years ago, people of the modern type, Homo sapiens, already lived in the Liang Bua cave.
What does this mean in the context of the possible interaction of "hobbits" and modern people? This discovery, according to scientists, in principle allows us to think about the fact that the first Cro-Magnons could contact the last "hobbits" during the colonization of Indonesia, both in the Liang Bua cave and in other parts of the island.
Of course, we cannot yet say for sure about this - to prove such claims, paleontologists will have to find unequivocal evidence that people entered Flores before the "hobbits" became extinct, and show that they really interacted with each other. Nevertheless, the very talk about the possibility of the neighborhood of "big people" and "hobbits" has now become a reality, Morley concludes.
Photo: Paul Jones | University of Wollongong
