TV Program Description
Original PBS Broadcast Date: November 11, 2008
An ancient legend on the Indonesian island of Flores tells of
an elflike creature similar to the fictional hobbit of novels
and film. But a controversial 2003 archeological find not only
suggests that there could be some truth behind the legend but
promises to rewrite a key chapter in the human evolutionary
story. This program investigates the discovery, analysis, and
startling implications of the hobbit of Flores.
Known for its strange fauna, Flores may now have offered the
world the strangest yet. The hobbit was an adult female no
larger than a three-year-old child, with a skull less than
one-third the size of a modern human's. The discovery created
a media sensation. But only now, five years later, are
researchers beginning to make sense of this archeological
oddity, dubbed Homo floresiensis. Definitive proof of
its place in the human lineage awaits future finds, especially
DNA evidence, but the implications of the work so far are
intriguing and quite possibly revolutionary.
Dated at 18,000 years old, the hobbit's skull was found deep
in the sediment of a cave as big as a concert hall. In earlier
deposits stretching back as far as 95,000 years ago, the
researchers later found bones from a number of other hobbits,
as well as stone tools, charcoal, and the butchered remains of
pygmy elephants, implying that these tiny cave dwellers had
hunted and used fire. (The coleader of the discovery team,
Mike Morwood, answers
viewer questions on this website.)
Many experts believe such sophisticated behavior is hard to
reconcile with the size of the hobbit's brain, which is
smaller than a chimpanzee's. Even more astonishing, the
hobbit's anatomy resembles that of some of our earliest
extinct ancestors in Africa three million or more years ago,
yet it lived relatively recently and may even have survived
into historical times. (For more on our evolutionary tree, see
Who's Who in Human Evolution.)
But is the hobbit an anomaly, a modern human whose small
stature and unusual features are the result of disease? Or
could its size result from the "island effect" that often
causes large creatures to evolve to be small and vice
versa—witness Flores's extinct pygmy elephant and still
surviving giant lizard, the Komodo dragon? (Go to
Gigantism and Dwarfism on Islands
for more on this complex phenomenon.)
Or is the hobbit the sole testament to a previously
unrecognized branch of the human family tree? If so, how did
it end up in Indonesia with virtually no evidence of
comparable early hominids anywhere between there and Africa,
the root of the family tree?
This program follows each of the lines of inquiry down some
fascinating paths: At the Mallinckrodt Institute in St. Louis,
paleoanthropologist Dean Falk produces a cast of the hobbit's
brain with the help of a CAT scan, and then compares it to
casts of pathologically diseased brains. (Make the comparison
yourself in
Compare the Brains.) Falk argues strongly that the hobbit skull represents a
healthy, and so far unique, specimen of ancient humanity.
At the Smithsonian Institution, anthropologist Matt Tocheri
finds a resemblance between the distinctive wrist bones of the
hobbit and African apes. Even more surprisingly,
anthropologist Bill Jungers of the State University of New
York at Stony Brook discovers he can fit together bones from
the hobbit with those of the most celebrated fossil in the
human family tree, "Lucy," who lived three million years ago
in Africa.
In the nation of Georgia, archeologist David Lordkipanidze
shows NOVA a skull of a recently excavated early human that
has been dated to 1.7 million years ago. Could it belong to
the same unsuspected and elusive branch of our family tree,
halfway between early African hominids and the hobbit?
Each of these interpretations has specialists who read the
evidence differently. But the plot is definitely thickening in
the saga of Homo floresiensis.
Program Transcript
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