A reconstruction of a Hobbit face.
Susan Hayes, University of Wollongong
New bones, attributed to Homo floresiensis -- aka the "Hobbit Human" -- along with other recent findings, are helping reveal what members of this species looked like, how they behaved, and their origins.
The latest findings, described in a Journal of Human Evolution paper, are wrist bones, unearthed on the Indonesian island of Flores.
Since they are nearly identical to other such bones for the Hobbit found at the site, they refute claims H. floresiensis never existed.
"The tiny people from Flores were not simply diseased modern humans," Caley Orr, lead author of the paper, says.
"The new species of human stood approximately 3' 6" tall, giving it its nickname 'The Hobbit'," continues Orr, an assistant professor in the Department of Anatomy at Midwestern University.
He says they were "similar to modern humans, in many respects".
He explains; they walked on two legs, had small canine teeth, and lived what appears to have been an iconic "cave man" lifestyle.
"Stone tools, and evidence of fire use, were found in the cave, along with the remains of butchered animals, like Stegodon (an extinct elephant relative), indicating meat was a part of the diet," Orr says.
He and his colleagues, also point out the differences between the Hobbit individuals and modern humans.
The Hobbits had arms longer than their legs, giving them a slightly ape-like structure.
Their skulls had no bony chins, so their faces had more of an oval shape.
Foreheads sloped, the inferred brain size was tiny, putting them in the IQ range of chimpanzees.
"Remarkably, the feet were also long, relative to the legs, as fantasy fans might expect of a Hobbit," he adds.
Hobbits' wrists looked like those of early human relatives, like Australopithecus, but the key ancestral candidate, is Homo erectus, "Upright Man".
It is possible a population of H. erectus became stranded on the Indonesian island, and dwarfed there, over time.
Orr says "this sometimes happens to larger animals who adapt to small island environments."
A problem is, H. erectus is somewhat more modern looking than the Hobbit, so researchers are still seeking more clues.
Another question concerns whether or not the Hobbits ever mated with modern humans.
There is evidence it happened to Neanderthals, which left traces of their genome in modern human DNA.
So far, conditions have not been right to extract DNA from H. floresiensis bones.
Nonetheless, the Hobbit -- which went extinct relatively recently, during the Pleistocene -- is now better known due to the new discoveries.
"These fossils provide further, clear evidence H. floresiensis is in no way a pathological modern human, or its primitive morphology is related simply to its small body size," says Tracy Kivell, a paleoanthropologist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
"Instead, it is clearly its own, unique, and very intriguing species."
Kivell adds, "What is particularly interesting is, H. floresiensis is associated with such a long, well-documented history of stone tools.
Its primitive hand and wrist were, still, apparently capable of making and using stone tools, suggesting H. floresiensis solved the morphological and manipulative demands of tool-making and tool-use in a different way from Neanderthals and ourselves."
Orr and his team continue to study the Hobbit humans, with at least one other paper about the interesting species in the works.
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