Newly Discovered Hobbit Fossils From 700,000 Years Ago Reveal Stunning New Detail

Jaw and arm bone fragments at an archeological site in Indonesia have revealed that humanity ‘s so-called “Hobbit” ancestors were even smaller than initially thought.

Knewz.com has learned that the first discovery of these humans was made when scientists dug out fairly recent remains dating back between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago.

The latest find, located 45 miles from the earlier one 20 years prior, comprised a bone fragment 3.5 inches long, initially thought to be from a crocodile .

It was later determined that the item belonged to a human arm and indicated that its owner – Homo floresiensis, who lived around 100 millennia ago – was likely 3-foot-3, making them 3 inches shy of their original height estimate (3-foot-6).

“Here, we report additional hominin fossils from the same deposits at Mata Menge. An adult humerus is estimated to be 9 − 16% shorter and thinner than the type specimen of H. floresiensis dated to ~60,000 years ago, and is smaller than any other Plio-Pleistocene [a period between 5.3 million and 100,000 years ago] adult hominin humeri hitherto reported,” the report in the Nature journal stated.

The discovery surprised the scientists, with Yousuke Kaifu from the University of Tokyo saying: “We did not expect that we would find smaller individuals from such an old site.”

The efforts and techniques employed to determine these individuals’ heights have convinced other specialists in the sphere.

Dean Falk, an evolutionary anthropologist at Florida State University confirmed as much when he said: “They’ve convincingly shown that these were very small individuals.”

The standing theory is that these short people hailed from the more primitive Homo erectus.

“The newly recovered teeth are both exceptionally small; one of them bears closer morphological similarities to early Javanese H. erectus,” the paper noted.

But the latter has not been cast in stone. Instead, there is an ongoing debate on how these early members of the human race, named after the remote Indonesian island of Flores, evolved to be so small.

An anthropologist at Canada ‘s Lakehead University, Matt Tocheri, confirmed the latter when he said:

Scientists do not “yet know whether the hobbits shrank” from the “earlier, taller Homo erectus” who lived in the same proximity, or whether their progenitors were even more primitive.

“This question remains unanswered and will continue to be a focus of research for some time to come,”  Tocheri said.

The study published in the journal, Nature , touched on the first artifacts examined in 2003, saying:

“Previous investigations at Mata Menge, Flores Island, Indonesia, [where the archeological dig is located] suggested that the early Middle Pleistocene ancestors of H. floresiensis had even smaller jaws and teeth.”

The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History cast light on said previous investigations, writing:

“A joint Indonesian- Australian research team found LB-1—a nearly complete female skeleton of a tiny human that lived about 80,000 years ago—in Liang Bua cave on the island of Flores, Indonesia.”

“Although there has been considerable scientific debate over whether LB-1 (the holotype of Homo floresiensis) may represent a modern human with a disease or growth disorder, most scientists now recognize H. floresiensis as a valid taxon and a human species distinct from Homo sapiens (modern humans).”