Did “hobbits” inhabit Indonesia’s Flores Island more than a million years ago?
It has been some time since we last reported on the “hobbits” of Indonesia—the casual term for “ancient” humans who left behind bones and tools on the Indonesian island of Flores. Scientists continue to debate whether the hobbits were, basically, otherwise “ordinary” humans affected by congenital disease or whether they were far more different—the latter view having given rise to the Homo floresiensis classification. Now, a team reporting in the journal Nature contributes a new evolutionary perspective on when the hobbits might have inhabited Flores and, consequently, what they may have been. The team, led by the University of Wollongong’s Adam Brumm, began by investigating the question of how long the hobbits or their ancestors inhabited Flores. The scientists studied dozens of stone blades that were buried on the island. The blades were all buried below a layer of volcanic ash that, by old-earth dating methods, was dated to slightly more than one million years before present. Ergo, t
