Evidence deepens row over 'hobbit'

Scientists have produced further evidence to support the controversial idea that a miniature species of human nicknamed "the hobbit" lived on a remote Indonesian island until it went extinct a few thousand years ago.

The latest study suggests that the metre-high creatures could make fairly sophisticated stone tools despite having brains no bigger than grapefruits.

Specialists are deeply divided over ancient bones found in a cave on the island of Flores which seem to suggest that another human species had lived alongside Homo sapiens as recently as 12,000 years ago.

Skeletal remains of the creature - formally named Homo floresiensis - suggested that adults walked upright, were only about 3 feet tall and, unlike modern-day pygmies, had a small head in perfect proportion to the rest of the body.

The most important specimen recovered from the floor of the cave at Liang Bua in Flores was of a complete skull although the bones of about eight other individuals have also been dug out and analysed.

The skull is so small that it can fit neatly into the palm of a hand.

It has a cranial capacity of just 400 cubic centimetres - about two or three times smaller than the brain of modern humans.

Sceptics have argued that a creature with such a small brain could not have possibly made the fine stone tools found at the same level in the cave sediments and presumably buried at the same time that H. floresiensis had lived there.

Proponents of the hobbit concept have suggested that the creature used the tools to hunt and butcher the miniature elephants, giant komodo dragons and oversized rats, whose remains were also found alongside the human bones.

However, just last month a team of sceptics poured scorn on the idea, saying that the skull belonged to a person with microcephaly, a congenital disease resulting in exceptionally small skulls and stunted growth.

James Phillips, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that it was wrong to suggest that these stone tools could have been made by earlier species of humans, such as Homo erectus, a creature that evolved more than 1.8 million years ago and had predated modern humans by many hundreds of thousands of years.

"These tools are so advanced that there is no way they were made by anyone other than Homo sapiens," Professor Phillips said.

Now, however, another team of stone tool experts has cast doubt on this judgement, saying that similar stone tools have been uncovered on the island that clearly predate the arrival of modern Homo sapiens.

Adam Brumm of the Australian National University in Canberra and colleagues report in the journal Nature that they have found hundreds of almost identical stone tools at a site called Mata Menge just 50 kilometres away from the Liang Bua cave.

They say the tools are between 700,000 and 840,000 years old - too old to have been made by Homo sapiens - and that the production techniques are practically identical to that used at Liang Bua just 18,000 years ago.

"The Mata Menga evidence negates claims that stone artefacts associated with H. floresiensis are so complex that they must have been made by modern humans (Homo sapiens)," the scientists say in Nature.

"Despite being separated by 50 km and at least 700,000 years, there are remarkable similarities between the stone artefact assemblage from Mata Menge and that found with H. floresiensis at Liang Bua," they say.

No human remains have yet been found at Mata Menge so it is not clear who made the stone tools found at the site but the scientists point to the only known possibility - Homo erectus.

They suggest that Homo floresiensis could be a direct descendent of H.
erectus and the knowledge of how to make the stone tools was passed down the generations to descendants who had evolved into a miniature form.

"Pronouncements that H. floresiensis lacked the brain size necessary to make stone artefacts are therefore based on preconceptions rather than actual evidence," the researchers say.

- INDEPENDENT