Surrounded by rice paddies on the Indonesian island of Flores, a limestone cave holds the only evidence of the 'hobbit' – a strange human that lived until 17,000 years ago.
It's a truly fantastic tale: more than a million years ago, ape-like humans walked out of Africa, through Asia and found their way across the rough seas onto Flores, a remote Indonesian island. The 'hobbit', the remains of which were discovered in a limestone cave called Liang Bua, would have stood at 106 cm tall (about the size of a five year old), with a brain around 400 cm3 (about that of a newborn baby).
Standing inside the enormous cave, it's easy to imagine hobbits here. The records at Liang Bua stretch back to about 95,000 years ago, and for most of that time the remains suggest hobbits hunted stegodons, a pony-sized elephant. Bones of Komodo dragons (still found on the nearby Komodo Island) have been found in Liang Bua but there's no cut or burn marks on the bones that suggest they were slaughtered, says palaeontologist Gert van den Bergh, from the University of Wollongong.
Following the disappearance of the hobbit from the records at Liang Bua, evidence for another wave of hominids - modern humans this time - begins from 4,000 years ago. At this time, the environment rapidly changed as animals were introduced and extensive tracts were cleared for agriculture, says Mike Morwood, the Australian archaeologist who revealed the hobbit in Nature in 2004.
As an archaeological site, however, there isn't much to see at the Liang Bua - just a few sticks in the ground, and roughed up dirt where the scientists refilled their digs.
Nevertheless, I'm surprised that I was free to walk into a site that is so important for the human story - and it seemed as though I could start digging too, if I'd wanted.
"No, you cannot just walk into Liang Bua and start digging," Morwood said, when I asked.
"It's a scientific reserve and has a notice posted at the entrance to that effect. And the gate is usually kept locked. And local people and an officially appointed site custodian all keep an eye on the cave."
While there was a sign - in Indonesian - that doesn't describe my experience. The gates were open. And when I stopped to ask for directions at a nearby town, I inadvertently collected a 'tour guide', who not only charged me 50,000 rupiah ($6) for a tour but also asked me to sign a visitor's book.
Indonesia does not have a good record of protecting such discoveries. In 2004, Teuku Jacob from Gadjah Mada University 'borrowed' the hobbit bones from Jakarta's Centre for Archaeology and returned them scarred and broken.
Liang Bua is not the only site on Flores with evidence of early hominids. To the east is Wolo Sege, where Adam Brumm and colleagues at the University of Wollongong uncovered 45 stone artefacts. As they reported in Nature in April 2010, the tools reveal that hobbits - or at least some kind of hominid - arrived on Flores as early as one million years ago (hundreds of thousands of years before anatomically modern humans emerged in Africa).
Wolo Sege also shows that extinctions were not due to the presence of hunting by hominids, but to two volcanic eruptions: one 900,000 years ago and another 17,000 years ago. The most recent eruption, 17,000 years ago, coincided with the disappearance of the hobbit. The only species that seemed to survive all of this, Brumm says, is the Komodo dragon.
Brumm thinks these sites are worthy of more serious protection. "I certainly think they could be given a World Heritage status, they are so important," he says.
The locals need to cultivate the land around Liang Bua and Wolo Sege for food, which means if they aren't protected they could end up as farms. "Reconciling the needs of the local people with protecting these sites is obviously a challenge," says Brumm.
Author: Jacqui Hayes | Source: Cosmos [Issue 33, June, 2010]