When scientific discoveries are made, the stories behind them are often kind of boring. At least to
most of us. A scientist has an idea, finds a way to get it funded, and it just so happens to work.
Rarely ever does a single discovery cover a hundred years of history with a cast of characters
who are genuinely interesting in their own right. But that’s exactly what I’ve got for you today.
The most unexpected discovery of something that we would never have predicted to exist:
an incredibly small group of people who lived in an incredibly improbable place.
This is story of Homo floresiensis. My name is Riley Harnett, and this is The HEAP.
Okay so before I get into the story of its discovery,
you really should know what it is I’m talking about here if you don’t already.
We’re Homo sapiens, so Homo floresiensis is another species of human.
Of course, we’re the only species of human alive today, so unfortunately, floresiensis is extinct.
These people were found on the isolated island of Flores in Indonesia and the only one whose height
we can estimate stands at a whopping 3 foot 7 . If one were standing next to me today, they would
be at my elbows. Compare that to pygmy groups whose average heights vary between 4 foot 6 and 11
and floresiensis is about a foot shorter than people who are a foot shorter than the norm.
That’s a pretty big margin, but we can talk more about its skeleton later,
this video is about its discovery. It's one of the most dramatic moments
in human evolution research in the past 20 years, but it didn’t happen in a microcosm.
The lead up to its discovery is as interesting as the discovery itself.
First, we need to go back to the first Homo erectus ever discovered.
This also happened in Indonesia, not on Flores, but on the nearby island of Java.
In 1887, a Dutch anatomist named Eugene Dubois was really into the brand-new search for early human
fossils. Neandertals had just been discovered, and Dubois wanted to make his mark on history.
Darwin and colleagues had suggested at the time that Africa was probably the place to look,
since Gorillas and Chimpanzees seemed to be the most closely related apes to us.
Dubois didn’t agree with this, he thought Orangutans were our closest relatives.
The idea wasn’t completely fringe at the time, and coincidentally the Dutch controlled Indonesia.
So he does what any of us would do. He joins the military as a surgeon and goes to Indonesia with
his wife and newborn daughter to search for something that no one has ever found,
a bonafide early human fossil outside of Europe. And after four years of searching,
and lots of despair, he actually does it, he finds our very first Homo erectus, Java man.
If I was around in 1887 and you asked me to bet on this man succeeding,
I would have laughed until I died. He literally went halfway across the world on bad assumptions,
managed to persevere through four years of complete failure, and then, against all odds, does
it. Eugene Dubois deserves his own episode but the discovery of Java Man is important for this story.
It sets a precedent that other humans lived in Indonesia long before us modern ones arrived.
Flash forward 60 years later to 1950, the Dutch had lost control of Indonesia to the Japanese
in World War 2 and tried to reclaim it afterwards. Indonesians weren’t having that,
and after a bloody struggle to finally free itself from the Dutch, Indonesia is independent.
A Dutch priest named Theodor Verhoeven gets sent there nonetheless for missionary work.
This is what Father Verhoeven’s wanted since he became a priest in 1933. But he was stuck
teaching in the Netherlands then. When World War two broke out, he wasn’t going anywhere,
so he made the best of it, and successfully hid Jewish children from the Nazis.
Verhoeven had a masters in classics, but he also had a love for archaeology.
So upon reaching Flores, he did a little bit on the side. This didn’t always go well for him, he
spent a night in prison because the local police didn’t think he had the permits to dig . But he
went to two sites in particular that ended up being very relevant, Mata Menge and Liang Bua.
Mata Menge popped up on Verhoeven’s radar when the local Rajah pointed out some bones that were
eroding out of the earth. It‘s found in the So’a basin, essentially a hilly savannah overshadowed
by a few potentially-catastrophic volcanoes. Liang Bua is a gorgeous cave with a huge mouth
and high ceiling that was known to Verhoeven as an elementary school. Class eventually relocated to
an actual school, and Verhoeven thought it might be worth a dig . He found artifacts at both sites,
but at Mata Menge, there’s a pygmy stegodon in close association with those stone tools.
A stegodon is an elephant relative with tusks that come together very closely.
They’re of course extinct, and honestly it feels weird to refer to them as pygmies because
they still weighed 1200 pounds. But that’s only a third the weight of their non-pygmy counterparts.
Everything is relative, I guess. So Verhoeven sees these stone tools
mingled with these elephants and figures there must have been a rather primitive
people here when these elephants were alive. That Homo erectus from the nearby island of
Java was considered to be 700,000 years old at the time so Verhoeven publishes
this find and suggests that the likely hunters of these pygmy stegodon were Homo erectus.
He doesn’t get much support with this idea. There were doubts that he had even found true
stone tools, or, if they were real, perhaps they had gotten mixed up with the stegodon fossils.
Heck, no one even knew when stegodon last lived on Flores. As far as they knew, stegodon
might have persisted until long after modern humans had settled it. But most importantly,
while Java and Flores are close to each other, they were never connected by land and there wasn’t
any evidence of seafaring among Homo erectus. Java is currently an island, but it wasn’t always.
During ice ages, when a lot of water is frozen in glaciers and the sea levels drop,
Java becomes part of Sundaland, and roughly half of Indonesian archipelago becomes a peninsula.
The rest of it never connects to Asia, and the border between is known as the Wallace line.
This line represents one of the hardest barriers for land animals to cross on the planet. Beyond
it we see the Australian marsupials, which is all of them except for possums, who split from
their Australian kin around 80 million years ago back when you could walk from Australia
through Antarctica to South America. We also see the only egg-laying mammals on the planet, the
Monotremes. You know, Platypuses and echidnas. 15------------------------------------
Everywhere else on the planet, garden variety placental mammals reign supreme.
Some of those exist in Australia, smaller rodents that are capable of surviving the float down
under, but you get the idea, Australia hasn’t been connected to another large landmass since at least
50 million years ago , and the islands in between aren’t easy to reach without once
in a thousand-plus year luck or modern human ingenuity, even when the sea level drops.
So Verhoeven’s idea falls into obscurity in the annals of history.
If we had evidence of Homo erectus crossing the Wallace line, then he’d have a fighting chance,
but there just wasn’t any at the time. Occasional excavations at Verhoeven’s
sites of Liang Bua and Mata Menge happened over the next few decades,
but there weren’t any early human developments until Dr. Mike Morwood, an archaeologist from New
Zealand, goes to Flores in 1995 and confirms that Verhoeven had indeed found genuine stone tools.
Beyond that, Morwood goes to Mata Menge and dates the volcanic sediments above and below them,
and sure enough. Someone was making stone tools on Flores 800-900 thousand years ago. Long before
any of us Homo sapiens got there . Verhoeven’s intuition finally gets some evidence behind it.
But these stone tools are only the smoking gun, if you really want to convince everyone
beyond a doubt there was another species of human walking past the wallace line, you really need to
find a convincing fossil. Morwood’s interest in Flores isn’t exclusively to find early humans,
he’s also curious about when modern folk first appeared and began using agriculture.
So another one of Verhoeven’s sites, the cave of Liang Bua, seemed very interesting. This cave is
utterly gorgeous. It’s got a huge mouth, offers lots of light and Morwood himself described the
stalactites as giving it a “cathedral-like ceiling .” No wonder liang bua literally means cool cave.
I’m not making that up. This place is called cool cave. Cool as in the temperature though.
Anyway, this site had been previously excavated by Raden Soejono since 1978 who had dug
roughly 10,000 years deep and found evidence for occupation over a number of periods in Indonesian
prehistory with many modern human burials. Soejono is a big name in Indonesian archaeology and
like Verhoeven, protested against the invading axis powers in World War 2. During the Japanese
occupation of Indonesia, he climbed a flagpole to remove a Japanese flag. A Japanese soldier caught
him however, and Soejono was forced to make the hard choice to either get down or lose his life.
He chose wisely and later met with Morwood in 1999, eventually allowing him permission to
excavate deeper at Liang Bua in collaboration. The two began excavating in 2001 with a team
of mostly Indonesians. One interesting find early on was a weirdly shaped and smaller than expected
human forearm bone, a radius, but it wasn’t until 2003 when something undeniably important
experienced the open air for the first time in thousands of years.
The sediments in Liang Bua go meters deep, and one of the problems with digging so deeply is
that sometimes the walls of your pit start to crumble, and when you’re 9 meters down,
you really don’t want that to fall on you. So the team moved their focus to another area of the
cave. The field season was wrapping up and Morwood himself had left, when one of the local workers,
Benyamin Tarus finds what appears to be the skeleton of a child.
Even better, it had one of the most diagnostic traits you can find to be sure it’s not homo
sapiens, a short, sloping forehead. Our massive brains require a flat forehead,
but the orientation of a brain wasn’t always that way. These remains were very fragile and had to
undergo some preservation before they could be looked at further. So a few days later, one of
the team members got to look at the teeth. They were very worn from usage during this person’s
lifetime, and the wisdom teeth had erupted. This was not the body of a child, but instead the body
of a tiny, fully-grown, life-lived adult. The story around Benyamin’s discovery is
actually quite beautiful. His father dug in Liang Bua when Soejono excavated there in the 70s.
Benyamin was just a child and would bring his father lunch every day. He continues to
work on the excavation team, and his children now bring him lunch. You can only imagine how
significant this cave is to this family. Now here’s the thing, this excavation was
a collaboration between Soejono and Morwood. They both have different people they like to work with,
so after this discovery was made, Soejono wanted to give the fossils to Dr. Teuku Jacob. If Soejono
is the king of Indonesian archaeology, then Jacob is the king of Indonesian paleoanthropology.
They’ve been a one-two punch since meeting in World War 2. Which just keeps coming up in this
video with fun little tangents. Jacob worked in radio at the time and tried to convince
those listening to resist the occupation. Morwood doesn’t like this. He’s aware of
their history and more relevantly, that Jacob does not often publish on material in his collection,
nor does he allow access to fossils easily. Jacob is also 74 and retired,
so Morwood is worried that all the time and money spent in making this discovery
might result in these bones being locked up somewhere unknown and never being published on.
Or if it does get published, none of the original team would be involved.
This is not how this process is supposed to work, Morwood and Soejono had signed agreements
stating that any discoveries would be equally shared between their respective institutions,
the national archaeology research institute of Indonesia or ARKENAS for short,
and the University of Wollongong. And after a chat, Morwood and Soejono came
to terms on respecting that agreement. The find is published in Nature in 2004.
Soon after, it becomes a news sensation. It’s published in 7000 newspapers around the globe, and
spawns a few tv documentaries. Flores experiences a huge jolt in tourist activity. The AAAS votes
it the second most important discovery of the year. The first? The discovery of water on mars.
Yeah, I know, it was a huge upset. Crazier things have happened. 2004 also saw the Return of the
King beat out Sophia Coppola’s magnum opus, Lost in Translation, for Best Picture at the Oscars.
Now I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy theory there, but Hobbits were hot.
These are unexpectedly small people, in an unexpected part of the world and were originally
dated to only 12,000 years old. Unexpectedly recent. So recent that they would have ranked as
very likely, the last-surviving other human species. The dates would get pushed back,
but there’s enough about this find that’s so breathtakingly extraordinary that of course
it’s a media hit. It certainly didn’t hurt that the Lord of the Rings trilogy just came out
and then we find tiny folk with big feet. The idea that floresiensis should be nicknamed
after Hobbits wasn’t a hit with everyone on the research team. But you really can’t fight the
market on this sort of thing. The media has regularly referred to them as hobbits ever
since, but they probably shouldn’t keep doing this. These folk might be extinct,
but if they weren’t, I think they’d probably be a little displeased with the epithet. I don’t want
any parallel timelines to have hobbit be a slur. You might think that this is where the story ends.
The discovery is done, the history explained. I can now thank you for watching and walk off into
the sunset. But no. There is more drama to be had I’m afraid. Soejono and Morwood had that agreement
that their institutions would share custody, but now, after all this publication and fame,
Soejono decides to just do what he wanted to in the first place.
He gives the fossils to Teuku Jacob. Soejono might be retired but he still has influence at ARKENAS.
So he pulls some strings and makes it happen. Morwood is devastated. Consider the last 120
years of history. If you change anything, we might not be here. Dubois had to get lucky and find the
first Homo erectus. Verhoeven had to come across Liang Bua and wonder what secrets it might hold.
Heck, even Soejono needed to prove prior occupation in the cave before anyone like
Morwood decides to dig deeper. It’s incredibly unlikely for Homo floresiensis to have existed,
but it might be equally unlikely for us to have found it when we did.
Morwood knows this, and despite his best efforts, he realizes that this might be the last time
science-at-large has access to this crucial discovery and the information within.
Jacob however, doesn’t disappear into the shadows, instead he does a press tour. He argues that this
find wasn’t a new species of human at all. That it was an unimportant, everyday, Homo sapiens
with a disease, microcephaly. Furthermore, he accuses the Australian researchers of
“Scientific Terrorism” and states that they won’t play the role of sheriff any longer.
Not sure exactly what this means, but I think I understand the sentiment.
This story is intertwined with the history of Indonesian Independence, and Jacob has
witnessed that struggle his entire life. Even more recently, East Timor gained its own independence
from Indonesia with Australian intervention. I wouldn’t be surprised if Soejono and Jacob see
Indonesia as a nation that continues to face the pressure of colonialism. By recapturing this piece
of Indonesian history, they can continue their life’s work and stick it to foreign intervention
at the same time. These people aren’t evil, and I’m not going to make them out to be the
bad guys here. Everything has got its nuance. ARKENAS eventually realizes its mistake, remember
there are other Indonesian researchers attached to this material too. They figure it out, and get the
remains returned. And with that, this story ends. Those children, taught inside of Liang Bua, didn’t
know it at the time, but they were learning on some of the most informative dirt in Indonesia’s
history, and if a Dutch priest weren’t there to witness it, this story might never have been told.
Verhoeven’s other site at Mata Menge yielded a small jaw and a few teeth around 800,000 years
old in a 2014 excavation that appears to be completely devoid of drama.
Another seemingly small-bodied human was found on Luzon, another island east of the
Wallace line. Though discovered in 2010, the realization that it’s another unique species,
Homo luzonensis, came in 2019. South-East Asia clearly still holds many mysteries,
and we’re not much closer to agreeing on exactly the best explanation for these little folk.
I’ll delve into that in the next video. For now, I hope you enjoyed this foray into the
odd discovery of an odd people. In other news, I’m very happy to
report that this channel is growing. If you enjoy watching these as much as I enjoy making them,
please consider donating to The HEAP’s Patreon. I would very much like to do this full-time,
and with some extra money I can make these better, and release more often. If you’d
like to help with that, I’ve included the link along with social media in the description below.
Otherwise, if you’ve got the time, check out another video. Thanks for watching.