In 2003 in a cave on the island of Flores
in Indonesia,
the skeleton of a tiny adult standing
just over three feet tall was found.
Dating techniques found this hominid lived
about 18,000 years ago.
It was named Homo floresiensis,
nicknamed "The Hobbit."
The significance of this particular skeleton
really comes in terms of what it looks like
and the date of the sediments that it comes from.
If we were to find a skeleton like this in East Africa,
in sediments that dated to
1.5 to 2 million years ago,
it wouldn't really be that big of a surprise.
The surprise is that we find it on this isolated island
in Indonesia only 18,000 years ago,
and so it is two million years out of date
and in the wrong place,
and also at a time when it overlaps with us,
which automatically ups the curiosity level.
So this wasn't what paleoanthropologists
would expect to find in Asia from this time period.
In fact, when Matt Tocheri first heard about it during
a professional meeting, he was stunned.
I just sort of thought,
'What is-It's got to be a joke, right?'
And I remember then asking someone about it,
and one of my good friends handed me the Nature papers
describing these specimens and I remember
just sitting down and my jaw dropping, thinking,
'Can this really be real?'
In fact, they tease me about it, because I actually said,
'Oh my God, what a great time to be alive!'
Was this really a new species?
Or a deformed modern human?
The answer can be found in the skeleton's anatomy,
and not just her height.
Her short stature is something
that is very interesting,
but even more interesting is the fact that within
that stature the proportions are all very
different from what they are in you or I.
Basically, she has very, very short lower limbs,
and so it makes the rest of her anatomy,
like her arms and her feet look large,
and this is something that is true for all earlier
hominins, as well as African apes today.
But it's actually the fact that we're the oddballs.
We're the ones that actually have really long lower limbs
that then make the proportions look
quite different.
Matt's own research also helped confirm
the hypothesis that Homo floresiensis belonged to an
earlier hominin species.
My PhD research had been looking at the
wrist anatomy of not only our species,
but our close relatives the great apes,
as well as looking at other human fossil wrist bones.
And what's really interesting is that
in our wrists, as well as the wrist of Neanderthals,
we have several features in our wrist bones that are
quite different that what we see in earlier hominins
or African apes.
There's been a big change basically in the evolution
of our wrist, and we see that change only in
Neanderthals and us.
And what was so striking to me was the fact that LB1,
this specimen of Homo floresiensis,
still has the condition we see in earlier hominins as
well as African apes.
So for me, this was very clear evidence that this was
not a diseased modern human.
This was basically a very close relative to ours,
but a different lineage of human.
It opens up a lot of doors, because of its time of
showing up at 18,000 years ago,
then we know it had to come from somewhere,
and so there's basically several million
years of human evolution particularly in that part of
the world that we need to sort of come to grips on,
and we wait now we have very little evidence of it,
and so know though that because of finding a
specimen like this there must be a record out there.
We know that there are stone tools on Flores that date to
more than 800,000 years ago, so we know that we have an
800,000 year record of human evolution,
and yet all we have are the tools
that are 800,000 years old
and then LB1 and some other bits from Liang Bua
within the last 20,000 years.
And so there's a lot still to learn about that to try
to figure out what happened there,
and also how to does that relate to human evolution on
mainland Asia and all the way back to Africa.
So, I see it as a tremendous opportunity,
because it shows us we are in for a lot more surprises. 98 00:04:03,000 --> 00:00:00,000