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UNE lecturer delivers public talk on “Hobbit” finding

November 08, 2004

Mike Morwood.jpgA public lecture by Professor Mike Morwood on his discovery of a new species of human will be delivered at Armidale Town Hall on Thursday, 11th November at 5.30pm.
Last year, Professor Morwood and colleagues from the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology conducted an expedition to the remote island of Flores, in East Indonesia, where they unearthed a skeleton of a tiny woman, who died about 18,000 years ago. The find nicknamed ‘Hobbit’ is now the type specimen for a new human species, Homo floresiensis.

The discovery was made at Liang Bua, a large limestone cave on Flores, 600km east of Bali. It is remarkably recent in age: the nearest anatomical equivalents lived in the Republic of Georgia, West Asia, almost 2 million years ago, with some features of the find harking back to 3 million year-old human ancestors in Africa.
This year, the remains of other hobbit-size individuals have been found dating to between 95,000 and 13,00 years ago. Their existence in Southeast Asia almost up to the start of agriculture 10,000 years ago means they were contemporaries of modern humans. In fact, the two human species probably overlapped in time by tens of thousands of years.
The skeleton, described and published by UNE colleague and paleoanthropologist, Professor Peter Brown, has been hailed as one of the most important early hominin discoveries of the past 100 years.
“It is a new species of human who actually lived alongside us, yet were half our size,” Professor Morwood said. “They were the height of a three-year-old child, weighed around 25kg and had a brain smaller than most chimpanzees. Even so, they used fire, made sophisticated stone tools, and hunted Stegodon (a primitive type of elephant) and giant rats. We also believe that their ancestors may have reached the island using bamboo rafts. The clear implication is that, despite tiny brains, these little humans were intelligent and almost certainly had language.”
The discovery was the cover story of the authoritative British scientific journal Nature, which has reported the world’s most significant scientific discoveries since it was founded in 1869. Significantly, Nature also reported the discovery by Eugene Dubois 110 years ago of the 700,000-year-old Homo erectus “Java Man” fossils, which initiated the scientific study of human origins and evolution.
Since the time of Dubois, no new human species has been found in Southeast Asia. Now the Flores “Hobbit” is set to make her mark in our understanding of human evolution.
The illustrated lecture will describe Professor Morwood’s research in Flores over the last 8 years, which culminated in the discovery the new human species, and what the find means for the history of human evolution and dispersal. It will be introduced by Professor Iain Davidson, from UNE’s School of Human and Environmental Studies.
Since the discovery was made public, UNE has been deluged with inquiries about the find, which is currently the subject a major exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London - with a replica of the Hobbit’s skull as centrepiece
For more information, contact Lydia Roberts on 6773 2779 or 0438 234 152.

Posted by Lydia Roberts at November 8, 2004 12:15 PM