Homo Floresiensis (Flores Island Hobbit) was more primitive than we believed

The Flores Island hominin, known as the hobbit (Homo floresiensis) was originally believed to have mastered fire, but new research published in Science on July 3, 2026 (E. Grace Veatch et al., Taphonomic analysis at Liang Bua reveals the behavioral and technological capabilities of Homo floresiensis. Sci. Adv. 12, eaeb7219(2026). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.aeb7219) suggest that they were much more primitive.

The paper's abstract indicates that "Since its discovery, Homo floresiensis—an extinct, short-statured, and small-brained hominin species from Flores, Indonesia—has often been ascribed unexpectedly advanced behaviors, such as hunting large game and using fire. Here, we report... that Komodo dragons likely had primary access to these remains leaving behind only low-utility elements for H. floresiensis to scavenge. Moreover, no signs of intentional use of fire are present in the stratigraphic units associated with H. floresiensis. Together, these results suggest that H. floresiensis was not as behaviorally advanced as originally suggested and provides critical insights into the behavioral repertoire of H. floresiensis, raising important questions about its ancestry."

The authors point out that the traces of fire usage in the sites where hobbits were found are more recent, and ocurred after these hominins became extinct. Fire was made by modern humans:

"The controlled use of fire and coordinated hunting of large game are considered critical milestones in hominin evolution ... The fact that H. floresiensis was originally described as having these behavioral adaptations continues to be a source of intense debate. However, with no evidence of in situ burning in the Stegodon or murine assemblage sampled thus far from H. floresiensis–bearing sediments at Liang Bua, it is reasonable to conclude that past fire use at the site was the sole result of H. sapiens behavior that occurred from ~46 ka until present day, well after H. floresiensis and Stegodon disappeared from the area."

This isn't surprising, the paper notes that although fire has been used for about 1 million years (My), it was only used widely over the past 400,000 years. Since the H. floresiensis reached Flores earlier than 1 My ago, they probably never mastered the art of fire making.

The researchers report that they were not hunters either, only scavengers. Since they couldn't cook meat, and ate it raw, they did not benefit from a better use of animal protein derived from cooking. The authors attribute this limited "behavioral repertoire as ... possibly due to an ancestry in which large game hunting and controlled use of fire did not evolve." This suggests that they evolved from a primitive, or more archaic branch of hominins and not from Homo erectus.

Comments

As mentioned in a previous post (about Stringer's remarks about the Out of Africa origin of humans), the origin of the hobbits is a mystery. It could be possible that they originated from an early lineage of hominins like those that led to Dmanisi - Homo georgicus, predating the Homo erectus line. They could even be the original basal line that originated in Eurasia, and in Europe, led to the hobbits proposed by Ludovic Slimak as living in France over 400 ky ago (see my previous post about Slimak).

Ancient hominins like these would have developed primitive stone technologies (Stringer calls them "prehuman"), and they may have not learned to use fire. They were probably the first hominins (were they even members of the homo clade?) who left Africa (or probably evene originated in Western Eurasia). They could be the ancestors of the Dmanisi people in the Caucasus (H. georgicus), and the erectines, and migrated into Africa to originate the hominins there.

In my next post we will look into the hominins that are said to have preceded Homo erectus inside Africa, and discuss Homo habilis, H. ergaster, H. rudolfensis.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2026 by Austin Whittall © 

Relatively quick origin for Homo floresiensis pigmies: 150 to 675 generations to shrink in size

The Flores Island Homini shrunk in height over a relatively short period of time according to an article published on October 9, 2019:

The paper written by José Alexandre F. Diniz-Filho, Lucas Jardim, Thiago F. Rangel, Phillip B. Holden, Neil R. Edwards, Joaquín Hortal, Ana M. C. Santos and Pasquale Raia (Quantitative genetics of body size evolution on islands: an individual-based simulation approach - 15Biol. Lett. http://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2019.0481), simulated models to explain how hominins could have reduced their size over time:

"We applied the model to evaluate body size differentiation in the pigmy extinct hominin Homo floresiensis, showing that dwarfing may have occurred in only about 360 generations (95% CI ranging from 150 to 675 generations). This result agrees with reports suggesting rapid dwarfing of large mammals on islands, as well as with the recent discovery that small-sized hominins lived in Flores as early as 700 kyr ago. Our simulations illustrate the power of analysing ecological and evolutionary patterns from an explicit quantitative genetics perspective."

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall © 

Australian Pygmies, fact and fiction

Australian pygmies are a source of controversy because mainstream science and the Aboriginal indigenous people oppose the notion that pygmies were the first humans to inhabit the continent.

Right wing supporters on the other hand believe that the pygmies came first and that the Aborigines took the continent from the pygmies.

Their argument goes as follows: Pygmies arrived first, the aboriginal people came later and drove the pygmies to extinction, the British were just another wave of migrants doing what the aboriginal people had done before. So why should invaders such as aboriginals have more rights over the land than the British. After all, the Aboriginals took it from the original Pygmie people.

A quick online search shows that there are not many references to pygmy people in Australia. I didn't manage to find anything recorded by the first European explorers or during the period of British exploration and occupation.

Most of the literature points back to an article published in Quadrant (Keith Windschuttle and Tim Gillin, The extinction of the Australian Pygmies, 2002).

Quadrant is a right-wing magazine (see what mediabiasfactcheck.com has to say about how far to the right they are), so Quadrant would have a reason to back the pygmy theory because it undermines the aboriginal people's claims of being the first people in Australia.

My Search for Pygmies in Australia

This is what I have found out about pygmies down under:

1. Pygmies are part of the Aboriginal people's mythology.

There is an Aboriginal myth, about the origin of the platypus (Source), which mentions the "small people" or "Dinderi". They hunted water snakes in the Brisbane River in what is now Queensland, but these managed to turn them into platypuses. But does this myth mean that there were a tribe of pygmies (the Dinderi)?

You can also read about Short people in Cape York Peninsula, Northern Queensland, Australia.

2. Short stature people lived in Queensland recently.

An article titled Pygmy elder faces eviction, published in 2007 (Queensland CourierMail August 25, 2007), reported that Lizzy Woods, 105 years old, was the "... oldest surviving matriarch of the Jirrbal rainforest people. ... the sole surviving link to the pygmy 'white cockatoo' tribe – most of whom stood less than 122cm (4ft) tall – of the Misty Mountain region near Tully.
... the 110cm-tall [3.6 ft] elder [said] 'I was born in the rainforest. I grew up chasing kangaroo and picking berries off the trees. I belong here. This is my land. The pygmy tribe – that is my mob'."

3. An anthropologist also reported the Dinderi myth.

Lindsay Winterbotham interviewed an Aboriginal man born in 1887, Gaiarbaus and wrote (1957) the book "Gaiarbaus story of the Jinibara tribe of south east Queensland (and its neighbours)", it was never published, but the book exists and you can read its index online, and this index mentions: "Pygmies (Dinderi), beliefs in south east Queensland tribes".

Winterbotham was advised by Norman Tindale during his interviews, and it is Tindale who is quoted in the article published by Quadrant.

3. Tindale and the Trihybrid theory

Tindale and American anthropologist Joseph Birdsell, worked together for over 50 years, starting in 1938. They put forward the theory that: The pygmoid and negrito people(the word negrito is Spanish, and means "small black people") living in the rainforests in Northern Queensland in the 1930s were the remnants of the first wave of humans to reach the vast Australian continent. These tiny people were later pushed in to the island of Tasmania (hence the name of "Tasmanoids" that Tindale and Birdsell gave them) and the deep rainforests by two later waves of humans invading Australia.

The two scientists later renamed them "Barrinean" after Lake Barrine. Yoy can read this theory in this 1953 newspaper article.

This "Trihybrid" theory included a second wave of pale skinned "Murrayians" which were supposed to be linked to the Ainu people of Japan, and the third wave of robust dark skinned "Carpentarians" possibly linked to primitive Indian tribes.

This website has some photos of these three "types" of humans proposed by Birdsell and Tindale as the successive waves that peopled Australia.

This theory has been discredited by later research (see this paper for example), but it was not invented by Tindale, I found an earlier publication suggesting the same idea:

In Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of South Australia, 1922, an article (Cylindro-Conical and cornute stones from the Darling River and Cooper Creek, Robert Pulleine. pp.304-308) mentions Albert Churchward:

"If we accept the views of Churchward, now gaining the attention of anthropologists, that mankind originated in the great lake districts of Africa, we find opened up a path which leads to an understanding of the origin of our aborigines and their beliefs. In his two books, "Signs and Symbols of - Primordial Man" and "The Origin and Evolution of Mankind," he pictures the Pygmy exodus throughout the world and their displacement and annihilation by the people of the second Nilotic exodus to which our aborigines, accord- ing to him, belong. He states that the Pygmies of the first Nilotic invasion were displaced in Australia and eventually only remained in Tasmania. "

Churchward had been writing about pygmies since the early 1900s, so he surely influenced Tindale.

4. There are "pygmies" in New Guinea

New Guinea has small people too, reported as early as 1910 (paper in Nature), as recently as 2013, and in between too (see this paper from 1961 (it mentions the trihybrid theory and Tindale).

Closing Comments

Probably different waves of humans colonized Australia, starting with Homo erectus and ending with the British. The Aboriginal people are without any doubt, the rightful original people of Australia, the first people to successfuly colonize the continent and live there for over 50,000 years. However it is also likely that other groups, linked to the Negrito people of Southeastern Asia and New Guinea also settled in Australia, whether it took place before, during or after the arrival of the Aboriginals is a trivial point.

But what if the Aboriginal myths aren't about the Negrito people, and instead refer to "small people" like the "Hobbits" of Indonesia? A distant relative of us humans.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall © 

The most recent information on Admixture with archaic hominins

A paper (Using hominin introgression to trace modern human dispersals, Joao C. Teixeira and Alan Cooper, PNAS first published July 12, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1904824116 - behind a pay wall), reports admixture with several groups of hominins other than Denisovans and Neanderthals during the dispersal of modern humans around the globe.

The abstract says the following:

"bstract The dispersal of anatomically modern human populations out of Africa and across much of the rest of the world around 55 to 50 thousand years before present (ka) is recorded genetically by the multiple hominin groups they met and interbred with along the way, including the Neandertals and Denisovans. The signatures of these introgression events remain preserved in the genomes of modern-day populations, and provide a powerful record of the sequence and timing of these early migrations, with Asia proving a particularly complex area. At least 3 different hominin groups appear to have been involved in Asia, of which only the Denisovans are currently known. Several interbreeding events are inferred to have taken place east of Wallace’s Line, consistent with archaeological evidence of widespread and early hominin presence in the area. However, archaeological and fossil evidence indicates archaic hominins had not spread as far as the Sahul continent (New Guinea, Australia, and Tasmania), where recent genetic evidence remains enigmatic."

Apparently the following admixture events took place between our unchaste ancestors and the other humans they met during their travels:

1. Neanderthals: in the Middle East (?) 50 - 55 kya
2. Unknown human similar to Neanderthals and Denisovans. More recent than 50 kya. In Northern India. Modern Punjabi and Bengal populations have some DNA from this admixture event.
3. Humans that headed into Central and Eastern Asia: Admixture with Denisovans.
4. Humans heading south into the Malaysian Peninsula: mixed with a relative of the Denisovans which had split from those living in Central Asia some 280 kya. This introgression took place in Malaysia or Borneo.
5. This group split: those heading into the Philippines mixed with yet another group of Denisovans and the hunter-gatherers living there nowadays carry this genetic imprint.
6. The group heading south towards Australia met some humans which were not Homo erectus, or Neaderthal or Denisovan, they were not the Flores "Hobbit" either. The genetic signals of this archaic group has been found int he short-statured people living on Flores nowadays.

Nobody seems to have admixed with the other known species of that region: the Homo luzonensis (from the Philippines) and the Flores Island hobbits.

The following images are from this paper:

 

 

These unknown hominins are indeed a very interesting find! We will have to await for further studies to learn more about them.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2019 by Austin Whittall © 

Short Stature evolved twice on Flores Island

A Report (Evolutionary history and adaptation of a human pygmy population of Flores Island, Indonesia by Serena Tucci et al. Science 03 Aug 2018, Vol. 361, Issue 6401, pp. 511-516.DOI: 10.1126/science.aar8486) tells us that the pygmy-sized Hobbits of Flores island evolved their own short stature independently from the small-sized Homo sapiens that live nowadays in Flores (pygmies).

The background is (quote from the magazine):

"The genetics of human short stature
Flores Island in Indonesia has a long history of hominin occupation, including by the extinct Homo floresiensis and a more recent settlement by modern humans. Furthermore, Flores has an extant population of pygmy humans, and H. floresiensis exhibited a diminutive adult size relative to other hominins. Tucci et al. examined genetic variation among 32 individuals, including 10 sequenced genomes, from a population of pygmies living close to the cave where H. floresiensis remains were discovered. These individuals exhibit signatures of polygenic selection explaining the short stature and have genomic content from both Neanderthals and Denisovans, but no additional archaic lineages. Thus, restricted height is under selection at this location and has evolved independently at least twice in hominins."

Twice because it evolved once in Pygmies in Flores and again (or rather before) in the H. floresiensis.

The Abstract tells us the following:

"Flores Island, Indonesia, was inhabited by the small-bodied hominin species Homo floresiensis, which has an unknown evolutionary relationship to modern humans. This island is also home to an extant human pygmy population. Here we describe genome-scale single-nucleotide polymorphism data and whole-genome sequences from a contemporary human pygmy population living on Flores near the cave where H. floresiensis was found. The genomes of Flores pygmies reveal a complex history of admixture with Denisovans and Neanderthals but no evidence for gene flow with other archaic hominins. Modern individuals bear the signatures of recent positive selection encompassing the FADS (fatty acid desaturase) gene cluster, likely related to diet, and polygenic selection acting on standing variation that contributed to their short-stature phenotype. Thus, multiple independent instances of hominin insular dwarfism occurred on Flores."

So the pygmy population that is now living on the island has Denisovan and Neanderthal admixture -but no additional archaic lineages. The latter is interesting. Maybe this has been concluded as the only genetic components are that of Denisovans, H. sapiens and Neanderthals.

But, as a BBC News article points out today: "Unfortunately, the wet and tropical conditions on Flores mean that all efforts to isolate hobbit DNA have so far failed. Dr Serena Tucci told the BBC: "Like many other scientists, it is my dream to find ancient DNA from the Hobbit. No DNA was recovered in the original Hobbit fossils, but DNA methods have improved markedly in the last few years.".

So no genetic comparison was made between both short statured groups.

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Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2018 by Austin Whittall ©