'Hobbits' may have survived on remains left by Komodo dragons

According to new research, humans' prehistoric relatives, nicknamed "hobbits" because of their short stature, may have been scavengers rather than skilled hunters capable of slaughtering large animals or lighting cooking fires.

The study adds to growing evidence that Homo floresiensis, which had a brain only slightly larger than a chimpanzee, was not as advanced as scientists previously believed.

Fossils unearthed by archaeologists in Liang Bua Cave on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 led to the discovery of the diminutive hominin. The creature had a skull the size of a grapefruit and was probably about 1 meter tall.

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Excavators discovered stone artifacts and bones of Stegodon florensis insularis, an extinct, bison-sized relative of elephants, near fossils of Homo floresiensis.

The discovery suggested that hobbits hunted with tools to kill large animals. Burnt bones of smaller animals also indicated that hobbits knew how to use fire.

This advanced behavior is considered a fundamental evolutionary trait associated with large-brained hominids such as Neanderthals, Homo sapiens (modern humans) and Homo erectus, an early human who lived between 1.89 million and 110 thousand years ago.

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The possible connection between hunting tools and the use of fire in Homo floresiensis has led some researchers to believe that hobbits were close relatives of Homo erectus.

Dr. Elizabeth Grace Veatch, a paleoanthropologist who studies the evolution of the human diet and how early humans interacted with animals, wanted to take a closer look at how Homo floresiensis survived on an isolated island between about 190,000 and 50,000 years ago.

Veatch and his colleagues performed a multifaceted analysis of the stegodon bones found on Flores, studying what happened to the bones after the stegodons died.

"I wanted to see if we could actually demonstrate that H. floresiensis was the hunter it had been portrayed as for decades," said Veatch, lead author of the study published Friday in the journal Science Advances and a research associate in the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.

A block of cave sediment includes a stegodon rib surrounded by stone artifacts and rat bones - Team Liang Bua
But the study, which included a feeding experiment involving a Komodo dragon, suggests that hobbits used their tools only to enjoy the raw remains of Stegodon, the island's only carnivorous animal - and Homo floresiensis did not use fire to cook meat.

The discovery, combined with previous research, changes the way experts think about Homo floresiensis' place in the family tree of human evolution.

Inside the mouth of a Komodo dragon
Thousands of tools were found alongside fossils of Homo floresiensis, suggesting that early hominids were producing what they needed to process Stegodon meat, extracted from the bones of local rocks called flint, said study co-author Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution.

But researchers wanted to see if the markings on Stegodon's bones indicated that hobbits also hunted the only large herbivore on the island at the time.

Stegodon weighed about 570 kilograms and stood approximately 1.5 meters tall at the shoulder.

The search for answers took researchers to an unexpected place: the Atlanta Zoo, Georgia, where they watched a Komodo dragon named Rinca use its powerful bite to feed on the carcass of a goat and better understand how giant lizards leave teeth marks on the animals' bones.

A Komodo dragon clings to the carcass of a goat at the Atlanta Zoo - Courtesy of Elizabeth Grace Veatch
The team used a 3D scanning technique on the remaining goat bones from Rinca's meal to evaluate them along with cut marks made by humans using stone tools, as well as stegodon bones found in Liang Bua Cave.

"After comparing the markings on the Stegodon bones to our sample of Komodo dragon tooth and cut marks, I was surprised by how similar most of the markings were to our Komodo dragon sample," Veatch wrote in an email.

Komodo dragon tooth marks have also been found more frequently on the fleshier parts of the stegodon, while cut marks from hobbit stone tools have been found on less noble parts of the animal.

Researchers believe that, just as Komodo dragons hunt water buffalo today, they used their venomous bite to take down stegodons - and, once the area was clear, Homo floresiensis arrived on the scene to prey on the meat of what was left.

According to the study, hobbits would not be at risk of venom poisoning while foraging for food, as Komodo dragon venom contains proteins that stomach enzymes break down.

To look for evidence of the use of fire, researchers analyzed rodent bones scattered throughout the cave, deposited over thousands of years by owls that roosted there.

If fireplaces had been built in the cave, the underlying bones would have shown signs of charring - but none of the 4,500 bones studied were burned. No stegodon bones showed burn marks.

Researchers suspect that the few burned bones found in later archaeological layers of the cave's sediments are evidence that Homo sapiens used the cave about 46,000 years ago, long after the disappearance of Stegodon and Homo floresiensis.

A different evolutionary path
According to Pobiner, Homo floresiensis probably fed on raw meat, plants and insects that it found around the world, and persisted for thousands of years despite the presence of Komodo dragons.

"Considering that modern Komodo dragons appear to attack humans only occasionally, and almost never without provocation, the simple fact that they lived in groups and were wary of Komodo dragons may have been enough for Homo floresiensis to largely avoid becoming their prey," Pobiner wrote in an email.

But the study highlights that prehistoric human relatives who lived at the same time as Neanderthals and modern humans may have had extremely different behavioral adaptations, Pobiner added.

Continued research investigating different aspects of Homo floresiensis since the species' discovery has altered many early interpretations about hominins, said study co-author Dr.

Thomas Sutikna, who was part of the team that found the first fossil and has led research at Liang Bua since 2001.

Excavation team member Benyamin Tarus works on Homo floresiensis deposits at the Liang Bua archaeological site - Liang Bua Team
Veatch continues his work to discover whether hobbits consumed other animals in order to gain a better understanding of their ecological role within the island's ecosystem.

The idea that Homo floresiensis did not hunt or use fire may also indicate a different evolutionary path for hobbits than previously considered.

It is possible that Homo floresiensis was more closely related to an early species other than the genus Homo, diverging before the emergence of Homo erectus.

"A more simplistic behavioral repertoire may indicate an ancestry that split from the Homo lineage before the emergence of these more advanced behavioral adaptations in later Homo species," Veatch said.

The new study reinforces a long-held suspicion that Homo floresiensis is not a dwarf form of Homo erectus, but rather a descendant of a more primitive form, similar to Homo habilis or Australopithecus, that arrived on the island more than 1 million years ago, said Dr. Chris Stringer, a leading researcher specializing in human origins and paleoanthropology at the Natural History Museum in London.

Homo habilis is one of the oldest known species of the genus Homo. Species of Australopithecus, like the famous Lucy fossil, walked upright but had a relatively small brain, closer in size to that of an ape.

Stringer was not involved in the research.

"This reinforces the minority view that floresiensis does not actually belong to the genus Homo and should be redesignated, although choosing a new genus name is not straightforward without knowing more about its ancestry."

Source: CNN