Our distant relatives, Homo floresiensis, nicknamed “hobbits,” have been credited with two advanced skills: hunting small elephant relatives and controlling fire – both generally associated with large-brained hominins, such as Neanderthals and modern humans.
A new study now challenges both of these famous ideas.
The analysis of thousands of bone fragments from Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores reveals that Komodo dragons, not hobbits, likely had dibs on the carcasses of Stegodon; extinct cow-sized elephants that shared the island with the hobbits. The hominins probably made meals from whatever meat remained on the bodies, researchers report in a paper published in Science Advances.
“Most evidence for early hominins hunting large game has probably been overplayed. I suspect Homo floresiensis hunted smaller game and probably did so quite effectively. But with regard to Stegodon, it just wouldn't have been worth the risk to try and hunt them,” Matthew Tocheri, a paleoanthropologist at Lake University, tells Refractor. “Instead, scavenging from Komodo dragon leftovers was likely a far more successful and safe strategy.”
Hobbits are a recently discovered early human species with small brains and a stature of about 1 meter (just over 3 feet). These hominins were previously assumed to share our level of culture and cooperation.
To see if H. floresiensis also hunted large game and used fire, Elizabeth Veatch at the National Museum of Natural History and her colleagues examined 3,155 Stegodon bone fragments. Most of the known assemblages were from cave sediments dated between roughly 190,000 and 50,000 years ago, a period linked to hobbits and not modern humans.
To figure out who was chewing on these bones, the scientists first needed to know what a Komodo dragon bite actually looks like. Therefore, the researchers fed a goat carcass to a Komodo dragon at Zoo Atlanta, then used 3D scanning technology to analyze the resulting tooth marks.
The analysis showed that the marks on the goat bones and the bones of Stegodon were similar. The Komodo dragon tooth marks were clustered on meat-rich bones like femurs, while cut marks made by hobbits appeared on bones that scavengers would be more likely to find after a predator had eaten its prey.
Out of the examined bones, only a few fragments showed predatory damage, suggesting that hobbits likely did not hunt them. Just one Stegodon element showed burning damage. The burning, too, was found near much younger sediments, where Homo sapiens had constructed hearth-like structures. To cross-check this, the researchers also examined more than 4,200 rodent bones from deposits associated with hobbits and found no evidence of intentional burns.
“It is clear that Homo floresiensis did not have first access to these Stegodon remains at Liang Bua, and there's no sign that they used fire,” says Tocheri. But this “doesn't necessarily mean that Homo floresiensis was not a formidable predator for all of the other smaller animals on Flores.”
“Think of islands as evolution's laboratory – strange things happen, but there is always a reason. This allowed us to see if our larger assumptions about the evolution of human dietary behavior are correct,” Vaetch tells us.
The study was published in the journal Science Advances.
Fact-checked by Mike McRae
