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The plot thickens in the mystery of the hobbit's demise
In 2003 a joint Indonesian-Australian research team discovered the skeleton of a tiny human that it was believed had lived around 80,000 years ago in Liang Bua cave on an island in Indonesia. The skeleton's unique traits led scientists to assign a new species, Homo floresiensis, named after the island where the cave is. Much more at the Smithsonian's exhibit What does it mean to be human? [si.edu].
Today Science Daily carried an article [sciencedaily.com] about new evidence which narrows the time-gap between the hobbits and modern humans.
After revised dating estimates of the original hobbit skeleton -- published in Nature in March -- placed the bones between 190,000 and 60,000 years old (it was previously believed to have survived on Flores until as recently as 12,000 years ago), and the most recent stone tools at 50,000 years old, a gap in the chronology of the sediment sequence opened up -- researchers had no idea what happened at the site between 46,000 and 20,000 years ago.
Dr Morley and colleagues, including CAS geoarchaeologist Professor Paul Goldberg and archaeologist Thomas Sutikna, were able to fill that gap, detailing environmental changes at the site between 190,000 and 20,000 years ago and revealing something rather unexpected: physical evidence of fire places that were used between 41,000 and 24,000 years ago, most likely by modern humans for warmth and/or cooking.
"We now know that the hobbits only survived until around 50,000 years ago at Liang Bua. We also know that modern humans arrived in Southeast Asia and Australia at least 50,000 years ago, and most likely quite a bit earlier" Dr Morley said.
[...]
Given that no evidence for the use of fire by Homo floresiensis during roughly 130,000 years of presence at the site has been found, Dr Morley said modern humans are the most likely candidates for the construction of the fire places.
The paper, "Initial micromorphological results from Liang Bua, Flores (Indonesia): Site formation processes and hominin activities at the type locality of Homo floresiensis" will appear in Journal of Archaeological Science today (June 30).
