Are Hobbits Real?, Carl Zimmer

The New York Times, June 20, 2016

A reader asks: Scientists seem to be calling members of a 3-foot-tall species whose fossils were recently found in Indonesia “hobbits” conversationally. When did this term come into existence? Before or after Tolkien? And how might the “real” hobbits have been similar to or different from the ones Tolkien created?

Carl Zimmer, who writes the Matter column for The Times’s Science section, considers the question.

The term came into scientific parlance very much after Tolkien.

In 2003, the archaeologist Michael Morwood and his colleagues discovered a skull and other bones of an ancient human relative — otherwise known as a hominin — in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. The Flores hominins were very small, standing about 3 feet tall, and had very small brains. And yet Dr. Morwood and his colleagues also found stone tools alongside the fossils, suggesting that they still had substantial mental firepower.

Making the discovery even more exciting was their estimate of the age of the fossils — as recent as 18,000 years ago. In 2010, Dr. Morwood and his colleagues re-examined the sediment layers in the cave and redated the fossils to somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago. That makes the fossils older, but not that much older, relatively speaking. Our own species had already emerged about 200,000 years ago.

The scientists decided the Flores fossils were so different from anything else ever found that the hominin deserved a new name. They dubbed it Homo floresiensis.

By 2004, Dr. Morwood and his colleagues were ready to publish a scientific paper with all the details of their research. They also wanted to publicize the results, but they knew very well that Homo floresiensis is a mouthful. Dr. Morwood proposed to his colleagues that they nickname the hominins of Flores hobbits, in honor of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 novel about the little people of Middle Earth.

Peter Brown, one of Dr. Morwood’s collaborators, told Morwood it was a terrible idea. “I thought it would result in every loon on the planet telephoning me as soon as it was published,” he said in a 2014 article in Nature. As he had feared, he later received “endless bizarre telephone calls from people who had seen some small hairy person in their backyard.”

The hobbits of Flores and the hobbits of Middle Earth had only a few things in common. Tolkien wrote that his hobbits were related to men, while Homo floresiensis probably shared a common ancestor with us that lived about 1.8 million years ago. And they were both short. Beyond that, the two hobbits part ways.

Tolkien portrayed Frodo and his comrades as diminutive people who lived in a kind of preindustrial paradise, like the village where Tolkien himself grew up in the late 1800s. “A well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favorite haunt,” he wrote in “The Fellowship of the Ring.”

Our own species invented farming about 12,000 years ago. The hobbits of Flores show no signs of agriculture. The fossil record indicates that their ancestors arrived with stone tools on Flores about a million years ago. By 700,000 years ago, a recent study found, their ancestors had shrunk to hobbit size. Judging from charcoal and cracked bones researchers have found, it looks as if Homo floresiensis used stone tools to hunt dwarf elephants, and then cooked their meat over fires in caves.

The hobbits of Flores probably weren’t capable of language, and probably couldn’t draw pictures. For almost a million years, they lived an unchanging life, making no improvements on the stone tools on which their lives depended. That evolutionary strategy allowed them to thrive on Flores — at least until we showed up. The youngest bones of Homo floresiensis date back to about the time when our own species arrived in Southeast Asia and Australia. It’s possible that we drove them extinct, perhaps by outbattling them for food and shelter.

“Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today,” Tolkien wrote. It is fun to imagine a few Homo floresiensis still surviving today in the remote jungles of an Indonesian island. Sadly, that’s probably just as fantastic as anything in Tolkien’s novels.