The “hobbit” stood 39 inches tall, weighed only 55 pounds and she brought paleoanthropologist Peter Brown the world’s attention when he discovered her bones in Indonesia in 2003.
Brown, a professor of anthropology at the University of New England, Australia, will give a slide lecture tonight in 180 PLC about his discovery of human-like fossils on the Indonesian island of Flores. He first described the fossils as “Homo floresiensis,” but they have since been labeled “hobbit people,” like the J.R.R. Tolkien characters, because of their small size.
“It’s supposed to be the biggest discovery in evolutionary science in the last 100 years,” Brown said.
He will also talk about the politics and publicity of science, which are now part of his work. Since the 2003 discovery, Brown has made six documentaries and done more than 90 interviews with the world’s biggest news sources, he said.
A Google search for “peter brown hobbit people” returns about 267,000 results.
“You gotta do the media stuff; no one really teaches you how to do that,” Brown said. “But you have to survive it. You learn as you go.”
Brown is sometimes awoken at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. for interviews, a result of him working in so many different time zones.
“It gets me a little cross sometimes, and my wife gets cross too,” Brown said. “The good thing is that it’s creating more interest in anthropology. I hope the speech (at the University) will get the attention of a lot of students.”
The skeletons of the hobbit and her peers were found in a giant limestone cave called Liang Bua. Brown said the small human relatives first lived there 90,000 years ago and became extinct 12,000 years ago after a volcanic eruption.
“The volcanic eruption was like a very large version of Mt. St. Helens,” Brown said.
Brown and his team members speculate that the species evolved from a normal-size, island-hopping Homo erectus population that reached Flores around 840,000 years ago. The process of “island dwarfing,” where animals bigger than a rabbit get smaller and those smaller than a rabbit grow larger, is the reason for their tiny stature, Brown said.
“So you end up with giant rats running around and elephants that could fit in a New York apartment,” Brown said.
In the limestone cave, Brown also found remnants of pygmy elephants, komodo dragons and stone tools.
Though the hobbit people were very small – the adult stood as tall as a 3-year-old human child and had a brain the size of a newborn human baby – they had incredible strength, Brown said.
“Chimpanzees have an arm strength four times that of a human; the hobbits were similarly as strong, we think,” Brown said. “You wouldn’t want to arm wrestle one, that’s for sure. It would probably snap your arm off.”
Since the discovery of the first female, a mostly complete skeleton, Brown’s team has found parts of six or seven others that are mostly the same as the first one, Brown said.
“We have found about half of the remains of a 3-year-old that is half-a-meter tall,” he said. “You could put its leg across an American $1 bill.”
Brown will also talk about the many questions that he and other scientists still have about the hobbit people, including how they got around the island, whether their growth rate is more similar to humans or chimps and how the species got to the island.
“Animals could have never walked to the island. The only way would be to swim or use some kind of watercraft,” Brown said. “We know the elephants were very good swimmers … but the small human relatives couldn’t have swam there because the current is too strong.”
Brown’s lecture, hosted by The Oregon Humanities Center is from 7:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. tonight.
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