Archaeologists hunting for evidence of modern human migration from Asia to Australia discovered a tiny, relatively intact skeleton of extinct humankind on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, which became known as Homo floresiensis, or more colloquially, the Hobbit, after the little, breakfast-guzzling critters from J.R.R. Tolkein's "The Hobbit."
The species was assumed to have persisted until recently, approximately 12,000 years ago, when subsequent research pushed that period back to around 50,000 years.
However, one retired anthropology professor at the University of Alberta believed that proof of the Hobbit's prolonged existence may have been ignored and that the Hobbit may still be alive at the time, or at least beyond living memory.
The possibility of the human species in the forest of flores
JOHN THYS / AFP) (Photo by JOHN THYS/AFP via Getty Images
The discovery of remains from a rare species of hominid on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004 shook the scientific world.
Homo floresiensis, which dates from the late Pleistocene, was presumably a contemporary of early modern humans in this portion of Southeast Asia.
Nonetheless, the small hominid resembled australopithecines and even chimps in certain ways.
When I first started ethnographic fieldwork on Flores 20 years ago, researchers heard stories of human-like creatures, some of which were said to be alive but only rarely observed.
The late Mike Morwood of the University of Wollongong in Australia, who led the H. floresiensis finding team, described these hominoids as "fitting floresiensis to a T," according to The Scientist.
Gregory Forth wrote in the essay: "My goal in producing the book was to identify the best explanation that is, the most reasonable and scientifically supported of Lio interpretations of the species."
These contain sighting accounts from more than 30 eyewitnesses, all of whom Forth interacted with immediately.
With that, the expert came to conclusion that the easiest way to explain what he heard was that a non-sapiens hominid has persisted on Flores until now or very recently.
He said that the local folk zoology of the island's Lio people involved legends about humans morphing into animals as they traveled and adapted to new settings, which he Compared to a sort of Lamarckism or the inheritance of acquired physical features, as cited by IFL Science.
How natural scientists construct knowledge on living things
Apes and humans also addressed broader issues, such as how natural scientists develop knowledge about living things.
One issue is the relative importance of various sources of information about creatures, including animals that have yet to be thoroughly investigated in the research literature, and particularly data given by historically non-literate and highly technological simple neighborhoods, such as the Lio, whom anthropologists would have labeled primitive 40 or 50 years ago.
To be fair, the Lio have nothing resembling the current evolutionary theory, with speciation fueled by mutation and natural selection.
But, if evolutionism is basically concerned with how various species emerged and how differences are preserved, then the Lio people and other Flores islands have been asking about the same issues for a long time.
What they say about the creatures, when combined with other types of evidence, is entirely compatible with a living hominin species, or one that went extinct within the previous 100 years.
