Ancient Tools Suggest Indonesian 'Hobbits' Had a Mysterious Neighbor
A team of archaeologists from Indonesia and Australia has now discovered the tools of a mysterious neighbor who resided on the island of Sulawesi to the north around the same time, if not earlier.
"It's highly unlikely these early hominins had the cognitive capacity (especially the ability for advanced planning) required to invent boats," archaeologist and co-lead of the expedition, Adam Brumm, told ScienceAlert.
"It is more likely that hominins got to Sulawesi by accident, most probably as a result of 'rafting' on natural vegetation mats. It's thought rodents and monkeys made overwater crossings from the Asian mainland to reach Sulawesi in this way."
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The seven flaked stones on Sulawesi were found at different depths below ground, but according to the dating of local sandstone and a nearby pig fossil, the tools range in age from 1.04 million years to 1.48 million years.
If correct, the artifacts could represent the earliest evidence of human activity in Wallacea – a string of mainly Indonesian islands that has separated the Asian and Australian continents for millions of years.
The identity of the isolated toolmakers remains a mystery.
Brumm has been studying early hominins in the region for decades, and he co-led the recent archaeological expedition on Sulawesi with Budianto Hakim from the National Research and Innovation Agency of Indonesia (BRIN).
Archaeologist Debbie Argue, who was not involved in the discovery, told ScienceAlert the findings are "most important", because they add to the startling fact that early Pleistocene hominins could somehow make sea crossings.
"With evidence for hominins on three islands that have never been attached to a mainland – Flores, Luzon, and now Sulawesi – island Southeast Asia is shaping up to be an extraordinary frontier for human evolution," said Argue.
Until now, the earliest evidence of stone tools in Wallacea – which are thought to be 1.02 million years old – came from the island of Flores.
Flores is the same place where archaeologists discovered the short-statured Homo floresiensis – also known as the 'hobbit' – in a cave in 2003. This meter-high hominin (3.3 feet) with a brain the size of grapefruit took the world by surprise when it was found, because it didn't look like any other early human.
The remains of H. floriensis date up to 100,000 years ago, but its presumed ancestors on the island date back 700,000 years. The 1.02 million-year-old stone tools on Flores were probably made by those ancestors – whether descended from Homo erectus or another hominin species on the Asian mainland.
According to a 2021 interview with archaeologist Lucy Timbrell, Brumm accidentally happened upon the Flores tools while "nursing an appalling hangover" due to a local village ceremony the night before.
"Whilst stumbling about in the sweltering heat, in a bewildered state, I found some heavily patinated stone tools eroding out from a fluvial conglomerate exposed at the base of a gully," Brumm recalled in the interview.
"I have since tried to make major archaeological discoveries while hungover, but it only worked that one time."
Archaeologists have yet to uncover hominin fossils on Sulawesi, but the evidence of stone tools indicates their existence.
It's unknown if the Sulawesi population was related to hominins on Flores, but the late Mike Morwood, one of the co-discoverers of the 2003 'hobbit', was convinced that Sulawesi was the key to understanding where H. floresiensis came from.
"We had always suspected that hominins were established on Sulawesi for a very long period of time, but until now we had never found clear evidence," Brumm told ScienceAlert.
Influenced by Morwood's thinking, Brumm suspects that Sulawesi was once a stepping stone to Flores from mainland Asia (which once stretched as far as Java and Borneo).
In 2010, Morwood told The Guardian that he suspected tools on Sulawesi could date back two million years. "This is going to put the cat among the pigeons," he said at the time.
No doubt he would have been thrilled by the recent work of Brumm's and Hakim's team.
The archaeologists now plan to search Sulawesi for direct remains of the mysterious tool makers.
"We are also working at much younger sites that we hope will provide insight into what happened to these early humans when our species arrived on the island at least 65,000 years ago," said Brumm.
The study was published in Nature.
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1.5 million-year-old stone tools from mystery human relative discovered in Indonesia — they reached the region before our species even existed
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Archaeologists have uncovered primitive sharp-edged stone tools on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, adding another piece to an evolutionary puzzle involving mysterious ancient humans who lived in a region known as Wallacea. Located beyond mainland Southeast Asia, Wallacea includes a group of islands between Asia and Australia, among which Sulawesi is the largest. Previously, researchers have found evidence that an unusual, small-bodied human species dubbed Homo floresiensis — also called 'hobbits' due to comparisons with the diminutive characters in fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien's books — lived on the nearby island of Flores from 700,000 years ago until about 50,000 years ago. The newly discovered flaked stone tools, which date back between 1.04 million to 1.48 million years ago, represent the oldest evidence for human habitation of Sulawesi and suggest the island might have been inhabited by early human ancestors, or hominins, at the same time — or possibly earlier — than Flores. Researchers reported the findings in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Researchers are still trying to answer key questions about these Wallacea island hominins — namely when and how they arrived on the islands, which would have required an ocean crossing. Flaked stone tools were earlier uncovered on Flores and dated to about 1.02 million years ago. The latest find suggests there might have been a link between the populations on Flores and Sulawesi — and that perhaps Sulawesi was a stepping stone for the hobbits on Flores, according to the authors of the new research, who have studied sites on Flores. 'We have long suspected that the Homo floresiensis lineage of Flores, which probably represents a dwarfed variant of early Asian Homo erectus, came originally from Sulawesi to the north, so the discovery of this very old stone technology on Sulawesi adds further weight to this possibility,' said co-lead study author Dr. Adam Brumm, professor of archaeology at Griffith University's Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution. Excavations conducted by co-lead study author Budianto Hakim, senior archaeologist at the National Research and Innovation Agency of Indonesia, began on Sulawesi in 2019 after a stone artifact was spotted protruding from a sandstone outcrop in an area known as the Calio site in a modern cornfield. The site — in the vicinity of a river channel — would have been where hominins made their tools and hunted 1 million years ago, according to the archaeologists, who also found animal fossils in the area. Among the finds was a jawbone of the now-extinct Celebochoerus, a type of pig with unusually large upper tusks. At the conclusion of excavations in 2022, the team uncovered seven stone tools. Dating of the sandstone and fossils resulted in an age estimate for the tools of at least 1.04 million years old to potentially 1.48 million years old. Hominin-related artifacts previously found on Sulawesi had been dated to 194,000 years ago. The small, sharp stone fragments used as tools were likely fashioned from larger pebbles in nearby riverbeds, and they were probably used for cutting or scraping, Brumm said. The tools are similar to early human stone technology discoveries made before on Sulawesi and other Indonesian islands as well as early hominin sites in Africa, he added. 'They reflect a so-called 'least-effort' approach to reducing stones into useful, sharp-edged tools; these are uncomplicated implements, but it requires a certain level of skill and experience to make these tools — they result from precise and controlled flaking of stone, not randomly bashing rocks together,' Brumm said. But who was responsible for making these tools in the first place? 'It's a significant piece of the puzzle, but the Calio site has yet to yield any hominin fossils,' Brumm said. 'So while we now know there were tool-makers on Sulawesi a million years ago, their identity remains a mystery.' The fossil record on Sulawesi is sparse, and ancient DNA degrades more rapidly in the region's tropical climate. Brumm and his colleagues retrieved DNA a few years back from the bones of a female teenage hunter-gatherer who died more than 7,000 years ago on Sulawesi, revealing evidence of a previously unknown group of humans, but such finds are incredibly rare. Another roadblock to unraveling the enigma has been the lack of systematic and sustained field research in a region of hundreds of separate islands, some of which archaeologists have never properly investigated, Brumm said. The researchers do have a theory about the identity of this unidentified ancient hominin, who might represent the earliest evidence of ancient humans crossing oceans to reach islands. 'Our working hypothesis is that the stone tools from Calio were made by Homo erectus or an isolated group of this early Asian hominin (e.g., a creature akin to Homo floresiensis of Flores),' Brumm wrote in an email. In addition to fossils and stone tools on Flores and the tools now found on Sulawesi, researchers have also previously discovered stone tools dating to around 709,000 years ago on the isolated island of Luzon in the Philippines, to the north of Wallacea, suggesting ancient humans were living on multiple islands. Exactly how our early ancestors could have reached the islands to begin with remains unknown. 'Getting to Sulawesi from the adjacent Asian mainland would not have been easy for a non-flying land mammal like us, but it's clear that early hominins were doing it somehow,' Brumm wrote. 'Almost certainly they lacked the cognitive capacity to invent boats that could be used for planned ocean voyages. Most probably they made overwater dispersals completely by accident, in the same way rodents and monkeys are suspected to have done it, by 'rafting' (i.e., floating haplessly) on natural vegetation mats.' John Shea, a professor in the anthropology department at Stony Brook University in New York, said he believes that the new study, while not a game changer, is important and has far-reaching implications for understanding how humans established a global presence. Shea was not involved in the new research. Homo sapiens, or modern humans, are the only species for which there is clear, unequivocal evidence of watercraft use, and if Homo erectus or earlier hominins crossed the ocean to the Wallacean islands, they would have needed something to travel on, Shea said. The waters separating the Wallacean islands are home to sharks and crocodiles and have rapid currents, so swimming wouldn't have been possible, he added. 'If you have ever paddled a canoe or crewed in a sailboat, then you know that putting more than one person in a boat and navigating it successfully requires spoken language, a capacity paleoanthropologists think pre-Homo sapiens hominins did not possess,' Shea said. 'On the other hand, just because some earlier hominins made it to these Wallacean islands does not mean they were successful.' By success, Shea means long-term survival. 'They might have survived a while after arriving, left behind indestructible stone tools, and then became extinct,' Shea said via email. 'After all, the only hominin that is not extinct is us.' Brumm and his colleagues are continuing their investigative work at Calio and other sites across Sulawesi to search for fossils of early humans. There is also a growing body of evidence to suggest that tiny Homo floresiensis was the result of a dramatic reduction in body size over the course of around 300,000 years after Homo erectus became isolated on Flores about 1 million years ago. Animals can scale down in size when living on remote islands due to limited resources, according to previous research. Finding fossils might help researchers understand the evolutionary fate of Homo erectus, if it is the human ancestor who made it to Sulawesi. The world's 11th-largest island and an area more than 12 times the size of Flores, Sulawesi is known for its rich, varied ecological habitats, Brumm said. 'Sulawesi is a bit of a wild card. It is essentially like a mini-continent in of itself,' Brumm noted. 'If Homo erectus became isolated on this island it might not necessarily have evolved into something like the strange new form found on the much smaller Wallacean island of Flores to the south.' Alternatively, Sulawesi could have once been a series of smaller islands, resulting in dwarfism in multiple places across the region, he said. 'I really hope hominin fossils are eventually found on Sulawesi,' Brumm said, 'because I think there's a truly fascinating story waiting to be told on that island.' Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more.
