The people that time forgot
December 13, 2004
Discovered by Australian and Indonesian scientists, the new human species was just a metre tall and believed to have eaten small elephants. Deborah Smith goes in search of the lost hobbits of Flores.
When Australian archaeologist Douglas Hobbs arrives in the hot and steamy valley on the Indonesian island of Flores where the new human species was found, word gets around quickly. Within moments, farmer Rikus Bandar and his youngest son Agustinus Mangga come running from different directions out of their fields of coffee, rice and corn.
It is their first chance to talk with one of the discovery team since the news broke in October that put their large limestone cave, Liang Bua, on the international map. Then, it was revealed that Australian and Indonesian scientists had dug up skeletons of Homo floresiensis, dubbed "hobbits", that stood only a metre tall.
The scientists found the first skeleton in the cave in September 2003. The one-metre-tall female, aged about 30, lived about 18,000 years ago. Six similar skeletons were later found, some of whom lived in the cave 13,000 years ago. The scientists have speculated that the species may have lived on Flores until the 16th century.
They were dark and hairless with sunken eyes, a flat nose, large teeth, a protruding mouth and no chin. Despite having a small brain, the scientists believe the species could cook, hunt large prey and build rafts.
Family members, young and old, crowd into Bandar's small bamboo hut. Over a thick brew of coffee, they express their surprise that in the month since the scientific announcement more than 25 people from as far afield as Sweden and England have made the journey to the sleepy village because of the find.
They proudly show Hobbs a newspaper article from Jakarta that has grainy photographs of them. The father and son are no longer just ordinary farmers on this remote island - they are also now the guardians of one of the most famous caves on Earth.
Bandar and Mangga hold the keys to the gate of the large limestone shelter around the corner from the hut where apparently, for at least 80,000 years, humans a metre tall with pot bellies and very long arms took refuge from the heat and feasted on mini elephants.
It is thought the hobbits lived on Flores - one of the world's most geologically unstable areas with 13 active volcanos - until they were wiped out by a volcanic eruption 12,000 years ago. To get to the cave it takes a slow, four-hour climb in a good car along the narrow, twisting road from the west coast of the predominantly Catholic island to the closest hill town, Ruteng.
Making the 14-kilometre descent on a bumpy side road to Liang Bua takes another hour. The big chunks of ancient coral seabed dotted between the trees on the way down give the first clue that something unusual is ahead.
For decades Bandar has helped local archaeologists who made the trek there. For the past four winters he has also acted as foreman for the Australian and Indonesian team - led by Professor Mike Morwood, of the University of New England (UNE), that discovered the new human species - organising villagers to help them dig for fossils each year.
One day, Liang Bua could be the jewel in the crown of a new tourism industry for the impoverished island, but for now there is not much to see inside the 30-metre wide cave, except for two sticks that record the spots where hobbit bones were found. Any of its remaining attractions lie protected beneath hundreds of tonnes of dirt until the scientists return next year.
The Australian end of the hobbit story began a decade ago in the Kimberleys in Western Australia. Morwood and Hobbs were on a dig together when conversation turned to the big questions about our continent: when, why and how did the first people arrive in Australia 50,000 or so years ago.
They knew pottery had been left scattered on the Kimberley coastline by Indonesian seafarers who came between 1720 and 1900 to collect sea cucumbers. It set them wondering whether ancient humans might have used the same currents and sea routes to travel south.
"So we hired a boat and went sailing in the shallow Arafura Sea," says Hobbs. Most importantly, during the journey they turned their attention to Flores. The sea routes used by the Indonesian sailors passed by this tropical island, colonised in the 16th century by the Portuguese, who gave it its name: Cabo das Flores, or Cape of Flowers.
The Dutch followed the Portuguese. And among those priests who successfully set about converting the locals to Catholicism last century was Father Theodor Verhoeven, who also happened to be a keen archaeologist.
Verhoeven dug at many sites across Flores in the 1950s and '60s, including the hobbit cave, which he also used as a classroom. "He would walk around wondering what was under his feet," says Hobbs.
Morwood was able to find some scientific papers the priest had published in obscure Dutch and German journals that outlined his discovery of stone tools and an extinct type of elephant known as a stegodon in a valley called the Soa Basin.
While his colleagues dismissed Verhoeven as just an enthusiastic amateur, Morwood took a punt and headed to Flores in 1995. At a site called Mata Menge in the Soa Basin, that has since been dated to 840,000 years old, he found stone tools in clear association with stegodon bones.
It was a major find. It meant archaic humans, Homo erectus, had been able to cross the treacherous ocean channels from Java and make it to the remote island a very long time ago.
On the Earth's timescale, Flores was created yesterday. It is only about 40 million years old, while north Australia is more than 2 billion years old. As the tectonic plate our ancient continent sits upon has slowly drifted northwards, it has collided with the Eurasian plate, sliding down under it and pushing the land upwards to form the island.
Flores also sits over a hotspot, resulting in regular volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. One severe shake and ensuing tsunami destroyed the town of Maumere in 1992, killing more than 2500 people.
There is no forgetting these facts on the trip to Mata Menge. The road from the nearest big town, Bajawa, carves its way down the side of an ancient crater left by a volcanic explosion. The smell of sulphurous gas, venting from deep below the Earth's surface, wafts through the thick undergrowth.
Unusual looking, large black boulders lie on the steep hillside, the weathered remains of the centre of an ancient lava flow. At the bottom, local people bathe and play in the boiling hot springs that bubble out of the ground at the village where we set off on the 2.5 kilometre walk through the heat to the Mata Menge dig site.
The 35-kilometre-wide Soa Basin is circled by mountains and volcanoes. Looming ominously to the south is Gunung Ebulobo, still active, steam belching out of the top of its 2100-metre perfectly-shaped cone.
Morwood's stone tool find at Mata Menge in 1995 secured his team a three-year grant from the Australian Research Council, which he was able to stretch out to five years with some deft juggling of exchange rates.
The Australians have a philosophy of drawing on the expertise of scientists from many disciplines as well as joining forces with Indonesian experts. The studies in the Soa Basin have been a collaboration with the Indonesian Geological Research and Development Centre, led by Dr Fachroel Aziz. The scientists also try to involve villagers as much as possible so the research benefits the people of Flores, says Hobbs.
In this friendly society, where Christianity has been transplanted onto a tradition of animism and ancestor worship, the people like to sacrifice a chicken or a pig before each excavation begins, to examine the entrails and celebrate with a feast and some palm wine.
"Blood is daubed on all the tools and on the wrists of the researchers," Hobbs says.
The people who live in the Soa Basin use it as a rangeland for their cattle and water buffalo. Soon after we arrive at the Mata Menge dig site, a man rides up on horseback to check us out, waving as he sees we are with the well-known archaeologist.
The dark rock near the site is sprinkled with white pieces of stegodon bone. And if you know what you're looking for, it is possible to pick up an ancient stone tool from the ground.
Verhoeven dug there first. The Australian and Indonesian researchers have now excavated an area about 15 by 10 metres, as well as numerous other sites in the basin.
The region is an archaeological treasure trove because lava has periodically blocked the exit of the river running through it, creating a lake that has allowed sediments to settle in a layer-cake effect.
From this dirt, a lost world of strange creatures has been revealed. "We've pulled out full stegodons with tusks four-metres long," says Hobbs.
The team has identified four periods in the past million years when the basin was dry. About 900,000 years ago, pygmy stegodon, giant tortoises and komodo dragons - but no humans - wandered the land.
By 850,000 years ago a new batch of large stegodon had swum to the island and lived in the basin with dragons and giant rats.
The early humans arrived and left their stone tools in the lakeless period between 800,000 and 700,000 years ago. And today, the basin is dry again.
Morwood's team's discovery that Homo erectus had made it to Flores by 800,000 years ago implied these archaic humans were much smarter than had been thought, and it was controversial scientific news when published in 1998.
The stretches of water they would have had to cross on the way from Java are very deep and treacherous. While we were on Flores, an experienced local diver drowned, swept away in the strong currents between Flores and Komodo Island, where the dragons still roam wild.
The intrepid Homo erectus mob that made it to Flores must have been able to talk, work as a group and build sea craft, Morwood argues. "It wasn't just a pregnant woman on a log," adds Hobbs.
When the 2000 season in the Soa Basin was finished, the Australian researchers decided to take a look at Liang Bua, where an Indonesian team led by Professor Radien Soejono had dug between 1978 and 1989.
Hobbs says it was the neighbouring cave - Liang Galang -that convinced him the hobbit cave was a promising site.
To show us this spot, Mangga suddenly breaks off from the track to Liang Bua, and heads up the hill, hacking away at the thick scrub. The small entrance is hidden by creepers, but once inside the cave, the floor drops steeply away, down about 15 metres.
"It meant Liang Bua could be very deep too," says Hobbs, adding, "We've not hit bedrock yet."
The hobbit cave is special because it has a raised lip along the front that has meant sediments built up slowly and evenly as water flowed through the cave over the millenniums, locking in the remains of those who lived and died there.
The Australians teamed up with researchers from the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta and have been digging each year since. It is hard, hot, tiring work, day after day, month after month. But the cave provides a cool spot for an afternoon sleep, something the hobbits probably appreciated.
Hobbs says his main concern when everyone is in the cave is that a sudden earthquake could bring down the huge stalactites from the roof, which may well have contributed to the fate of the hobbits.
Morwood's team has developed expertise in excavating quickly to depth with picks and shovels, and shoring up the hole against a cave-in.
The team thought they would find modern humans, Homo sapiens, in Liang Bua. But as they dug down in the centre of the cave in 2001 they came across the radius of a forearm and a toe bone that were clearly not modern. Hobbs recalls shouting excitedly. "We've got it. And it's archaic."
Dating experts, Professor Bert Roberts of the University of Wollongong and Professor Jack Rink of McMaster University in Canada, flew straight to Flores to take samples.
In the 2002 season, little material of note was uncovered. But in 2003, the team hit paydirt at a spot near the left-hand wall, facing into the cave.
The Australians had gone home in August when their visas ran out. But Dr Thomas Sutikna, from the Jakarta centre, and his team kept digging. In September, at 5.9 metres down, they uncovered the skull and bones of a 30-year-old woman who died 18,000 years ago.
"It is very tiny and we are thinking it is the skull of a child," recalls Sutikna. "It is very soft and fragile and we can't touch it straight away."
It took great care and expertise to remove the moist, tissue paper-like remains, says Morwood.
Once they were safely in Jakarta, UNE bone expert Professor Peter Brown rushed over. When he saw the remains of the little woman, "my jaw dropped to my knees", he says.
This year the team recovered the woman's long arms as well, and bits of other hobbits, to make a total of seven small hominids in all. They also came across an area where a stegodon had been butchered, and found evidence of fire use.
But in a development that has outraged the Indonesian and Australian team, the remains of all seven hobbits have been removed from Jakarta by a leading Indonesian palaeanthropologist, Professor Teuku Jacob, to his own laboratory in Gadjah Mada University in Jogjakarta. Although long retired, Soejono, who still wields influence, insisted he take them, although this is in breach of an agreement between UNE and the Jakarta centre. Jacob, who has claimed the skeleton is not a new species but the remains of a small human related to a local pigmy population, has signed an agreement to return them by January 1, but Brown is sceptical he will honour it.
"It should never have happened," he says.
The Liang Bua dig is part of a much bigger project funded with an $800,000 Australian Government Discovery grant to understand the archaeology and past climate on either side of the Wallace Line. This is an imaginary line separating islands to the west, such as Java, which were joined to the Asian mainland by land bridges at times of low sea level, from those to the right, such as Flores, which have always been isolated from both Asia and Australia.
Hobbs and Dr Chris Turney of the University of Wollongong are studying the chemical signatures and dates of samples of volcanic ash from sites around Flores to try and fathom the island's volcanic past.
Kira Westaway, also from Wollongong, is studying the history of the environment, and how the river terraces and caves were formed, which sees her having to climb high in the caves taking cores from the stalactites.
Dr Carol Lentfer, of Southern Cross University, uses pollen and other plant evidence of past climate in sediments and on stone tools from the area to get a better picture of the hobbits' world. She may even be able to get DNA from the tools, which could reveal who used them and what they slaughtered.
"It might turn out that modern humans were killing the hobbits," she says.
Early next year the team will return to a limestone cave in east Java, called Song Gupuh, where they have found animal remains and tools dating back 35,000 years.
They will dig in Sulawesi, steering clear of unrest in the north by concentrating on sites in the south. Morwood says it is likely that other dwarfed or giant animals, including hominids, could be found on this island, too.
And they will return to Flores. Apart from digging for more bones in Liang Bua, they will explore other caves on the island, including one near Boawae, at the base of Gunung Ebulobo, where folklore has it that hairy hobbit-like people called Ebu Gogo, who ate everything they could get their hands on, including villagers' babies, lived on the mountain long ago.
