Miniature hominids do not appear to have killed the island’s elephant relatives or used fire.
Long ago, on the Indonesian island of Flores, Komodo dragons ate first, tearing the flesh of cow-sized elephants and stripping their bones. Our little human relatives probably picked from the leftoversthe researchers report on July 3 in Scientific advances.
New study challenges scientists’ understanding of how animals behave Homo floresiensis – extinct hominids measuring one meter high, nicknamed “hobbits”. This suggests that the island’s smaller inhabitants were not hunting big game after all, but rather scavenging for some of their food. If so, this raises questions about H. floresiensis‘ evolution and the level of sophistication.
Tens of thousands of years ago, the island had both giants and dwarves. Isolated, local species of storks and rats have reached immense sizes. Three-meter-long venomous Komodo dragons roamed the hilly terrain. Other species have evolved smaller sizes. These included the miniaturized elephant parent Stegodon florensis insularis – who measured only 1.2 or 1.5 meters – and the hobbits, who disappeared about 50,000 years ago.
When H. floresiensis was first described more than 20 years ago in Liang Bua Cave, purported cut marks on elephant bones and the charred remains of other animals have led some researchers to propose that hominids had complex behaviors surprising by the small size of their brains: killing large prey and controlling fire. But researchers had not yet carried out a systematic analysis of the bones to confirm this idea.
Elizabeth Grace Veatch, a paleoanthropologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, and her colleagues analyzed the markings of more than 3,000 ancient artifact fragments. Stegodon bones of Liang Bua dating from 190,000 to 50,000 years ago. The researchers also fed live Komodo dragons to goats and analyzed the shape of the tooth marks left on the bones using 3D imaging. The marks on the Stegodon and the goat bones were similar and did not resemble cuts made by human stone tools. There were also no impact marks on the ancient bones from the spear points.
It was Komodo dragons that massacred the elephants, not the island’s small hominids, the team concludes. Instead, any elephant meat H. floresiensis eaten was probably salvaged from the remains.
“Komodo dragons typically consume almost all of the edible soft tissue of their prey, sometimes leaving only about 12 percent of the carcass,” says Mika Rizki Puspaningrum, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia, who was not involved in the study. It mainly consists of skin, bones and some internal organs. “This raises an interesting question about how much edible meat would actually have remained available for Homo floresiensis to exploit,” she said.
If any remained, the meat was probably eaten raw. Veatch and his colleagues analyzed nearly 7,000 fragments of rodent skeletons for signs of burning, as their remains – littering the cave floor – would have been exposed to hominid fires. But none were charred.
If hobbits didn’t kill large prey and start fires, then they might have evolved from a species that hadn’t evolved these skills either, adding another question mark to the ever-changing picture of early human evolution.
