‘Hobbit’ hominins scavenged meat left over by Komodo dragons

The ancient humans known as hobbits, who inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores until approximately 50,000 years ago, exhibited limited hunting capabilities, according to research on animal bones discovered in their caves. It is believed by researchers that these humans scavenged meat left by Komodo dragons instead.

Fossils of Homo floresiensis were first revealed to the public in 2004. These humans were just over a meter tall, and their remains date back between 90,000 and 50,000 years.

Initially, the presence of stone tools and charred bones near their remains suggested that they engaged in complex behaviors such as controlled fire use and hunting large island animals. However, the cognitive abilities of these small-brained hominins have recently been questioned.

“I would argue that our field at large still holds on to this idea that Homo floresiensis had to have some form of advanced cognition to have reached the island and survived in a depauperate faunal community, regardless of brain size,” says Elizabeth Veatch at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.

The Liang Bua cave, where H. floresiensis remains were found, also contained numerous bones of a dwarf elephant species (Stegodon florensis insularis). Veatch and her team speculated that these animals might have been killed by Komodo dragons, one of the world’s largest reptiles, which inhabit Flores and some other Indonesian islands.

To identify the marks Komodo dragons leave on the bones of large mammals they consume, Veatch and her team conducted an experiment at Zoo Atlanta in Georgia, feeding a dead goat to a Komodo dragon. “Stegodon are extinct and it would be near impossible to create an experiment where a Komodo dragon was fed a whole elephant,” says Veatch.

Once the Komodo dragon finished its meal, 72 bones remained, with 26 showing a total of 192 tooth marks. The researchers compared these bones to over 3,000 Stegodon bone fragments found in Liang Bua cave, associated only with H. floresiensis, and to nearly 7,000 more recent bones from giant rats linked to Homo sapiens at the same site. They also checked all these bones for evidence of fire exposure.

In their experiment with the goat, the Komodo dragon preferred the carcass parts with the most meat, such as the hindquarters and forequarters.

However, the stone tool marks made by H. floresiensis on the Stegodon bones were mostly found on less desirable cuts like cranial bones and thoracic vertebrae, which would be surprising if humans had initial access to the carcasses.

Of the more than 3,000 Stegodon bone fragments connected to these ancient humans, only one showed any evidence of fire exposure, likely from a later disturbance by humans. In contrast, a fifth of the rat bones left by modern humans after the extinction of the hobbits showed signs of cooking.

“The rat bones demonstrate the pattern clearly – zero burned bones in Homo floresiensis layers, hundreds burned in modern human layers,” says Veatch. “Claims of advanced behaviour have been slowly chipped away, but our study directly confirms our suspicion that Homo floresiensis did not use fire or hunt big game as was originally claimed.”

Adam Brumm at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, notes that the study convincingly demonstrates that Homo floresiensis likely scavenged Stegodon remains rather than hunted them.

Martin Porr at the University of Western Australia adds that previous claims of Stegodon hunting and fire use by these hominins have been contentious. “In a sense, the new findings bring Homo floresiensis more in line with what we know about other small-bodied hominins, such as Australopithecines, and this would make some sense given their brain capacity and body weight,” says Porr.

However, other small hominins have only been discovered in Africa. The key question is whether Homo floresiensis descended from small hominins with a broader range or from larger hominins like Homo erectus, which later became smaller and lost certain abilities.

“I think that both options remain possible right now and it will require more research on and around Flores to clarify this,” says Porr.