'Hobbit' Island Shows Signs of Ancient Civilization

Gregory Mone
Contributor

(March 17) -- In 2005, archaeologist Adam Brumm was in the midst of a dig on the sweltering Indonesian island of Flores when he decided to embark on a midday walk. While the rest of the crew was napping to stay out of the heat, Brumm, from Australia's University of Wollongong, came across a large, deep gully and ventured down. "I found some stone tools lying around on the surface," he recalled. But these weren't just any tools. Brumm suspected they were very, very old. "I quickly realized the significance and brought the rest of the team back."

Now, after painstakingly excavating a section of the gully over several years, Brumm and his colleagues reveal in a new paper in the journal Nature that the site is indeed important. Their findings suggest that ancient humans occupied the island as long as 1 million years ago, or 120,000 years earlier than previously believed. The species that used these simple tools could be the ancestors of the famous so-called "hobbits of Flores," the tiny, small-brained species discovered there in 2003 and named after the little folk of the "Lord of the Rings" books.

The work has also overturned the going theory on what happened to certain species of animal life on the island and sparked new questions about when premodern humans actually reached Flores.

Before this discovery, scientists believed that ancient humans appeared there 880,000 years ago. Archaeological discoveries from around that period reveal a significant change in animal life. Several species, including a small elephantlike creature and a giant tortoise, were wiped out. "We always thought the premodern humans arrived on Flores and caused the extinction," archaeologist Gert van den Bergh, a co-author of the Nature paper, told AOL News.

While no actual bones or fossilized remains were found at the site Brumm wandered across, the presence of the tools suggests that ancient humans were on Flores long before that extinction. So this idea that they arrived and killed off the giant tortoise and pygmy elephant no longer holds. "Either this means that the first humans to arrive didn't have an enormous impact," van den Bergh said, "or maybe the extinctions were caused by other events, like volcanic eruptions."

If volcanic activity killed off the two species, he explained, its effects on the island's ancient humans is hard to determine. They may have survived the event. Or they might have been wiped out as well. In this case, van den Bergh said, it could be that the island was colonized later, by another group.

"The find is exciting," Brumm told AOL News, "but it's also really frustrating because now we have absolutely no idea when hominins first reached Flores."

One way out of this evolutionary maze would be to dig deeper into the past. But that is not going to happen at the site Brumm discovered. The archaeologists literally hit rock bottom on their dig. Now they're in search of a new hot spot of ancient activity.

"We want to look for other places on the same island for sequences that may be older than 1 million years," van den Bergh said. "We might be able to see there when the first humans actually arrived."

To put it another way, the time has come for Brumm to go for another stroll.

http://www.aolnews.com/science/article/hobbit-island-shows-evidence-of-million-year-old-civilization/19403582
(Submitted by T. Peter Park)