by Lydia Pyne
By that 2003 Liang Bua field season, it had been well over ten years since any new fossil hominin species had been described in scientific literature. While fossils continued to enter the scientific record, they were easily assigned to well-established fossil hominin taxa, like Lucy’s Australopithecus afarensis or the Taung Child’s Australopithecus africanus. So the discovery of Flo and eight other small hominins on Flores was fundamentally a game changer in human evolution studies. Finding a hominin so small, with such a small brain, so relatively late in the geologic record, and in Southeast Asia shook up how scientists thought about human evolution. This fossil challenged the who, what, when, and where of hominin evolutionary history—in other words, the discovery was something new, it was unexpected, and it was utterly confounding.
As important as the discovery was within the scientific community, the Homo floresiensis discovery amassed an enormous amount of public interest as the announcement of the fossil neatly overlapped with the final installment of the 2001–2003 film release of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Thanks in no small part to Elijah Wood’s prosthetic-eared portrayal of the hobbit Frodo Baggins, by the time the Flores fossils were excavated and published, the world was primed to think big about small creatures. A cute little hominin was exactly what was on the world’s mind when the fossils were discovered—and a cute little hominin was what everyone got. When Nature published the Flores specimens in October 2004, I was a grad student spending a semester working on a paleoarchaeology project in coastal South Africa. The discovery shocked everyone on the project; the field director kept saying, “It was this big!!! This tall!!! This is crazy! It really is a hobbit!” He couldn’t stop gesturing about the species’ diminutive size—indicating the small stature with his hand at his waist. “What’s next? Gandalf? A Legolas? Should we ask the NSF to fund excavations at Mordor?!?”
Once a fossil is discovered, it is assigned to a species—either a new one or one that is already established. For many famous discoveries, like Lucy, the Taung Child, or even Piltdown, the bones were so different from what had been found before that the fossils justified creating that new species. All fossil discoveries are then fitted into phylogenetic trees—scientists describe where these fossils fit in terms of their evolutionary history, giving them an evolutionary narrative and context. (Is this species ancestral to another? Is it more or less like this other species?) But new fossil discoveries must also fit into a cultural context. For some—like the Taung Child—the struggle to fit into hominin evolution is its cultural story. For others—like Piltdown—the fit of the fossil to a cultural narrative is prefabricated, and the cultural story is the dismantling of that forced pairing of a fossil so perfectly designed to fit an evolutionary paradigm. Flo’s story, however, is very different from other celebrity fossils and offers a new model for a celebrity fossil. Flo simply didn’t fit the then existing models of phylogeny—she was too small and too recent in the geological record for her to easily slide onto a branch of the hominin family tree, and her cultural story practically mapped onto a preexisting template, already at hand with Lord of the Rings. It’s as though the fossil was discovered to give meaning to a flourishing cultural meme—she was a celebrity before she was discovered, and this cultural embodiment is what makes her fame so unique.
—
Back in 1995, archaeologist Dr. Mike Morwood was a lecturer at the University of New England in New South Wales, Australia. For years, his research emphasized Australian Aboriginal archaeology, particularly in Kimberley, northern Australia, in areas that would be likely beachheads for the first people to reach Australia’s shores from Asia during the Pleistocene, sometime between 2.6 million and 11,000 years ago. (Although most current research puts the period of these first Australian migrations between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago.) After spending years researching the Australian side of early Homo sapiens’ migration path, Morwood found it impossible to not wonder how and from where those first migrants from Asia came, since all of the possible routes involved crossing the biogeographic boundary known as the Wallace Line—an invisible demarcation that describes the separation and pattern of how plant and animals species separate from mainland Asia, the Asian islands, and Australia. Pleistocene migration to Australia could have followed several equally possible routes: some migrations could have followed prevailing ocean currents, with landfalls at the western tip of New Guinea and the island of Aru (part of the Greater Australian coastline during the Pleistocene); others would have involved island-hopping from the Nusa Tenggara islands from Lombok to Flores to Kimberley via Timor. Morwood’s interest in moving his research’s emphasis from Australia to Southeast Asia, specifically Indonesia, was a way of stepping back research into the question of the first Australians, tackling finally what he saw as “big questions” in archaeology and paleoanthropology.
By the mid-1990s, Morwood began writing to Indonesian researchers to explore the possibility of a collaborative project that would examine these three potential migration paths in the Wallace Line area for early Homo species. Frustrated by the slow pace of development, eventually Morwood simply went to Jakarta and introduced himself to Professor Raden Pandji Soejono at the National Research Centre for Archaeology (ARKENAS) and met with Dr. Fachroel Aziz, a paleontologist with the Geological Research and Development Centre (GRDC) in Bandung, two men interested in his project proposal. Aziz was immediately enthusiastic about a joint project because he and his team had been finding stone tool artifacts at various archaeological sites for years. A few small-scale projects around Flores provided the basis for grants that would allow a joint Australian-Indonesian team to excavate. This joint project became the foundation for the work that would eventually lead to the 2003 field season.
The project slowly expanded to include other archaeologists from GRDC, ARKENAS, the University of Gadjah Mada, and Northeastern University in Australia, and fieldwork began in the Soa Basin in 2001. Researchers visited different caves in the basin, namely Liang Bua and Liang Galan. “Stepping into the cave for the first time, I was immediately struck by its size, and particularly impressed by its suitability for human occupation: it was spacious, well lit with a northern outlook, and had a flat, dry clay floor, which would have made it a comfortable place to live,” Morwood recalled after his initial visit to Liang Bua.2
Excavations at Liang Bua, discovery site of Homo floresiensis. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia, CC BY-SA-2.5)
A project at the Liang Bua site would build on earlier archaeological work conducted by Dutch missionary and amateur archaeologist Father Theodor Verhoeven in the 1950s as well as excavations by professional archaeologists such as Professor Soejono in the 1980s. In March 2001, preparations began in earnest for modern excavations at Liang Bua—excavations that would be undertaken under the authority of ARKENAS with collaborative publications specified. On April 10, 2001, Morwood and colleagues flew to Kupang in West Timor to get excavation permits from the departments of Culture, Police, and Social Politics.
“Liang Bua is a very easy site to work on,” Morwood explained. “It is not until you step inside that you realize how big it is. An intrusive concrete archway and path now installed by the Manggarai provincial government leads up to a lockable gate in the high mesh and barbed wire fence that restricts access to the cave. The key is kept by the official cave guardians Rikus Bandar and his son Agus Mangga, who also act as guides for the few tourists venturing this far out of Ruteng, the provincial capital.”3 Liang Bua was used as an elementary school in earlier decades when Father Verhoeven first arrived in Flores. (Liang Bua was one of the many sites Father Verhoeven had excavated during his seventeen years as a resident priest and prehistorian on Flores.) In 1950, Verhoeven decided that the cave would make an excellent excavation project, and this neatly coincided with the opening of a more conventional schoolhouse. He excavated a small test pit in the west wall of the cave, just inside the entrance, that backed up to some roof fall in the back of the cave.
The early excavati
ons at Liang Bua in the twenty-first century yielded an amazing assemblage of artifacts. Once researchers pried their way through the hard flowstone of the cave’s floor, the subsequent layers of clay were chock-full of artifacts: stone tools, bones, and teeth—up to five thousand artifacts per cubic meter of deposit. Close to two hundred tons of the cave’s sedimentary deposits were processed for artifacts each season. The presence of artifacts like these indicated the presence of very old human activity in the cave; the question was just which species. When researchers found a small piece of humanlike arm bone—a radius—at a depth of around six meters, excavation efforts redoubled. “To keep tabs on how things were going at Liang Bua, I was phoning Hotel Sindha in Tuteng every night to get a summary of progress, finds and problems,” Morwood wrote. “On August 10, Thomas [Sutikna] answered the phone as if he had been sitting right on top of it. Bursting with excitement, he told me that they had just found the skeleton of a nonmodern child in Sector VII at a depth of six meters. They had found it! They had found the hominid that went with the Stegodon bones and artifacts. The very first year of our project was off to a flying start.”4
“Before Mike Morwood left for the season in 2003, I said, ‘Why are you leaving now? If you leave, maybe we will find something important.’ A few days later, on 2 September, I was supervising sector VII. Our local workers were digging at around 5.9 metres. Their trowel met with a skull. A member of our team who specializes in animal and human bones came down and said, ‘Yes, I’m sure that’s a human bone. But it’s very small.’” Wahyu Saptomo, a field archaeologist, recalled that moment of discovery ten years later in an interview with Nature correspondent Ewen Callaway. Saptomo realized the magnitude of what the team could be looking at immediately: “Thomas, he was sick and was at the hotel that day. So I went back and met with him. I said, ‘We have something very important. We found the first hominid in the Pleistocene layer.’”5
The discovery of the hominin bones was a hugely significant moment in the Liang Bua excavations, unlike anything discovered before at the site. Until any hominin bones were recovered, tying the extensive stone tool assemblages found at the site to a specific species, let alone trying to figure out how the artifacts were used, was practically impossible. So when an actual hominin skeleton was unearthed, researchers knew that they would be able to tie the fossil hominin to the stone tools that they had recovered in the cave’s sediments. Recovering the bones during the excavations, however, was incredibly difficult as the bones were exceptionally fragile—in fact, they hadn’t actually undergone the fossilization process and were, according to the research team, like “wet blotting paper” since the soils they were found in were so moist.6 Preservation of the bones would be—and was!—problematic and researchers were frantically concerned about damage to the bones since they were so soft.
To date, remains from a total of nine individuals have been recovered from the site, including one complete skull. When the bones were first recovered, on-the-ground researchers and excavators didn’t know what exactly they were looking at. Something “human” writ large, of course (or small, in this case), but whether it was an adult or a child, what species of Homo it could be assigned to, and how old were simply open questions. Morwood sent a sketch to his colleague paleoanthropologist Dr. Peter Brown, for him to weigh in on the specimens, inviting him to Flores to take a look at the discovery.
“Mike [Morwood] doesn’t know much about human skeletons, and the Indonesian researchers didn’t either. I was quite sceptical. The drawing may as well have been a Greek urn in terms of looking like anything much at all,” Brown recalled in a 2014 interview with Callaway. “I was interested and willing to go to Jakarta. It’s an interesting place to visit. I like the food. I like the atmosphere and the culture and everything else, but I didn’t expect to find anything interesting or important. At the most, I thought it was going to be a sub-adult modern human skeleton, probably dating to the Neolithic period or maybe a little bit earlier. The other possibility was a pathological individual, someone with a growth disorder. Those were my expectations when I turned up.”7 Brown, and the rest of the scientific community, would soon discover just how mistaken they were. The skeletons (plural) turned out to be anything but banal.
—
In 2004, the Liang Bua research team officially published their discovery in Nature. Thanks to Nature’s media embargo, no whispers of the find swirled through the paleointelligentsia before publication, so the announcement sent shock waves through the scientific world. In the paper, researchers described the anatomy of LB1 (“Flo”) and designated the fossil as the type specimen of the Homo floresiensis species—a new species, because the size and shape of the bones were so different from any other set of fossils collected. Researchers highlighted the unique characteristics of the bones in LB1’s nearly complete skeleton—pronounced as an adult female who stood about three feet tall, weighed between thirty-five and sixty-five pounds, and died about eighteen thousand years ago. LB1’s cranium was small—about the size of a chimpanzee’s—and the shape was confounding. This Flores specimen—a small, rather hobbit-like hominin—could walk bipedally, and archaeologists found evidence that pointed to the species’ controlled use of fire, spearheads, and group hunting—all unlikely complex behaviors for this new fossil species that wasn’t Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, or Homo sapiens.
The skeletal remains of the small hominins from Flores were met with shock but also scrutiny. On the ten-year anniversary of the Flores discovery, paleoanthropologist Dr. William Jungers, who had participated in many of the anatomical studies of the fossil after its discovery, recalled, “I had to check the date to make sure it wasn’t April Fool’s Day. It was so preposterous on the surface that there could be this little hominin that evolved in isolation in southeast Asia for God knows how long and persisted until almost the Holocene.”8 Since geologists put the beginning of the Holocene about eleven thousand years before the present, Dr. Jungers’s comment underscored the fact that Homo floresiensis had lived until a very recent time in terms of the fossil record. The scientific community seemed split as to how to best interpret the small size of the fossil specimens—disease? a new species? genetic aberrations?—and quickly put Southeast Asia back into paleoanthropology’s spotlight.
Part of introducing the specimens to the paleoanthropological community meant that the fossils had to be assigned to a specific taxa. They had to be given a scientific name and assigned to a species, and bestowing a name implicitly connotes a phylogeny and evolutionary life history. Assigning the fossils to Homo rather than Australopithecus offers a very different narrative about hominin mobility and dispersal in the Pleistocene. Assigning the species to Homo erectus would have had different implications for how much variation was acceptable within a single species. A completely new genus and species name would have meant that the fossils’ morphology was so different that there wasn’t an evolutionary narrative thread that could offer continuity between previous discoveries and the Flores discovery.
Ultimately, the team of researchers—with feedback from peer review within the scientific community—settled on Homo floresiensis. Henry Gee, then senior editor at Nature, recalled some of the difficulties that surrounded the specimen’s taxonomy. “When it came to us, they had given it this Latin name, Sundanthropus floresianus—man from the Sunda region from Flores. Well, the referees said it’s a member of Homo so that’s what it should be, and one of the referees says floresianus actually means ‘flowery anus’ so it should be floresiensis. So Homo floresiensis came along.”9
More than shake up the hominin family tree, the Flores fossil set the tone for twenty-first-century paleoanthropology. Its discovery created the sense that paleoanthropology still had new and curious fossils to find and these fossils could—would!—be found in unexpected places and have significant implication for how we think about evolution.
—
Historical context for Flo’s story goes back much further than the 1950s a
nd early excavations at Liang Bua. Paleoanthropology’s roots in Southeast Asia trace themselves to the nineteenth century with Eugène Dubois’s discovery of Java Man. Dubois’s discovery kicked off over a century of archaeological and paleoanthropological research, and scientists have been working off and on throughout Indonesia for decades. While the island archipelago could boast other hominin discoveries after Dubois’s initial work—for example, “Solo Man” (Ngandong) was discovered between 1931 and 1933 by German-Dutch paleontologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald in Java—the Last Big Find from Southeast Asia that fundamentally shook up both paleoanthropology was the Java Man fossils, found in 1891.
When Dubois published the fossil species he’d discovered and called it Pithecanthropus erectus, he was quick to argue that he had found the “missing link”—an ancient ancestor that was clear evolutionary proof of humanity’s antiquity. (Pithecanthropus erectus was later renamed Homo erectus in 1950 by biologist Ernst Mayr, once Mayr had examined the Java and Zhoukoudian specimens. The similarities in the skeletons led Mayr to conclude that these fossils, separated by time and space, were actually members of the same fossil species.) At the turn of the twentieth century, the impetus to find humanity’s “missing link” to apelike ancestors underscored scientists’ fossil-searching research agendas. These missing links were thought to be those species that showed anatomical characteristics along a continuum of apelike to humanlike—a view of evolution that we now call unilinear.