Hobbit may be earliest Australian

[Ruby Lang]

Hobbit may be earliest Australian

From: By Carmelo Amalfi and Leigh Dayton
December 08, 2005

Theory ... a researcher has claimed Indonesia's Homo floresiensis could have lived in Australia / AFP THE tiny hobbit-like humans of Indonesia may have lived in Australia before they became extinct about 11,000 years ago.

The startling claim comes from archaeologist Mike Morwood, leader of the team that uncovered remains of the 1m-tall hominid at Liang Bua cave on Indonesia's Flores island in 2003.
They believe the pint-size person - known officially as Homo floresiensis and unofficially as the "Hobbit" - was wiped out by a volcanic eruption that spared their Homo sapiens neighbours.

Speaking at a public lecture in Perth, Professor Morwood from the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales, raised the prospect that Hobbits colonised Australia before Aboriginal settlers arrived about 60,000 years go.

He suggested that the Hobbits may have been pushed out by the bigger people, in part because their population was too small to compete.

"This is seriously being discussed now by the archaeological community in Australia as a result of our work in Indonesia," Professor Morwood said.

He suggested that further field work at sites in Indonesia and northern Australia could provide answers.
But one of Professor Morwood's colleagues on the discovery team was surprised by the notion of Hobbits in Australia. "It's the first I've heard about it," said Bert Roberts, a dating expert with the University of Wollongong.

"Call me a wet blanket, but I'm not sure where Mike thinks he's going to excavate."

Professor Roberts said conditions during the north Australian wet season meant that small, ancient remains were unlikely to have survived.

He noted that no early human remains have been unearthed in northern Australia and said that even the remains of the giant prehistoric animals, the mega-fauna, were scarce.

"Realistically, there's one cave on the planet with the remains of this species. How about looking some place close to Liang Bua cave," Professor Roberts said.

"Australia is a wild conjecture."

There is also the troubling question of how the Hobbits would have travelled south from their Indonesian homeland. To date, there's no hard evidence they could sail or raft.

Professor Morwood's surprising suggestion follows a recent report in the journal Nature that the team has been denied exploration permits to excavate at Liang Bua cave, although other sites are approved.

"We're waiting for the dust to settle," said Professor Roberts, referring to a long-running dispute with Indonesia's senior paleoanthropologist, Teuku Jacob of Gajah Mada University in Yogyakarta.

Professor Jacob, who temporarily snatched the Hobbit remains, claimed the creature was a deformed human and wished to work at the cave to prove his point.

[Conrod]

Hey, this is my first post but i think i'm going to go with the good DR Roberts on this. Does anyone know of any remains of these people found in Northern Australia.

[dawn]

I had always believed that the Cow Swamp people were the earliest inhabitants of this land, well before Aboriginal settlement. I had thought they were dated to 100,000.....

[Conrod]

Cow Swamp people?

[dawn]

The cow swamp people were the remains of a stoneage people that were found around a swamp area in Victoria called Cow Swamp. As I understand it they predated the aborigines by many thousands of years, or so I have been told. I must admit I havent tried to google the site!

[dawn]

http://wwwpersonal.une.edu.au/~pbrown3/KowS.html

Here we go Conrad...have a read of this, I was off with my dates I think!

If that dosen't work I just googled Kow Swamp

[Ruby Lang]

Hi Guys,

It's Kow Swamp (you threw me for a second too ).

Australia separated from the landmass of Pangaea long before the evolution of modern man.
Although evidence taken from the remains of a hominid found in the Kow Swamp in Victoria shows that there may have been predecessors to the Australian Aborigines or at least of vastly different kinds of humans coexisting with them. Yet neither of these peoples evolved in Australia but arrived here probably about 60-40 thousand years ago from somewhere in South-East Asia. The time of their arrival is still a matter of some debate but it is far enough in our prehistory to firmly establish their original ownership of the land. How they got here is also a matter of some speculation. It is often assumed that Aboriginal ancestors were able to come most of the way on foot at a time when sea levels were much lower and land linked this continent with Asia. But there is also recurrent imagery in Aboriginal dreamtime stories about ancestors arriving by boat.

-----------------------------------------------------------

The Australian, Jan 2004

Boffins in row on sands of time

By Leigh Dayton * Science writer

NEW estimates of the age of ancient Aboriginal remains found in northern Victoria's Kow Swamp have reignited a long-running debate about the peopling of Australia and triggered charges of scientific censorship.
The findings, published recently in the Journal of Human Evolution, seem straightforward.
According to geochronologists Tim Stone and Matthew Cupper of Melbourne University, sand in which the early Australians were buried is older than previously believed. Using a technique called optically stimulated luminescence, they found the sand was between 19,000 and 22,000 years old, instead of 9000 to 15,000 years, as determined by earlier carbon dating.
Independent dating experts Bert Roberts of Wollongong University and Rainer Grun of the Australian National University agreed yesterday the sands were properly dated.
What's infuriated experts such as ANU anthropologist Alan Thorne -- who excavated the remains between 1968 and 1972 -- are the conclusions drawn by the Melbourne team.
Firstly, Dr Thorne said there was not a ``shred of evidence'' the dates were associated with the burials.
Dr Roberts was also dubious about the ``ambiguous'' relation between the skeletons and the sand.
Further, communication seen by The Australian confirms journal editor Fred Spoor of University College London would not permit Dr Thorne and Darren Curnoe, of the University of NSW department of anatomy, to respond to the paper in the journal.
``You can't tell people they can't comment on part of the study, especially the part that's so silly,'' Dr Thorne said. ``It's called censorship and it has no place in science.''
According to Dr Thorne, he and Dr Curnoe should be able to reply to claims made by Mr Stone and Dr Cupper that the Kow Swamp people developed heavyset ``robust'' features as a response to the severity of the last ice age, between 19,000 and 22,000 years ago, and that the people disappeared when the cold retreated.
``The robusticity exists today,'' Dr Thorne said, noting that people sharing the traits live across central Australia, the Murray River Valley and Arnhem Land.
He said the people were one of several groups of physically different people who settled Australia.
Mr Stone was not party to the dispute between Dr Thorne, Dr Curnoe and Professor Spoor. While Mr Stone dismissed Dr Thorne's criticisms, he acknowledged he and Dr Cupper had ``put our spin on the results''.

[dawn]

What dipstick would spell cow with a "K" DOH!!!

[Conrod]

Cheers, all questions answered.

[jezza]

The earliest human remains yet located were found around Lake Mungo in the Willandra Lakes chain. They have been dated to beyond radio carbon dating 40,000+ yrs. They are significant as they display evidence of cremation and funeral rites.
The Kow swamp people have been dated to approx 22,000 yrs. However what is significant is there physical form was a more solid/taller shape than the Willandra people. Hence the discussion of a Gracile and Robust Aboriginal race.
Also the shape of the heads sloping/conical of the Kow swamp people was different from any other human with larger jaws and solid neck/shoulder ( Sounds familiar to something being sought by members of this site??)

[philt]

Hey, this is my first post but i think i'm going to go with the good DR Roberts on this. Does anyone know of any remains of these people found in Northern Australia.

There are no remains found as yet but I also agree with Dr Roberts. If the land bridge was intact then anything could be possible.

[Wally]

Dont overlook our little hairy friends who are currently in existance in the Gammon Ranges.
Wally

[jezza]

Current geographical studies report that the Australian mainland did not join up with SE Asia at anytime during the ica ages. The closest distance was approx 90kms.
It is believed the aboriginal folklore of arriving by boat would have to be considered accurate.
Theories exist that the original migration was attracted by the sight of rising smoke on the horizons and the ancestors would steer towards these during the monsoons.

[dawn]

Jezza, I don't know if it is possible to tell, but do we know how deep that 90k of ocean was back then? The ocean levels would have been a lot lower I would imagine that would maybe have allowed for a lot of little islets? to be dry, would it have been possible to wade from islet to islet?

[Hunter]

I haven't been keeping up to date on this news item but a Doco I watched a few weeks back said the Hobbits were now believed to be Australopithecines. Pre-cursors to our Cro-magnon forebears. They came all the way from Africa to a nearby Island so it seems incredulous that they didn't reach Australia. They probably did have boats. Why not? Even primatives understood that wood floated. Boats rarely fossilise so that explains the lack of physical evidence. Some inventions just recur over and over. Like cement and steam engines. Seems more than possible to me. I'd say it was the most likely scenario and if I was to look up Australian Australopithecines I'm sure there would be some mention. It's just that the mainland Australopiths didn't shrink adapt to the environment. In fact the Tasmanian Aborigine (now extinct) was much taller than the mainland peoples. According to records so I hear.

http://www.webster-dictionary.net/d.asp ... opithecine

Definition of australopithecine
n. 1. any of several extinct humanlike small-brained bipedal primates of the genus Australopithecus; they existed from 1 to 4 million years ago.

Related Words
Australopithecus, genus Australopithecus

[Hunter]

My bad!

H. erectus is the ancestor of the hobbits. Not an australopith.

Hobbit page at Wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis

[Hunter]

from wiki

Significance
The discovery is widely considered the most important of its kind in recent history, and came as a surprise to the anthropological community. The new species challenges many of the ideas of the discipline.

Homo floresiensis is so different in form from other members of genus Homo that it forces the recognition of a new, undreamt-of variability in the genus, and provides evidence against linear evolution.

No doubt, this discovery provides more fuel for perennial debate over the out-of-Africa or multiregional models of speciation of modern humans, despite H. floresiensis not itself being an ancestor of modern humans. Already, further arguments have been made on either side.

The discoverers of H. floresiensis fully expect to find the remains of other, equally divergent Homo species on other isolated islands of Southeast Asia, and think it possible, if not quite "likely", that some lost Homo species could be found still living in some unexplored corner of jungle.

Henry Gee, a senior editor of the journal Nature, has agreed, saying, "Of course it could explain all kinds of legends of the little people. They are almost certainly extinct, but it is possible that there are creatures like this around today. Large mammals are still being found. I don't think the likelihood of finding a new species of human alive is any less than finding a new species of antelope, and that has happened" [2].

Gee has also written that "The discovery that Homo floresiensis survived until so very recently, in geological terms, makes it more likely that stories of other mythical, human-like creatures such as Yetis are founded on grains of truth....Now, cryptozoology, the study of such fabulous creatures, can come in from the cold" [3].

An alternative suggestion is that Homo floresiensis was actually a rainforest-adapted type of modern Homo sapiens, like Pygmies and Negritos, only of a more extreme type.