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Homo floresiensis ancestor

Several teeth from an adult and children, and the fossilised mandible of a diminutive species of early human that lived 700 000 years ago have been discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores. It is thought to be the direct ancestor of the Hobbit of Flores, the 1.1 metre tall human species that lived around 50 000 years ago.


Volcano view

The volcanic landscape around Mata Menge, where the older 'hobbits' were found.

Photo: Unknown     Source: http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/new-hobbit-fossils-on-flores-hint-at-varied-human-evolution/


map




Location of the latest finds.

Photo: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/




aerial photo
Aerial photo of the general site. Note the filled in trench at the top of this image, possibly in a sterile area.

Photo: © Kinez Riza
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
Ultimate Source: Brumm et al. (2016)




mata menge grassland
The Mata Menge site is an open grassland, much as it would have been in 700 000 BP.

Photo: © Dr Gerrit van den Bergh/University of Wollongong
Source and text: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
Ultimate Source: Brumm et al. (2016)




hobbit jaw
The fossilised mandible of a diminutive species of early human that lived 700 000 years ago has been discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores. It is thought to be the direct ancestor of the Hobbit of Flores, the 1.1 metre tall human species that lived around 50 000 years ago.

Photo: © Kinez Riza
Source: video, www.nature.com/nature Text: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/




hobbit jaw



A good comparison of the relevant mandibles from sciencemag.org.

Photo: © Y. Kaifu et al./Nature © June 2016
Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/06/tiny-jaw-reveals-dawn-hobbit




hobbit tooth hobbit tooth
The tooth of an adult found at the site.

Photo: © Kinez Riza
Source: video, www.nature.com/nature




hobbit tooth
The two milk teeth from children found in the deposit.

Photo: © Kinez Riza
Source: video, www.nature.com/nature




hobbit tooth
Fractured molar, 9 mm wide, from the deposit.

Photo: © Kinez Riza
Source: video, www.nature.com/nature




Homo naledi timeline


Hominin timeline.

Note that Homo floresiensis has not been placed on this timeline. van den Bergh et al. (2016) indicate that it may be a form of Homo erectus.

Photo: © National Geographic, Jason Treat, NGM staff
Source: Lee Berger, University of the Witwatersrand (WITS), John Hawks, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Proximate source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/05/homo-naledi-human-evolution-science/




aerial shot of dig
Aerial shot of the particular part of the dig in which the new discoveries were made.

Photo: © Kinez Riza
Source: video, www.nature.com/nature




hobbit skull
This is the skull of one of the Homo floresiensis from Liang Bua cave.

Photo: © Kinez Riza
Source: video, www.nature.com/nature




map
Location where the mandible was found, and the discoverer.

The fossils were found in a deposit of sandstone (pictured) which is thought to be laid down by an ancient stream. Dating techniques revealed the fossils were 700 000 years old.

PhD student Mika Puspaningrum is pictured pointing to where she found the mandible fragment in October 2014.

Photo: © Dr Gerrit van den Bergh/University of Wollongong
Source and text: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
Ultimate Source: Brumm et al. (2016)




teeth diagram




This is a very clear diagram of the hominin fossils found at Mata Menge, and their source in the jaw of the hominin, thought to be similar or identical to a diminutive Homo erectus.

As noted in the diagram, the fossils are believed to be from one adult and two children.

Photo: © Yousuke Kaifu; Susan Hayes prepared the topmost panel.
Complete diagram and text: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jun/08/new-fossils-shed-light-evolution-hobbits-flores#img-2




teeth diagram
Stone tools found during excavation in Mata Menge, Soa Basin, Ngada, Flores, East Nusa Tenggara, are exhibited during a media conference at the Geology Museum in Bandung.

Photo: Arya Dipa, http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/06/10/oldest-ancient-human-remains-from-flores-made-public.html




researchers
Leaders of the Mata Menge dig sitting around the fossil tusk of a pygmy Stegodon. (Top left) Gerrit D ‘Gert’ van den Bergh, from the University of Wollongong, (top right) Iwan Kurniawan, from the Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory at Bandung’s Geology Museum (Indonesia), and (bottom) Adam Brumm, from the Griffith University Research Centre of Human Evolution.

Photo: © Iwan Kurniawan, curator at the Geology Museum in Bandung, Indonesia
Source: https://theconversation.com/a-700-000-year-old-fossil-find-shows-the-hobbits-ancestors-were-even-smaller-60192




Hobbit recreation




Recreation of the later hobbit.

Photo and sculptor: Unknown

Source: http://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/new-hobbit-fossils-on-flores-hint-at-varied-human-evolution/




Hobbit recreation




Top three rows, hobbit ancestor mandible from Mata Menge.

Bottom, 'modern' hobbit mandible from Liang Bua cave, for comparison.

Photo: Brumm et al. (2016)




mata menge teeth




Teeth found at Mata Menge in 2014.

Length of scale interval 1 cm.

Photo:Brumm et al. (2016)




mata menge teeth




The dig at Mata Menge. Note the Stegodon florensis (ancient elephant) fossils.

a, View of Excavation 32 (trench E-32) in 2014, taken towards the north-north-west. The dip slope visible in the background is the eastern flank of the Welas Caldera, which was the source for many of the volcanic products deposited in the area. Photo and text:Brumm et al. (2016)




stegodon
Stegodon

Fibre Glass sized life size models of extinct Elephants (tusks measuring 18 feet) which once lived in Siwalik Hill ranges.

Stegodon is a genus of the extinct subfamily Stegodontinae of the order Proboscidea. Stegodonts were present from 11.6 mya to late Pleistocene, with unconfirmed records of regional survival until 4 100 years ago. Fossils are found in Asian and African strata dating from the late Miocene. They lived in large parts of Asia, East and Central Africa and North America during the Pleistocene.

Sculptor: Unknown
Photo: Vjdchauhan
Permission: GNU Free Documentation License
Text: Adapted from Wikipedia




stegodon
Stegodon skeleton at the Gansu Provincial Museum.

Photo: 幽灵巴尼
Permission: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license




mata menge diagrams site
Context and chronology of the hominin fossils at Mata Menge.

a, b, location of Flores and the So'a Basin.

c, Digital elevation map of the So'a Basin, with location of Mata Menge and other sites mentioned in the text. A single outlet of the main river system (the Ae Sésa) drains the basin via a steep-walled valley towards the northeast.

d, Stratigraphy and chronology of the main fossil-bearing intervals and intervening Ola Bula Formation (OBF) deposits at Mata Menge. Several basin-wide key marker tephra beds that are exposed in the hill flank on the northern side of Mata Menge (trench E-34/34B) are eroded in the central part of the stream valley, where they are replaced by a 4–5-m-thick sequence of tuffaceous mudflows with intervening fluvial lenses forming the lower fossil-bearing palaeovalley-fill sequence.

e, f, Context of the hominin fossils; f is a 3D image of Mata Menge and surrounds, with excavated trenches outlined in red and labelled, and e is a 3D representation of the stratigraphy exposed by trench E-32A to E, with coloured ovals denoting the positions of in situ hominin fossils (SOA-MM1, 2 and 4-6) excavated from the fluvial sandstone unit, Layer II. The remaining hominin specimens were retrieved in the sieves.

Trenches E-1 to E-8 were excavated between 2004 and 2006, at the section originally excavated by Th. Verhoeven in the 1950s5, 6. The remaining trenches were excavated between 2010 and 2015. E-12 is a slot-trench excavated into the side of a hill, revealing an 18-m-thick sequence of lacustrine clays and micritic limestones, fluvial sandstone beds, massive tuffaceous mudflows, well-developed clay-textured palaeosols, and numerous centimetre-thick basaltic tephra inter-beds from the middle-upper part of the OBF.

At the base of this slot-trench, a less than 30-cm-thick fossil-bearing sandstone unit (Layer II)—from which all the hominin fossils were retrieved—was exposed.

Tephra codes in d are as follows (top to bottom): T6 (upper inter-regional tephra); PGT-2 (Piga Tephra 2); T-UMM (Upper Mata Menge Tephra); T-LMM (Lower Mata Menge Tephra); T-Pu (Pu Maso Tephra); T3 (lower inter-regional tephra); T-T (Turakeo Tephra); T-WSI (Wolo Sege Ignimbrite); and T-W (Wolowawu Tephra). The original published 40Ar/39Ar age for T-WSI is 1.02 ± 0.02 Ma (ref. 14); however, when recalculated to the recently determined value for the age standard ACS-2 used in this study (1.185 Ma; see reference 25 in the Supplementary Information), T-WSI becomes 1.01 ± 0.02 Ma.

Photo and text: Brumm et al. (2016)




References

  1. Brumm A. et al., 2016: Age and context of the oldest known hominin fossils from Flores, Nature 534, 249–253 (09 June 2016) doi:10.1038/nature17663
  2. van den Bergh G. et al., 2016: Homo floresiensis-like fossils from the early Middle Pleistocene of Flores, Nature, 534 (7606): 245–248. doi:10.1038/nature17999. PMID 27279221.


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Recent additions, changes and updates to Don's Maps

This page last updated: Tuesday, 11th May 2021 11:13


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Note, however, that the Ägyptischen Museum München and the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel permit photography of its exhibits for private, educational, scientific, non-commercial purposes. If you intend to use any photos from these sources for any commercial use, please contact the relevant museum and ask for permission.

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My background

Some people have expressed interest in knowing a little bit about me. For those people, here is a potted biography:

I live in New South Wales, Australia, and I am a retired high school mathematics/science teacher.

The Donsmaps site is totally independent of any other influence. I work on it for my own pleasure, and finance it myself. I started before there was an internet, when I thought I could do a better job of the small map on the end papers of Jean Auel's wonderful book, Valley of the Horses, by adding detail and contour lines, and making a larger version. I have always loved maps since I was a young boy.

I had just bought a black and white 'fat Mac' with a whopping 512 kB of memory (!), and no hard disk. With a program called 'Super Paint' and a lot of double work (hand tracing first the maps of Europe from atlases, then scanning the images on the tracing paper, then merging the scanned images together, then tracing these digital scans on the computer screen), I made my own black and white map.

Then the internet came along, the terms of my internet access gave me space for a small website, and Don's Maps started. I got much better computers and software over the years, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for example, and my maps became colourised and had more detail. I did a lot of maps of the travels of Ayla from Jean Auel's books, and I gradually included other pages with more and more photos available from the web, and scanned from books or from scientific papers, since I was not happy with the quality generally available. I became very interested in the Venus figurines, and set out to make a complete record of the ice age ones. Along the way I got interested in archaeology for its own sake.

In 2008 my wife and I went to Europe, and when we arrived in Frankfurt at sunrise after the 24 hour plane trip from Sydney, while my wife left on her own tour with her sister, they visited relatives in Germany and Austria, I went off by myself on the train to Paris. Later that afternoon I took a train to Brive-la-Gaillarde, found a hotel and caught up on lost sleep. The next morning I hired a car, and over the next four weeks visited and photographed many of the original archaeological sites in the south of France, as well as many archaeological museums. It was a wonderful experience. My wife and I met up again later in the Black Forest, and cycled down the Danube from its source to Budapest, camping most of the way, a wonderful trip, collecting many photos, including a visit to Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic, as well as visiting the Vienna natural history museum. Jean Auel fans will realise the significance of that trip!

Luckily I speak French, the trips to France would have been difficult or impossible otherwise. No one outside large cities speaks English (or they refuse to). I was travelling independently, not as part of a tour group. I never knew where I was going to be the next night, and I camped nearly everywhere, except for large cities. I am a very experienced bushwalker (hiker) and have the required equipment - a one-man ultra lightweight tent, sleeping bag, stove, raincoat, and so on, all of which I make myself for use here when I go bushwalking, especially down the beautiful gorges east of Armidale, though for Europe I use a commercial two person lightweight tent, since weight is not so much of a problem when cycling or using a car, and in any case my wife was with me when cycling, once along the Donau from its source to Budapest in 2008, and again from Amsterdam to Copenhagen and then up the Rhine from Köln to the Black Forest in 2014, both of which were memorable and wonderful trips.

In 2012 we went to Canada for a wedding and to visit old friends, and I took the opportunity to visit the wonderful Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, where I took many photographs of the items on exhibit, particularly of the superb display of artefacts of the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest.

In 2014 my wife and I did another European cycling tour, from Amsterdam to Copenhagen, then from Cologne up the Rhine to the Black Forest, camping most of the way in each case, and taking many useful photos in museums along the way, including the museums at Leiden, Netherlands, and Roskilde in Denmark, and the National Museum in Copenhagen. Again, I later hired a car and did more photography and visited many more sites in France.

In 2015 I made a lone visit to all the major museums in western Europe by public transport, mostly by train, and that went very well. I had learned a lot of German while travelling with my wife, who is a fluent speaker of the language, and of all the European countries, Germany is my favourite. I feel comfortable there. I love the people, the food, and the beer. Germans are gemütlich, I have many friends there now.

I repeated the visit to western Europe in 2018, to fill in some gaps of museums I had not visited the first time, because they were either closed for renovation the first time (such as the Musée de l'Homme in Paris) or because I ran out of time, or because I wanted to fill in some gaps from major museums such as the British Museum, the Berlin Museum, München, the Louvre, the Petrie and Natural History Museums in London, the Vienna Natural History Museum, the important museum in Brno, and museums in northern Germany. It takes at least two visits, preferably three, to thoroughly explore the items on display in a major museum.

I spend a lot of time on the site, typically at least a few hours a day, often more. I do a lot of translation of original papers not available in English, a time consuming but I believe a valuable task. People and fate have been very generous to me, and it is good to give back a very small part of what I have been given. With the help of online translation apps and use of online dictionaries there are few languages I cannot translate, though I find Czech a challenge!

I will never be able to put up all the photos I have taken, each photo needs a lot of research, typically, to put it in context on the site. I do not have enough time left, life is short and death is long, but I am going to give it a good shot!

Life has been kind to me, I want for nothing, and am in good health. Not many in the world are as lucky as I am, and I am grateful for my good fortune.

My best wishes to all who read and enjoy the pages of my site.



May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
And may rain on a tin roof lull you to sleep at night.


Webmaster: Don Hitchcock

Email: don@donsmaps.com



Website last updated Monday 21 October 2024