Human Hobbits?

Shhhh… Don’t tell Peter Jackson. But according to research published last week, hobbits may never have existed!

I know it’s disappointing. But last week, researchers led by Ralph Holloway of Columbia University published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that Homo floresiensis was likely just a small, deformed Homo sapiens, not a separate species.

This theory of human-hobbits isn’t new; since the discovery of an 18,000-year-old fossil in 2003 on the Indonesian island of Flores, hobbits have been a great source of debate among anthropologists and archeologists. Lack of evidence seems to be the problem, Science News reports:

Perhaps the only thing the hobbit warriors agree on is the need for more fossils to study. The skull remains the only braincase found of the hobbit people. Archaeologists have, however, unearthed other bones from at least eight other individuals.

The latest study utilized magnetic resonance imaging to scan endocasts of human skulls for microcephaly, a neurodevelopmental disorder that is characterized by a small skull and brain. The skull-scanning included adult and children, both with and without microcephaly. And the researchers concluded that the H. floresiensis skull fell into the range for microcephalic humans. In other words, hobbits were just humans with microcephaly.

But other researchers aren’t convinced, especially those that discovered the hobbit fossils in the first place. Nature News shares a few dissentions that Holloway refutes. It concludes with William Jungers of Stony Brook University in New York simply declaring “hobbit politics as usual.” Who knew?

Image: Ryan Somma/Wikimedia