Small Wonders: Tiny islanders elevate ‘hobbit’ debate
By Bruce Bower
Randy Newman once jokingly sang that “short people got no reason to live.” But he never met the extinct, half-sized humans found in the South Pacific that, long after their deaths, have now entered a heated scientific debate. The debate began over a previous set of fossils found in Indonesia and hailed by their discoverers as a new species of scaled-down human ancestors.
![This South Pacific cave has yielded bones of extinct, meter-tall people, including a skull filled with hardened sediment (inset), that have fueled debate over so-called hobbit fossils from Indonesia.](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/7537.jpg?resize=300%2C183&ssl=1)
A team led by paleoanthropologist Lee R. Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, found thousands of human bones in two caves in Palau, Micronesia, in 2006 and 2007. These remains belonged to people who stood roughly 1 meter tall, Berger’s group estimates. Radiocarbon measurements indicate that Palau’s diminutive denizens lived between 2,900 and 1,400 years ago.