Ancient Humans | Homo Floresiensis

Back in September 2003 a team of archaeologists were on the Indonesian Island of Flores when they discovered a nearly complete skeleton of a small person in the Liang Bua Cave, this skeleton is now known as LB1.

Usually when archaeologists find such old bones they are fossilized, but that was not the case which means that the bones had a consistency of wet blotting paper, so once the bones were exposed from the soil they had to be left to dry before they were able to dug them up.

There are now a total of 15 individuals found of Homo floresiensis, although some of these individuals are only represented by teeth and bone fragments.

In the cave the archaeologists found a number of stone tools that were quite small and would fit perfectly to be used by the small humans. I hear you think, how small are we talking about here? I called them Hobbitses for fun, but how small were they actually?

The tallest skeleton they have found so far stood at 1.1 meters, which is 3 ft and 7 inches and they would have weighed approximately 30 kilograms which is 66 lbs on average. So if we look at the description of the height of a Hobbit given by Tolkien, Homo floresiensis falls exactly within those measurements.