Until about 60,000 years ago, smaller hominin relatives, Homo floresiensis (hobbits loved their nickname for obvious reasons), shared the island of Flores with Komodo dragons, dwarf elephants and giant rats.
Based on the presence of hominin and pygmy ivories in the same layers of cave sediment, it initially appears that the Hobbits hunted and butchered dwarf elephants, an impressive task for such a small hominin. But according to Elizabeth Veatch, an anthropologist at the University of Tübingen, and her colleagues, the hunters were the Komodo dragons, and the Hobbits appeared only to scavenge the rest.
If Veatch and his colleagues are right, their findings may challenge some of the assumptions we make about ourselves. Homo floresiensis– and about the first hominin species to enter the wider world outside of Africa.
These small hominins were not big game hunters
Bones of an extinct baby elephant were found at Liang Bua (a cave site where it appears to have taken refuge). Homo floresiensis) is covered with traces of Komodo dragon teeth, as well as marks cut from stone tools. Based on these bones, we know that Hobbits and the ancient ancestors of today’s Komodo dragons shared a taste for the same kind of meat: a dwarf relative of modern elephants called Stegodon. At least three species of Stegodon lived in Flores, ranging from 1.25 to almost 2 meters in height and weighing from 500 kilograms to 1.5 tons.
To better understand the stegodon bones and how they got to Liang Bua, Veatch and his colleagues began feeding a Komodo dragon almost an entire goat carcass. The Komodo dragon at Zoo Atlanta had its best day, and the researchers compared the results with Liang Bua’s Stegodon bones.
The Komodo dragon has serrated teeth and a habit of shaking its head from side to side to grab its prey and then tear the meat from the bone. This left distinctive marks on the bones, usually shallower, shorter and wider than those cut by stone tools. Veatch and her colleagues also found that the Komodo dragon at the zoo went straight for the fleshiest parts of the body, which is where archaeologists found teeth marks on the Stegodon bones at Liang Bua: limbs and surprisingly fat legs, as well as parts like ribs.
