Ancient tools on Sulawesi may be clue to origins of ‘hobbit’ hominins

Seven stone tools found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi are the first evidence never discovered by ancient humans making a sea crossing, dating back to 1.4 million years.

They can provide clues to how a small human species, nicknamed “Hobbits”, found itself on the neighboring island of Flores.

The first of the artefacts was found integrated into a sandstone outcrop on a site called Calio by Bualido Hakim at the National Research and Innovation Agency in Indonesia in 2019, and a complete excavation discovered six other tools in the same outcrop.

In the same time as the stone tools, Hakim and his colleagues found part of the upper jaw, with teeth, a giant pig off known as the name Celebochoerusas well as a dental fragment of an unidentifiable species of a juvenile elephant.

Although researchers cannot go directly with stone tools, they were able to find an estimated age between 1.04 million and 1.48 million years by analyzing the sediments and teeth of the fossil pork. Until now, the evidence of hominines on Sulawesi have not dates back to 194,000 years.

At least one of the newly discovered artifacts is a flake that was struck by a larger flake and then cut off, explains Adam Brumm, member of the team at Griffith University in Brisbane, in Australia. While non -human primates like chimpanzees are known to use stones like a hammer to break open nuts, they do not carefully work on flakes to produce tools.

“This is a very early type of human intelligence of a species that no longer exists,” explains Brumm. “We do not know what species it was, but it is a human intelligence behind these stone artefacts on the Calio site.”

The remains of a masseur hominin named named Homo Floresiensis were discovered in Flores in 2003. Archaeological evidence show that hominines were on this island over a million years ago, but it was a mystery how a first human species could have made its way.

Flores and Sulawesi had large sea stretches separating them from continental Southeast Asia, even during low-level sea level periods. Brumm says that the distances between the continent and Sulawesi were too large to swim and that it is almost certain that these first hominines were not able to build ships in the ocean.

“It can be a kind of bizarre geological event, like a tsunami, for example, washing some hominines at sea clinging to floating trees or carpets of vegetation of a certain kind, then ending on these islands in greater numbers to give birth to these isolated populations,” he said.

Martin Porr at the University of Western Australia says Homo erectus was the candidate most likely to have made maritime passages, because this species was in Southeast Asia at that time and made tools similar to those found in Sulawesi.

He says that if the new work is in accordance with this hypothesis, he also raises many new questions, especially if the capacities of these first hominins must be revised.

The late archaeologist Mike Morwood, who managed the team that identified Homo Floresiensis, was the first to suggest that Sulawesi was an important place to search for potential hobbits, Kira Westaway explains at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. This is due to the Indonesian flow path, a strong current circulating from Sulawesi to Flores.

“But I think that even Mike would be pleasantly surprised by the antiquity of stone tools found on this site,” she says. “We could argue that seven tools are not a large enough assembly to support major affirmations, but this certainly represents an early presence of hominins.”

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