Until about 60,000 years ago, the tiny hominid cousins, Homo floresiensis (affectionately nicknamed Hobbits for obvious reasons), shared the island of Flores with Komodo dragons, pygmy elephants, and giant rats.
Based on the presence of hominid and pygmy elephant bones in the same layers of cave sediment, it originally appeared that hobbits had hunted and slaughtered dwarf elephants, an impressive feat for such a small hominid. But according to University of Tübingen anthropologist Elizabeth Veatch and her colleagues, the Komodo dragons were the hunters, while the hobbits only showed up to scavenge what was left.
If Veatch and his colleagues are right, their findings may challenge some of the assumptions we have made about Homo floresiensis—and about which hominid species was the first to venture into the world beyond Africa.
These small hominids were not hunters of big game
Extinct pygmy elephant bones unearthed in Liang Bua (the cave that also appears to have housed Homo floresiensis) are covered in Komodo dragon tooth marks as well as cut marks 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 type of meat: pygmy relatives of modern elephants, called Stegodon. At least three species of Stegodon lived on Flores, varying between 1.25 and almost 2 meters in height and weighing between 500 kilograms and 1.5 tons.
To better understand the Stegodon bones and how they arrived at Liang Bua, Veatch and his colleagues began by feeding a nearly whole goat carcass to a Komodo dragon (as is done). He Komodo Dragon at Zoo Atlanta had its best day ever and researchers compared the result to Liang Bua’s Stegodon bones.
The Komodo dragon has serrated teeth and the habit of grabbing its prey and then moving its head from side to side to tear the flesh from the bone. This left distinctive marks on the bones, marks that were generally shallower, shorter and wider than cut marks from stone tools. Veatch and his colleagues also noticed that the zoo’s Komodo dragon went straight for the fleshiest parts of the body, which turned out to be the same areas where archaeologists found tooth marks on Stegodon bones at Liang Bua: parts like the limbs and feet that were surprisingly rich in fat, as well as the ribs.
