A limestone cave on Flores in Indonesia, slightly north of the town of Ruteng, which the Dutch missionary and archaeologist Theodor Verhoeven flagged as promising back in the 1950s and 60s. In September 2003 an Indonesian team led by Thomas Sutikna uncovered the top of a small skull, assumed at first to be a child, until the permanent adult teeth showed otherwise. Most of the skeleton followed, coded LB1, and it became the type specimen of Homo floresiensis, a metre-tall human relative that used stone tools, hunted dwarf elephants and shared the island with giant rats and komodo dragons. Excavation continues and teeth are still coming out of the floor. The cave is a wide, high chamber and the dig is the thing to see.
Homo floresiensis, the hobbit of Flores · Late Pleistocene
This ground is protected. Photograph it, record it, leave it where it lies. On US federal land the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act 2009 makes collecting vertebrate fossils an offence, and penalties are real.
Indonesia
See it on the map
This is remote ground. The closest other places on the map are a long way off.
