Liang Bua

Liang Bua, the cool cave, is a large limestone cave in west central Flores, Indonesia, just north of the town of Ruteng. In the 1950s and 60s a Dutch priest, Father Theodor Verhoeven, taught at a Catholic seminary on the island and spent his free time digging. He found stone tools with the bones of Stegodon, an extinct elephant relative, argued that Homo erectus from Java had made them, and first excavated Liang Bua in 1965. Paleoanthropologists of the day took little notice. The Indonesian archaeologist Raden Soejono dug there from the late 1970s until 1989, but all the early work stayed within the top three metres, deposits of the last 10,000 years full of evidence of modern humans.

In 2001 an Indonesian-Australian team set out to go deeper. On Saturday 6 September 2003, six metres down in Sector VII, a locally hired worker, Benyamin Tarus, saw the top of a skull appear. The archaeologist Wahyu Saptomo joined him, and the faunal expert Rokus Due Awe judged it a hominin, probably a small child from the size of the braincase. Days later, with the field director Thomas Sutikna in the pit and more of the cranium and jaw exposed, Rokus saw that every tooth was permanent. This was a fully grown adult. By the end of the season the team had most of a partial skeleton the likes of which had never been found, now LB1, the holotype of Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the hobbit.

LB1 was probably a woman of about 30, about a metre tall, with a brain of roughly 380 to 420 millilitres. The anatomist Peter Brown found her limb proportions closer to Australopithecus and Homo habilis than to modern people. Despite the small stature, the species made stone tools and hunted, living alongside dwarf Stegodon, a giant stork, vultures and large Komodo dragons.

The dates have been revised. A new study of the volcanic ash and calcite above and below the fossils put the hobbit bones at about 100,000 to 60,000 years old and the stone tools at 190,000 to 50,000, so the species vanished around 50,000 years ago, far earlier than first thought. From about 46,000 years ago the cave records modern humans instead, the earliest evidence of their arrival on Flores. In 2016 a jaw and teeth about 700,000 years old turned up at Mata Menge, some 70 kilometres east, possibly an early form of the species. Excavation at Liang Bua continues.