Ancient ‘Hobbits’ Existed, Some Say They Still Do

In 2003, scientists exploring Liang Bua, a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, discovered a skeleton with a nearly complete skull brimming with teeth. Measuring 3 feet 6 inches tall, the individual was about 30 when she died around 80,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before modern humans reached Flores.

Scientists concluded the puzzling skeleton represented an entirely new species of early human or hominin. They named the small species Homo floresiensis after the island where it was found, and the discovery made headlines around the world. Because of their small stature, many people nicknamed our newest evolutionary relatives “hobbits,” after the diminutive fictional beings in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings book series.

To anthropologist Gregory Forth, the new species of ancient human ancestor brought to mind another being: small ape-like creatures called lai ho’a, described to him by communities in eastern Flores. “When the news of Homo floresiensis came out, I was quite taken aback to realize that they were a good match with what people had been talking about,” Forth said. “Not just in terms of physical appearance and height but also possible behavior.”

Forth, professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Alberta, started conducting fieldwork on Flores in 1984. His research began among central Flores’ Nagé people, who told stories of ape-like creatures called Ebu gogo that inhabited the island’s dense forests hundreds of years ago. Forth first reported tales of Ebu gogo in his scientific literature in 1998, several years before H. floresiensis was discovered.

In 2003, Forth moved his research focus to the eastern part of Flores where the Lio people lived. There, he heard similar stories of small ape-like hominoids with one significant difference: The Lio people spoke of these uncanny creatures, who they called lai ho’a, as if they were still around. “Whereas the Nagé said the creatures called Ebu gogo were wiped out in the past, the Lio were saying that the lai ho’a, while rare, were still occasionally seen,” Forth said.

When scientists described H. floresiensis, these folktales of lai ho’a gained a new level of credence for Forth, who was studying the interpretation of wildman stories across history and cultures. Forth collected several accounts from Lio people who had observed lai ho’a firsthand and compiled them into his 2023 book Between Ape and Human. Some of the tales dated as far back as the 1960s.

In one case from 1972, a group of Lio men traveling through the mountains saw a lai ho’a approach their moving vehicle. In another from 2010, a man said he came across the carcass of a recently deceased lai ho’a in the woods. Forth has also heard accounts of Western travelers coming across monkey-like creatures on Flores as recently as 2019, shortly after he concluded his fieldwork on eastern Flores in 2018.

The resemblance between these mysterious ape-like creatures and H. floresiensis seemed uncanny. The Lio described lai ho’a as hairier than humans, small in stature and sporting simian faces. Unlike other apes, they walked upright. Fossils found in Liang Bua paint a somewhat similar picture. Paleoanthropologists have concluded that H. floresiensis also walked upright and had some ape-like facial features, including the absence of a chin and relatively large teeth.

While small in size, H. floresiensis was mighty, surviving on Flores for tens of thousands of years. Its brain was roughly the same size as a chimpanzee’s, yet these ancient humans crafted stone tools and may have been able to utilize fire. They used their toolkit to hunt the bizarre bestiary that inhabited this isolated island.

During the Pleistocene, some lineages of animals grew larger than their mainland relatives while other species shrank. Flores was home to an ecosystem of cow-sized pygmy elephants, giant Komodo dragons, towering storks and rats larger than small dogs. H. floresiensis hunted the island’s giant rats and pygmy elephants—excavations have yielded elephant bones with signs of butchering and Liang Bua is filled with so many rodent bones that some scientists refer to it as the “rat cave.”

Some scientists think it’s possible the earliest modern humans to reach the island encountered them shortly before the small species went extinct. Additional excavations at Liang Bua—the only place where H. floresiensis fossils have been found—yielded bones and teeth from around a dozen H. floresiensis individuals that date between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago. Stone tools left behind by H. floresiensis hint the species may have stuck around on Flores until about 50,000 years ago, around the arrival of modern humans.

Forth thinks it’s plausible the small hominins continued to live alongside humans on Flores in the more recent past. While he can’t say for certain whether the creatures local Lio people occasionally encounter are remnant H. floresiensis or something else entirely, he has not ruled anything out: “I haven’t found any really consistent explanation for these stories and reports of lai ho’a.”