Concerning the Reality of Hobbits

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

And so he did: Bilbo Baggins, that is. However, the opening sentence of Tolkien's story could just as easily describe another hobbit -- a girl hobbit, who is now referred to be the name "Flo". Unlike Bilbo's hole, Flo's hole was indeed nasty, dirty, and wet -- a muddy cave on the little island called Flores. And, also unlike Bilbo, Flo was real.

The story is too big to recount fully here, so I'll hit the high points. In 2003, a band of intrepid scientists, digging about on the island of Flores in Indonesia, discovered something they hadn't been looking for: the skeleton of what appeared to be an adult human, except that it was only about three feet tall. The stature of the skeleton was not terribly unusual -- genetic dwarfism can produce people of that scale -- but the size of the skull was very unusual: it was the size of a grapefruit and it possessed physical features very unlike human skulls today, especially in the jaw and the brow region.

The researchers concluded that this was a new kind of human, not simply a genetic freak. They named it after the island on which it was discovered -- Homo Floresiensis -- and dubbed the single complete specimen "Flo". However, since many of the scientists were New Zealanders, the countrymen of Peter Jackson, the tiny skeleton reminded them of another cultural phenomenon, and so Homo Floresiensis acquired the nickname "Hobbit".

Of course, the scientists are still arguing about whether Homo Floresiensis was really a separate breed of human or just an anomaly: skeptics cite such genetic defects as dwarfism and microcephaly as possible causes for Flo's stature and proportions. However, there are also arguments (convincing enough to this laymen) which support the idea of Homo Floresiensis as a distinct type of human. They were not simply apes: though their brains were on a smaller scale than ours, their brain structures associated with higher level cognition were much like ours in size and shape ("The Brain of LB1"). The caves Flo was found in also contained stone tools scaled to her size and the remains of butchered animals, both signs of higher order (i.e. human) intelligence.

So, the significance of this: it seems as if there was, at least at one time and in one place, a race of people roughly half our size. I don't know about you, dear reader, but that excites me. If little people were in Indonesia, where else might they have been? Were they, perhaps, the original brownies, huldufolk, and menehune? I don't know, given that there's been no evidence of little people anywhere else, but the notion seems more possible now than it did five years ago. We live in an amazing world; our perceptions of the world's ordinariness are only reflections of our own incuriosity.