Liang Bua is a large limestone cave and the location of the recently discovered new species of human called Homo floresiensis (better known as the hobbit).

Originally excavated in the 1950s by Verhoeven, archaeologists have been digging at the site ever since. In 2003, an almost complete human skeleton was discovered during excavations.  Today the research team have identified the remains of at least nine individuals of similar dimensions.

The main find appears to be that of an adult female but a whole range of features in the skeleton are unusual. The individual was pygmy in size, standing around 1 metre tall, while its brain size was tiny, a mere 380 ml, similar to that of a chimpanzee. Before this discovery, the lower limit of human brain capacity was thought to be around 500 ml; the find at Liang Bua punches below this definition. Next time you’re at a bus stop or train station, look at the head size of different people as they pass you by. Our species is pretty variable but you should see examples that are the equivalent of between 1200 and 1500 ml; you won’t see anything close to the find in Liang Bua.

Not only did the skeletal remains show the individuals were exceptionally small, but the main find also had many other unusual and ancient features. These included a sloping forehead, wide pelvis, relatively long arms (which went down to the knees) and multiple rooted teeth. The find was clearly not related to a modern pygmy human. Although small, pygmies have similar sized brains to us and don’t have the other ancient features described above.

Intriguingly, the site also had large amounts of stone tools, some quite sophisticated, that appear to have been used for the hunting of young Stegodon; an extinct dwarf species that was a cousin of today’s elephants.

The human finds were identified as a new species, Homo floresiensis, but has become better known as ‘the Hobbit’. When I did the radiocarbon dating of the site I found the main skeleton was around 18,000 years old and the last of the remains were as young as 13,000 years.  I was blown away by this.  These ages make Homo floresiensis the most recently surviving human species after ourselves; the Neanderthals in Europe only survived until around 26,000 years ago.

The last of the hobbit remains are capped by a white volcanic ash which I’ve recently analysed for its geochemical makeup.  I’m now trying to use this layer to find the volcano that may have caused their extinction.