Littlefoot
a.k.a. Homo floresiensis
by Michael Rugg
Bones of a gracile hominid were found
September 2003 in a cave in Liang Bua, on the
Indonesian island of Flores. The most complete
skeleton was that of a 30 yr old female 3'3" tall
and similar in build to the australopithecine
"Lucy" but decidedly of the genus Homo. The
skeleton was only 18,000 ya (but others went
back as far as 95,000 ya) and had not yet
fossilized. It could also be said that "Florrie" fit
the physical description of the local Littlefoots,
the ebu gogo.
Gregory Forth, an anthropologist from
University of Alberta in Canada says the stories
of the ebu gogo have much in common with
other "legendary" wildmen, such as the abominable
snowman and bigfoot. The contemporary
inhabitants of the island, the Nage of central
Flores describe them as being diminutive hairy
bipeds. Village elders say they exterminated the
ebu gogo, all but a single pair that escaped into
the deepest forest, and survive there to this day.
It has been suggested that the littlefoot people
got small via "endemic dwarfing," an adaptive
process wherein animals trapped on an island
swap sizes over time (e.g. elephants get smaller
while rats gets bigger). The implications are
that unique and diverse species of humans
might have evolved elsewhere in the archipeligo
of Indonesia, perhaps from sea faring Homo
erectus that landed on the islands, much as birds
and tortoises evolved in unique ways on the
various Galapagos Islands. This would be a first
for the genus Homo, whose adaptive devices
thus far noted have been culture and technology,
but apparently NOT morphology.
There is some controversy between anthropologists
over the makers of the stone tools found
on the site. The discoverers say that Littlefoot
was a Hobbit; a tool using mini human. Other
anthropologists suggest the tools were more
likely made by homo erectus. Forth points to
the descriptions of the Nage, who characterized
the ebu gogo as hairy wildmen, with no tools or
apparent culture. Does that sound familiar?
The lesson here may be that local ethnic
histories (sometimes referred to as myths or
legends by non-experiencers) may offer more
truths than previously suspected, for divining
the complete picture of a fossil hominid's
physiology and lifestyle. As Forth states,
"Rather than simply assuming that these
traditions are as fantastical as Tolkien's fiction,
the challenge for social anthropologists is to
discover the correct relationship between the
paleontological and ethnographic images and
the true source of their resemblance."
(see the article by Gregory Forth in Anthropology
Today Vol21 No3 June 2005 pp. 13-17)