Name: Little People of Flores
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<div class="rich-text">(This video is no longer available for streaming.) In 2003 paleoanthropologists made a discovery on the Indonesian island of Flores that shook up the world of early human studies like no other in recent years. Inside a cave, under a thick blanket of sediments, they unearthed fossil bones of a three-foot-tall human. The fossil appeared for all the world not to have been that of a diseased modern human or Homo sapiens, but rather an entirely new species, which its discoverers named Homo floresiensis. The debate over just what this so-called hobbit and its kind were has only just begun.
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The remains of three-foot-tall humans are discovered on a remote Indonesian island.

<div class="rich-text">The remains of three-foot-tall humans are discovered on a remote Indonesian island.</div>

Little People of Flores

Evolution

<div class="rich-text"><h3>
 LITTLE PEOPLE OF FLORES
</h3>

 PBS Airdate: April 1, 2005



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 You're not going to believe this, and I
wouldn't blame you, 'cause if I told you this story that..."once upon a time,
on a little island, somewhere way off in the sea, there lived a race of teeny
people not known to science. They lived with elephants the size of ponies. They
hunted dragons that spat poisonous saliva laced with botulism and anthrax..."


 You'd say, "Come on."


 But here's the thing. An international team of paleoanthropologists think
that this story may be true, and tonight we're going to show you evidence that
suggests that these little people may have existed on our planet for tens of
thousands years. And, even more intriguing, there's the outside chance, they
may still be around.


 Midway between Asia and Australia, here in Indonesia, lies the island of
Flores. For centuries the people who lived here told tales of little, hairy
people.



 KERRY GRANT
 
 (University of New England, Australia)
 
 :
 
 Well, they
talk about being scared of three things: one is elephants, one is tigers, and
one is the little people of the forest.



 RICHARD ROBERTS
 
 (University of Wollongong)
 
 :
 
 Small people, maybe a
meter tall, hairy, with sloping foreheads, thick eyebrow ridges and no
chin...and they used to come up to the village. They used to raid their crops,
until, one day, they stole a baby. And that was it. The villagers decided to
chase them out of their cave, and that was the last they saw of what they
called the Ebu Gogo which is translated as "the grandmother who eats
everything."



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Ebu Gogo: learned people, scholars, dismissed
these tales as folklore. But then a team of Australian archeologists digging in
this cave, Liang Bua, it's called, discovered something simply astounding. At
first, they thought it was a child.



 MICHAEL JOHN MORWOOD
 
 (University of New England)
 
 :
 
 They thought it
was a young child because the skeleton was very, very small. The Individual was about a meter tall.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 About the size of a modern three year old.
But then they looked more closely at the skull. The lines on top here would be
different if it was a child's skull, further apart. And the teeth...This was no
child.



 MICHAEL JOHN MORWOOD:
 
 It's, in fact, an adult. The wear and tear on the
teeth shows that this individual was an adult, probably aged about 30. It was a
female. We already knew she was very, very small, so then we knew we had
something quite unusual.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Unusual is an understatement. Jared Diamond
is a scientist and author.



 JARED DIAMOND:
 
 To me, when I heard of this, I immediately said to
myself, "This is the most amazing discovery in any field of science in at least
the last 10 years."



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 That big?



 JARED DIAMOND:
 
 Yeah.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Why?



 JARED DIAMOND:
 
 Why? Because it's the most drastically different human
that existed in the last million years.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Just to give you a taste for this, I am about
six feet tall. Now here, this is what a full-grown pygmy looks like, a 24 year
old adult pygmy. Let's check it out...about four and a half feet tall. And here
is Homo floresiensis. Let's check this...a little over three feet tall. That's
about half my size.



 MICHAEL JOHN MORWOOD:
 
 It's the smallest human species ever identified
anywhere in the world from any time.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 "Wait a second," said this well-respected
Indonesian anthropologist. Teuko Jacob says, "I think she's one of us, our
species, but with a rare disease."



 TEUKO JACOB
 
 (Gadjah Mada University)
 
 :
 
 Therefore there's a small
brain, microencephaly.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Microencephaly can severely retard growth in
modern people. So she's one of us with a growth disease?



 TEUKO JACOB:
 
 I'm sure about it.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 "Well, you're wrong," said the Australian
team.



 RICHARD ROBERTS:
 
 There's no chance at all that it's a pathologically
deformed individual of our species.



 RALPH HOLLOWAY:
 
 Welcome to paleoanthropology.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 So, since the debate here is highly
technical, I visited Ralph Holloway, one of the world's preeminent ancient
skull experts.


 Less than this?



 RALPH HOLLOWAY:
 
 Less than many chimpanzees.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 And since he's got a cast of the lady's
skull, I asked him, "Does it look like our species? Like Homo sapiens? This is
a human being. Are these new creatures that you've seen...do they look like
this? Or are they..."



 RALPH HOLLOWAY:
 
 No.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 No. They're different in some fundamental
way?



 RALPH HOLLOWAY:
 
 Absolutely.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Ralph has examined this cast of her brain
cavity, and it's not like ours, he says.



 RALPH HOLLOWAY:
 
 It's low. It's broad.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 You're sure of this.



 RALPH HOLLOWAY:
 
 Absolutely.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 So what we may have here is a brand new
flavor of human. But if we do, how'd this creature get so small?


 The Australians believe that Homo floresiensis descends, as we do, from the
original, earlier human, Homo erectus, who came out of Africa and spread to
Europe and Asia. But as best scientists can tell, Homo erectus probably wasn't
advanced enough to build boats. So how'd they get to the island?


 Jared theorizes that early humans reached Flores by a land bridge.



 JARED DIAMOND:
 
 All this was going on during the Ice Ages, when, around
the world, a lot of water was locked up in glaciers so sea level was low.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 So what today is water, then was land. You
could have walked there conceivably?



 JARED DIAMOND:
 
 No, you couldn't walk there, but the water gaps were
narrower.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Those gaps were so narrow it didn't take much
to swim or float across. Other creatures did.



 JARED DIAMOND:
 
 Elephants did it. Monkeys did it. If monkeys could do it,
why couldn't these dumb humans do it?



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 But after they got there, he says, the Ice
Age ended. Glaciers melted, the ocean rose, and these early humans were
stranded. And this may explain why they got so small.



 RICHARD ROBERTS:
 
 They get small on an island where there are no major
predators and where there are not that many nutrients, so you really don't want
to be eating any more than you need to if you want to survive. So for reasons
for avoiding starvation, it's more efficient to keep small.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 So you're not surprised then that
 

 this
group of human-types could become very small?



 JARED DIAMOND:
 
 There're lots of big animals that arrive on small islands
and then, over evolutionary time, they shrink on...shrink in size.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 There are islands where instead of hippos
there are pigmy hippos; instead of buffalo, there are pigmy buffalo; instead of
elephants, there are elephants one-eighth normal scale. So maybe people landed
on Flores, and they got smaller, too—one half our size. The amazing
thing, though, is their brains were a third our size.



 RALPH HOLLOWAY:
 
 Small, small. That's under chimpanzee. And here it is
associated with supposedly sophisticated stone tools. What the hell have they
found?



 KERRY GRANT:
 
 The evidence is showing us that something with such a
little brain may have been more capable of doing a lot more things than we
originally thought.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 The Australians say they found, at the cave
site, traces of campfire, so the little people may have been cooking with fire.
They found stone tools nearby that may or may not belong to them but they look
pretty sophisticated.


 And remember, these people hunted and ate dwarf elephants, so... Here's one
getting up. Check out the sharp tusks. And look at this one's tusks. And, say
the paleontologists, they did okay hunting and eating formidable prey 'cause
not all island species get small.



 JARED DIAMOND:
 
 Warm-blooded animals shrink on islands. Cold-blooded
animals often expand on islands, to fill the niche left by lions and tigers
that could not get out there.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 The evidence suggests little people ate
Komodo dragon. And these guys weigh in at what?



 JARED DIAMOND:
 
 Up to 500 pounds. But it's worse than that.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Because back then, apparently, Komodo dragons
were even bigger, and if you get near their mouths... You see that spit?



 JARED DIAMOND:
 
 It's spit that contains botulism bacteria and anthrax and
other things you wouldn't want to get infected by, really nasty bacteria.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 So, most likely, if you were three feet tall,
you'd want to hunt these animals in groups.


 Would that, in your sense
 

 require some kind of signaling or language
or "Watch out, Joe! Here comes the lizard,"?



 RALPH HOLLOWAY:
 
 Yeah, I tend to be in that camp. I really do think that
communal hunting, and so forth, has to involve language.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Language, tools, technology, maybe the little
people did all that, but if they did it with brains a third our size, those
brains would be very different, radically different.



 RALPH HOLLOWAY:
 
 And that may be one of the great lessons of this, if it
turns out...you know, it may tell us...Hey...



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Oh, you're suggesting that maybe this brain
is organized differently so it can do more in a little space?



 RALPH HOLLOWAY:
 
 Oh, it's definitely organized differently, and it may
have done more in a little bit of space, absolutely.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 And if that's true, brain scientists would
have a whole new model for human intelligence, and that's huge.


 Meanwhile, back at the cave site, the Australians say they've discovered
fragments from seven additional individuals, all, they claim, appear to be
little people.


 But the biggest shock was yet to come: the age of these remains.
Paleontologists say that the first Homo erectus creatures arrived on Flores
something like 800,000 years ago. So scientists figured, "Well, then, these
skeletons would be old."



 KIRA WESTAWAY
 
 (University of Wollongong)
 
 :
 
 We were all expecting
it to be may be sixty, a hundred thousand years old.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 But when they aged these bones, one sample
was only 18,000 years old. In paleontology, that's like the day before
yesterday.



 KIRA WESTAWAY:
 
 The fact that it came out at 18,000 was pretty much a
shock to everybody.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 A shock because that means that these little
people were alive during, well, modern times.



 MICHAEL JOHN MORWOOD:
 
 We know that modern humans have been in that area
for at least 50,000 years.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 So, if you do the math, little people and big
people shared this island for over 30,000 years!



 JARED DIAMOND:
 
 The final question that everybody is too shy to ask is,
well er, uh, um, "Did we, or didn't we have sex with them?"



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Because if little people became a different
species, they branched away from humans and couldn't have babies with us, and
wouldn't want to.



 JARED DIAMOND:
 
 My bet is we did not have sex with them. And here's my
reasoning. I would have predicted that they would have been really nasty, just
like any humans would be really nasty.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 Because looking at the other was like, this
is an other. I don't know why he's doing this.



 JARED DIAMOND:
 
 That's right. That's right.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 To test this you'd want to analyze the little
people's DNA.



 RICHARD ROBERTS:
 
 Then we can compare their DNA with our DNA and we'll
have a case for whether we may or may not have interbred as we came through
Southeast Asia on our way to Australia.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 So what happened to the little people of
Flores? It looks like they were wiped out—along with those little
elephants they were hunting—by a major volcanic eruption on the island
about 12,000 years ago. Or—and this is not impossible—could the Ebu
Gogo still exist?



 JARED DIAMOND:
 
 No.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 That's one view. Here's another.



 KERRY GRANT:
 
 I did have somebody speak to me, a geologist, and he didn't
want to be named because, of course, he felt like if he told people he'd seen
little people, people would think he'd seen aliens or something like that. So,
at the moment, we are going to follow these stories of an actual cave where
they may have been living, and we, we do intend to go and excavate this actual
cave.



 RICHARD ROBERTS:
 
 Folklore has it that they, they just simply ran over
the volcano nearby and disappeared further west. So, perhaps in some other part
of Flores, they might still be living. It's not outrageous, but it's highly
improbable. But it'd be worth looking, just in case that did happen to be the
case.



 ROBERT KRULWICH:
 
 And now we are going to make something. I'm
not going to tell you what it is we're making; you'll have to guess. But we
will give you all the ingredients. We will do this in an English kitchen, so we
will use English measures. So this is a recipe for something.


 Can you guess what that something is?


 This recipe is key to the future:


 Take 3 liters of water.


 Add sufficient fat to make a small bar of soap.


 Take enough carbon for 55 pencil leads.


 Mix with enough phosphorus to produce 135 match heads.


 (A generous helping of calcium always improves the result.)


 Take enough sulfur to produce a couple of stink bombs.


 Extract every atom of iron and zinc from a galvanized roof tack.


 Garnish with traces of magnesium and potassium.


 Season with a pinch of salt.


 Bake in an oven at 37 degrees for 270 days.


 Monitor carefully until incubation is complete.


 We will return to the subject of making babies later in the program when we
talk about stem cells, which by the way, are, again, teeny, teeny little
things.


 But we shouldn't dwell only on small things, because sometimes big things,
very big things, can be exciting and scary. So, if I may...


 Thank you.

</div>

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