DAVID GREENE, HOST:
OK. Let's dive back in history now. Or maybe I should say prehistory. It is easy to think that evolution led inevitably to modern humans, the cleverest of apes. But there were some strange excursions along the way. Take, for example, the hobbits. That's the nickname for a 3-foot-tall human relative that once lived in what is now Indonesia. As NPR's Christopher Joyce reports, a new discovery suggests that it was island life that created this dainty creature.
CHRISTOPHER JOYCE, BYLINE: Anthropologists discovered the bones of the hobbits in 2004 on the island of Flores. They were chimp-sized, with tiny brains and long arms. But they had stone tools and teeth much like ours. They lived about 60,000 years ago. Who were they? Well, one idea had it that ancient human ancestors from Africa ended up on this island. Then they shrank because on islands, animals sometimes evolve to become smaller. But human ancestors, too?
AIDA GOMEZ-ROBLES: For some reason, when we saw that the same can happen to us, to humans, this is when people started to thinking - oh, my God, this is not possible.
JOYCE: Aida Gomez-Robles person is an anthropologist at George Washington University. Some scientists believe hobbits, also known as Homo floresiensis, were just modern humans with some abnormality like microcephaly. But now, scientists have found more tiny hobbit-like bones on the island. And shockingly, they date back 700,000 years, way older than the first hobbits. Gerrit van den Bergh from Wollongong University in Australia says clearly, this was a long-standing population of very different human relatives.
GERRIT VAN DEN BERGH: Human diversity could have been far greater than we have ever realized.
JOYCE: Writing in the journal Nature, van den Bergh suggests that some ancient human ancestors must have traveled from Africa to Asia. They reached this island, perhaps carried by tsunami. He notes that the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 did something like that.
VAN DEN BERGH: A week after that event, several people were picked out from the sea, some floating 60 kilometers from the coast. And they were just clinging to a tree.
JOYCE: Once the hobbits got to the island, island dwarfism set in. They slowly got smaller. Scientists found fossil elephants on the island that also did the same over time. Despite their small brains, the hobbits were smart enough to make stone tools. But Adam Brumm from Griffith University in Australia says they didn't seem to get any smarter.
ADAM BRUMM: This technology, whatever it was used for, essentially stayed the same for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years on this island, which is intriguing to say the least.
JOYCE: A tiny version of early humans, it seems, that lived long but did not prosper. Christopher Joyce, NPR News.
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