When modern humans left Africa and fanned out to populate the Earth some 60,000 years ago, we ran into another species of human, the "hobbit" people of Flores Island in Indonesia.
This did not bode well for Homo floresiensis, as scientists know the hobbits: New research published in the journal Nature suggests they died out almost as soon as we showed up.
Explorers first discovered Homo floresiensis bones in 2003, in Flores Island's Liang Bua limestone cave. The diminutive species stood at just 3.5 feet tall, and archaeologists believe they evolved from early human ancestors who became marooned on the island at least a million years ago.
Previous research suggested that the hobbits died out between 11,000 and 13,000 years ago — tens of thousands of years after humans first arrived on the island.
However, further archaeological excavation of the cave suggests the hobbit people vanished much earlier than that, closer to 50,000 years ago.
The research team, consisting of Indonesian scientists and researchers from Griffith University, used uranium-thorium dating to provide an estimated age of the fossilized remains.
The earliest bones and simple tools tested by the team date back about 60,000 years. Meanwhile, all of the fossils cease above a 50,000-year-old layer of the cavern — around the same time modern humans probably arrived.
Study coauthor Adam Brumm thinks that hobbit people went the way of our other human cousins, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Once homo sapiens made it to Flores, we out-competed our human-like kin in only a few thousand years.
"They might have retreated to more remote parts of Flores, but it’s a small place and they couldn't have avoided our species for long," Brumm said in a Griffith University press release. "I think their days were numbered the moment we set foot on the island."
Our ancestors disrupted many archaic humans in our unstoppable spread across the planet. And in the case of Homo floresiensis, these new results hint we out-competed them startlingly fast.
