The Hobbit Enigma: Director's Statement

Written by: Annamaria Talas and Simon Nasht

Sometimes the announcement of a major scientific discovery is only the beginning of the story. Finds that really upset accepted wisdom are bound to be contentious. So when researchers made the extraordinary claim to have found the remains of a strange new member of the human species - a small brained, metre tall woman - on the island of Flores we should have expected controversy. Palaeoanthropology is a science that is full of arguments, but the discovery of The Hobbit was so totally unexpected, and so threatening to accepted ideas about human origins, that four years later we are still not sure exactly what was found in that Indonesian cave.

Bones compared of 3 million year old prehuman 'Lucy' with those of the Hobbit. Despite huge differences in age and location (Lucy is from Africa), the two share many similarities. Is the Hobbit a descendent of the very first hominids?
Credit: Djuna

As filmmakers rather than scientists there is a special challenge to try and interpret the known information, weigh the different opinions (and there are many!) and come to a reasoned conclusion about the significance of the discovery. As Professor Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum in London says in the film, this is a very unusual case: one group of scientists is going to be completely wrong, so careers and reputations are at stake. Such conflict makes a good story, but it also means we had to be very careful about the approach we took.

As we investigated the find, we were often reminded of the continuing debate over global warming. Like climate science, the study of human origins is often not an absolute, empirical process. It relies on interpretations and assumptions, especially in the case of palaeoanthropology where we are trying to explain millions of years of evolution with just a few bone fragments and incomplete skeletons as evidence. There are huge gaps in our knowledge, so it's little wonder that there is plenty of room for argument.

The Hobbit, only 1 metre tall, has a foot almost as long as a modern human, such strange proportions suggest this is a distinct new species of human.
Credit: Djuna

Still, we can't sit on the fence if the weight of evidence points to difficult conclusions – that would be a denial of the scientific method. And in the case of The Hobbit, the accumulated studies are overwhelmingly in favour of the of the discovery team's claim: Homo floresiensis is indeed a previously unknown human relative who lived well into the time of our own ascendancy on earth. We modern humans shared the planet with her, and also with Neanderthals and probably the remnants of primitive species like Homo erectus too. It's a startling thought: nature seems to have been experimenting with what it meant to be human, and although we moderns were eventually the only survivors, it might very well have been different.

Accepting that The Hobbit as real is however only the beginning of the story. Now we must explain how she came to be isolated on a distant little Asian island, and why she prospered when her tiny brain resembles something last seen in Africa millions of years ago. That debate may take many years to resolve, so in a sense we are only at the beginning of the story. More surprises lie ahead, and hopefully we may have the chance to be involved in them.