In 2003 , archaeologists looking for evidence of the migration of modern humans from Asia to Australia stumbled across a small-scale , fairly complete skeleton of an extinct human mintage on the Indonesian island of Flores , which come to be know asHomo floresiensis . Or , as it became more usually sleep with , the Hobbit , after the small , breakfast - guzzling animal from J.R.R. Tolkein’sThe Hobbit .
The mintage was ab initio consider to have hold up until comparatively recently , around 12,000 years ago , before further analysis pushed that date back toaround 50,000 years . But one retired professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta tell that evidence that the species ' continued existence may have been overlooked , and the Hobbit may still be alive today , or at least within living memory .
In an opinion piece forThe Scientistpromoting his forthcoming bookBetween aper and Human , Gregory Forth argue that palaeontologists and other scientists have miss Indigenous cognition and accounts of an " ape - world " living in the forests of Flores .
“ My intent in write the Holy Writ was to find the best account — that is , the most rational and empirically best supported — of Lio accounts of the creatures , ” Forthwrote in the piece . “ These let in reports of sighting by more than 30 eyewitness , all of whom I spoke with direct . And I conclude that the good way to excuse what they told me is that a non - sapiens hominin has survived on Flores to the present or very late times . ”
He writes that local tribe fauna by the Lio people inhabit the island contains stories of humanity metamorphose into fauna as they move and adapt to young environments , which he likens to a case ofLamarckism , theinheritance of develop forcible characteristics .
" As my fieldwork uncover , such posited change reflect local watching of similarities and differences between a supposed ancestral metal money and its differentiated posterity , " he says .
The Lio identify these creatures as animals , not having the complex language or technology that world possess . However , their eerie similarity to humans is noted .
" For the Lio , the ape - man ’s coming into court as something incompletely human makes the brute anomalous and hence problematic and worrying , " Forth wrote .
For now , the close we can definitively dateH. floresiensisbeing alive is still 50,000 year ago . But Forth urges that autochthonous knowledge should be contain as we investigate hominin development .
" Our initial inherent aptitude , I suspect , is to regard the extant ape - men of Flores as totally fanciful . But , taking severely what Lio citizenry say , I ’ve found no good reason to opine so , " he concludes . " What they say about the creature , affix by other sorts of evidence , is fully consistent with a live hominin species , or one that only went extinct within the last 100 years . "
