Tool man

Could ancient stone tools be proof that hobbits walked among us? A student in archaeology believes it’s possible.


	Hendrickus Corpus, a Nagada elder, helps Adam Brumm understand the real Flores. Image: Adam Brumm.

Like many men, Adam Brumm has an appreciation of tools. Yet for the PhD student in the Department of Archaeology and Natural History at ANU, finding a hammer involves more than just a visit to the local hardware store. Brumm is part of a research team that has been unearthing ancient stone tools from the Indonesian island of Flores, home to the hotly contested ‘hobbit’ remains. These seemingly unremarkable pieces of rock could be evidence that Homo floresiensis is indeed a new hominid species and not, as some scholars contend, the remnants of a deformed modern human.

“I’ve always been interested in hunter-gatherer cultures – people who made stone tools and lived directly from the land,” Brumm says. “I studied modern hunter-gatherers through anthropology at university, then took a subject in archaeology and really liked the idea of extending those observations further back into time.

“At that time I was a bit bummed out living in cities, so I think the idea of the foraging lifestyle appealed. It’s a fascination with how people lived before cars – the ingenuity they showed in surviving without all the mod cons.”

As Brumm was to learn when he visited the island for the first time in 2003, there are few “mod cons” on Flores.

Lying east of Bali and northwest of Timor, this long island is one the most remote and driest parts of Indonesia. It was here that a team of archaeologists from Indonesia and Australia discovered the remains of diminutive hominids in Liang Bua cave in 2003. These little people, christened ‘hobbits’, would have stood no taller than one metre with a brain the size of a grapefruit, and lived between 90,000 to 12,000 years ago. A heated debate has raged ever since about whether they are a new species (Homo floresiensis), pygmies or deformed humans (microcephalics). Some of those who dispute the new species theory argue that the hobbits didn’t have large enough brains to have developed tools, remnants of which were found in the same cave. But Brumm and his colleagues disagree.

Some 50 kilometres east of Liang Bua in the grasslands of the Soa Basin lies Mata Menge, the site of an excavation being conducted by Indonesian researchers from the Geological Research and Development Centre in Bandung, Java, in conjunction with their Australian counterparts. Brumm is one of the archaeologists who have been uncovering the remains of stone tools and fossil Stegadon (an extinct elephant species), all of which date back at least 800,000 years.

“I think that there is very little doubt that this is a valid new hominid species. Every time a new fossil is found that challenges existing paradigms, a lot of people will dispute it, saying that the new form was pathological, a deformed modern human. In this case, the weight of the evidence strongly suggests it’s a valid new species.”

“We’ve yet to find any human fossils at Mata Menge, so we can’t say what kind of hominid was there 800,000 years ago,” Brumm says. But the researchers are confident that some tool-users were based there, having left behind stone ‘hammers’ and other implements that have been preserved in the sediment.

“The local material is really coarse-grained, so you need a good eye to know what you’re looking for,” Brumm says.

“Once you have an idea of how stone fractures when it’s deliberately struck by hominids, the tools become quite obvious. You look for ‘scars’, which are the result of someone taking another rock and striking the edge of the stone tool until it knocks off a sharp-edged flake. That leaves a depression – a negative imprint in the stone. If you look for patterns of scars all over the object, it indicates that these stones were deliberately struck and fashioned into tools by hominids.”

What’s more, this collection of stone artefacts is remarkably similar to those discovered with the remains of the hobbits in Liang Bua. Although the materials differ in accordance with the local geology, Brumm says the techniques by which the tools were made are identical.

“Some people have claimed that Homo floresiensis, because they had such small brains, wouldn’t have been capable of making the stone tools found in association with their remains at Liang Bua. They infer that modern humans must have made the tools, but not left their skeletal remains in the cave. The similarities between the Mata Menge tools and the tools found at Liang Bua suggests that what we most likely have is a continuous sequence of tool manufacture associated with a particular line of hominid on the island, which resulted in Homo floresiensis in the late Pleistocene period.

“It’s not known for certain who made the tools at Mata Menge at this stage, but based on the technological similarities, our argument is that they were the direct ancestors of Homo floresiensis.”

When asked about the ongoing debate over the nature of the hominid remains found on Flores in 2004, Brumm replies that those arguments are for the experts in hominid skeletal anatomy. But he is prepared to express a view as to the validity of the new species theory, arguing that what’s being played out now in the academic journals and popular press is a time-worn practice of palaeoanthropological debate.

ANU Reporter Spring 2006