As we roll out our new trip ‘Islands of Hobbits & Dragons,’ that takes you to the islands of Komodo and Flores in Indonesia, we were excited to see a recent article by the Guardian on the real life hobbits that lived on Flores!
At Liang Bua Cave in 2004, researches unearthed some 50,000 year old fossils that pointed to a race of tiny humans, known as ‘Homo floresiensis’ but quickly nicknamed ‘Hobbits.’ They made stone tools and had very small brains, only one third the size of ours. A more recent discovery was made of even smaller jaw bones, some 50km from the Liang Bua cave site, in Mata Menga a large basin overshadowed by the volcanoes on Flores. A team from Australia, Indonesia and Japan worked with 140 locals to excavate the fossils from the sandstone laid down by a stream 700,000 years ago. This pre-dates any trace of Homo Sapiens and is an amazing discovery!

Hobbit Tooth Photograph: Kinez Riza
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