Hobbits Of The South Pacific

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Morwood theorizes that the Hobbit's ancestors must have built primitive rafts of bamboo; members of the team even constructed their own, à la Kon-Tiki, to prove it could be done. That would have been a technological feat far beyond anything H. erectus had ever been credited with, and some paleoanthropologists are skeptical. Not all, though. Says Chris Stringer, head of the Human Origins department at the London Natural History Museum: "The most likely explanation, as difficult as it is for me to accept, is that they used some kind of watercraft." Morwood goes a step further, suggesting that to achieve the kind of cooperation required to build rafts, H. floresiensis must have had language.

That's too speculative for most of his colleagues to accept at this point. But some of Morwood's other theories are being taken quite seriously. If the Hobbits evolved in isolation on Flores, there is every reason to believe that the same thing happened on other nearby islands. "I think we're going to have a plethora of new human species showing up," he says. Moreover, if the creatures survived all the way to 13,000 years ago, it's not at all impossible that they survived much longer — perhaps long enough to provide a factual basis for the Floresian folktales.

And if the Hobbits hung on until as recently as 500 years ago, it is conceivable, though admittedly very far-fetched, that pockets survive even today — if not on Flores, then on other remote Pacific islands. "The probability is that they're extinct," says Stringer. "But since this is such an astounding and surprising find, I think it shows how little we know about events in Southeast Asia. You really have to keep an open mind."