Mata Menge hominins on Flores

On the Indonesian island of Flores, at a site called Mata Menge in the Soa Basin, a team led by Gerrit van den Bergh reported in 2016 a small lower jaw fragment and six teeth, from at least three individuals, in sediments about 700,000 years old. The jaw is tinier than the jaw of the later Homo floresiensis, and the teeth are small too. Stone tools from the Soa Basin go back even further, to roughly 1 million years ago, which tells us that hominins had reached the island long before. The finds are the oldest hominin fossils known from Flores.

Flores was never joined to the mainland, even when sea levels fell during ice ages, and reaching it meant crossing deep water. Nobody knows how: one idea is that a few individuals drifted on floating vegetation, perhaps after a storm or tsunami. Once there, the small founding population lived with strange fellow islanders, including dwarf elephants, giant rats and large lizards. The tiny size of the Mata Menge people fits the 'island rule', in which large mammals shrink on islands where food is limited. They were probably descended from Homo erectus from Java, and they led in time to the 'hobbits' of Liang Bua.