In 2003, researchers digging caves on the Indonesian island of Flores found astounding fossils. This is because the fossils found are believed to be from dwarf humans with small brains the size of chimpanzees. They called the species Homo floresiensis.
This relative of modern humans was over 90 cm tall. Several villages in the area, according to scientists, are inhabited by people whose average height is 149 cm.
However, an anthropologist believes that ancient humans still survive today, on a remote island with hot springs in the east of the Java Sea.
Gregory Forth, a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta has spent decades researching Homo floresiensis (a small prehistoric human species that inhabited the island of Flores).
It is believed that humans of an average height of one meter are still alive after hundreds of thousands of years. Because of its smaller size than humans in general, Homo Floresiensis also often gets the nickname as the Hobbit from Liang Bua.
Quoting the National Post, Forth said he spoke to 30 local residents who said they had seen gnome-like humans in the forests of Flores.
In an excerpt from the book, Forth tells of a conversation he had with a man who claimed to have found the body of an old hominoid woman. The woman’s body was covered in light puppy-colored hair with conspicuous breasts and a very short tail.
Another body is described as having a head similar to that of a human and a body covered with light gray hair, a monkey-like face and a skull-like nose.
In 2003, traces of the presence of dwarf humans were found by a group of researchers from the Indonesian National Archaeological Research Center. They found the nearly complete skeleton of an adult woman about one meter tall, weighing just 30 kilograms, in a large limestone cave on Flores.
The woman, who is thought to have died 18,000 years ago, is known as the Hobbit, and is described by National Geographic as the most extreme human ever found. Together with the skeletons were found the bones of pygmy elephants, Komodo dragons and giant rats.
The female skeleton differs from Homo sapiens in that she has a broad hip and hunched shoulders. However, it is not known when the species Homo floresiensis, with a skull the size of a grapefruit, went extinct.
Source: CNBC Indonesia
