Homo floresiensis, a diminutive ancient hominin often compared to the hobbits of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings mythos, engaged in a sort of “second breakfast” according to new research.
Instead of eating twice in short succession like their fictional counterparts, a new paper published in Nature Microbiology suggests that these hobbits were second to the table, eating the scavenged remains of Komodo dragon kills. This new work challenges earlier suggestions that H. floresiensis was a sophisticated species capable of using fire and hunting large game.
Interpreting The Hobbits of Flores
H. floresiensis remains have been discovered co-located with proboscideans, the taxonomic group that includes elephants, stegodons, and similar trunked creatures. One such discovery occurred on the island of Flores, off the coast of Indonesia, at the Liang Bua site.
Among the H. floresiensis and Stegodon remains at the site, small stone tools littered the area, leading researchers to conclude that the hobbits were ancient hunters.
The isolated conditions of the small island produced one of the most dwarfed Stegodon breeds, typically standing just under four feet tall and weighing between 770 and 800 pounds. In comparison, the hobbits were only a bit over three feet tall and weighed around 66 pounds, with the two species together forming almost a miniature scale model of the big-game hunting that later hominins would engage in elsewhere in the world.
The Secret of Fire
Archaeologists identified Stegodon remains bearing char marks, which they interpreted as evidence that the small hominins had mastered fire and were cooking their food. This was an unexpected find, as H. floresiensis was a relatively small-brained species, while evidence of fire use has typically been identified only in larger-brained species such as modern humans and Neanderthals.
The suggestion that the tiny, small-brained creatures killed and cooked Stegodon and other elephant ancestors led scientists to believe the species was relatively advanced. Potentially supporting this contention were skull measurements, indicating that despite the relatively small brain size, there was an expansion of the brain’s frontal polar region, associated with high-level cognitive processing. Taken together, this evidence led researchers to suspect that the hobbits were far more sophisticated than they had previously been given credit for.
Reconsidering Hobbits
However, when Smithsonian researchers reexamined the Stegodon bones found on Flores, they came to a different conclusion. Only one other creature on the island was a large enough predator to take down a Stegodon: the Komodo dragon. The Smithsonian team set out to investigate who was really behind the Stegodon kills: tiny hobbits, or giant lizards.
First, they performed an experiment at Zoo Atlanta, feeding Komodo dragons and then measuring the tooth marks on the leftover bones. Based on these baseline measurements, the researchers discovered Komodo dragon tooth marks on the meatiest, and therefore, most desirable parts of the carcass for predators to consume. It was only on the less desirable portions of the Stegodon remains that the team found cut marks likely caused by the hobbits.
This indicates that Komodo dragons were most likely the original predators who killed the Stegodon, quickly taking the prime portions, with H. floresiensis coming later, like a hyena, to scavenge the remains.
Additionally, their reinvestigation of H. floresiensis’s use of fire also called into question prior assertions. Only one of 3155 Stegodon bone fragments showed any evidence of contact with fire. That one fragment was unearthed high in the strata and may have poked through the surface of the site when it was used as a hearth by later H. sapiens, explaining the one odd incidence of fire damage.
In their final conclusion, the authors write, “The evidence to date thus suggests that H. floresiensis did not engage in a behavioral repertoire as diverse or as flexible as in modern humans or Neanderthals, possibly due to an ancestry in which large game hunting and controlled use of fire did not evolve”
The paper, “Taphonomic analysis at Liang Bua Reveals the Behavioral and Technological Capabilities of Homo Floresiensis,” appeared in Science Advances on July 3, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.