A new study led by University of Tübingen anthropologist Elizabeth Veatch challenges the long-held assumption that Homo floresiensis — the diminutive extinct hominins nicknamed "Hobbits" who lived on the Indonesian island of Flores until around 60,000 years ago — were capable big-game hunters. Rather than hunting and butchering the island's pygmy elephants (Stegodon), the researchers argue that Komodo dragons made the kills and the Hobbits merely scavenged the leftovers. If correct, the finding reshapes our picture of how these hominins lived and feeds into a wider debate about which human relative first left Africa.

The team examined Stegodon bones from the Liang Bua cave, which bore both Komodo dragon tooth marks and stone-tool cut marks. To interpret them, they fed a nearly whole goat carcass to a Komodo dragon at Zoo Atlanta and compared the results: the dragon's serrated teeth left shallower, shorter, wider marks than stone tools, and it targeted the meatiest parts — limbs, fat-rich feet and ribs — exactly where tooth marks appeared on the fossil bones, while stone-tool marks fell on the less desirable parts, consistent with scavenging. The Stegodon species ranged from 1.25 to nearly 2 metres tall and weighed between 500kg and 1.5 tonnes, and no evidence of fire was found in the hominin layers, suggesting the Hobbits ate their scraps raw. The authors suggest this behaviour may lend weight to the idea that Homo floresiensis descended not from Homo erectus but from an even older hominin such as Homo habilis or rudolfensis, a debate linked to 2.1-to-2.43-million-year-old stone tools found in China.