AS YET, no one can agree on her name. She is known variously as LB1, the Hobbit or Ebu, derived from a local legend about Ebu Go Go, a small, waddling creature with a big appetite. But become known she will, for Ebu 鈥� let鈥檚 call her that for now 鈥� is perhaps one of the most important humans yet recorded.
Ebu鈥檚 remains were unearthed in September 2003 in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, a 14,000-square-kilometre hotbed of volcanic activity and earthquakes some 1500 kilometres from Jakarta (see 鈥淢eet our new human relatives鈥�). It is hard to point to one defining trait that makes Ebu so special; she has so many unique features. Standing at around 1 metre tall, she is the smallest adult hominid known. Her brain is also tiny, no larger than a grapefruit, yet she came from a highly specialised people that seem to have hunted dwarf elephants on a remote island. Perhaps most amazingly, while Ebu is a human, she is not a Homo sapiens In these ways and more, Ebu has shocked and surprised anthropologists around the world.
Ebu is that rarest of things: a member of a species of human that is entirely new to science. Of course, such discoveries have been made before, and anthropology is rich with disputes over just how many Homo species once existed.
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But what is exceptional about Ebu and her ilk is that they lived until just 13,000 years ago, much later than any other human species apart from ourselves. To put that into context, it is more than 140,000 years after modern humans evolved in Africa, more than 25,000 years after H. sapiens reached Australia, and more than 15,000 years later than the last known Neanderthal. It is also when modern people stood on the cusp of inventing the pillars of human culture, such as agriculture, pottery and village life.
What can Ebu teach us? As yet we cannot be quite sure, because the potential implications of her discovery are so profound. For example, the existence of the new species she represents, dubbed Homo floresiensis, throws into doubt many of our assumptions about intelligence.
Until now, the received wisdom was that our evolutionary success can be directly linked to the size of our brains, which allowed us to develop sophisticated tools and culture. Ebu鈥檚 brain case is the size of a modern baby鈥檚, yet her people may have been clever enough to have used sophisticated tools and fire. They certainly managed to outlive many of their contemporary hominid species, surviving almost until the end of the last ice age.
H. floresiensis also appears to be the most extreme hominid yet discovered 鈥� a diminutive being with extremely wide pelvic bones compared to ours, whose dwarf size may have been an adaptation to island life where predators were few but resources were scarce. That teaches us that humans came in many forms. Indeed, the researchers who discovered Ebu suggest we are likely to discover many highly specialised and unique species of Homo that once existed on a multitude of remote islands. The idea that more than one species of human may have survived into recorded history is not quite so fanciful any more.
鈥淓bu is that rarest of things: a member of a species of human that is entirely new to science鈥�
When asked why Ebu is so important, some anthropologists are simply lost for words. Some say it鈥檚 the most important discovery they have known. Others initially believe it too good to be true and assume Ebu must be a fake. Her remains will certainly force a major rethink of human evolution, radiation and specialisation.
And Ebu could teach us an even deeper lesson. Many of us have yet to appreciate the complexity of our past, and remain wedded to the idea that Homo sapiens evolved along a simple, linear path that began in Africa and ended with us conquering the planet.
That may be partly true, but what is not is the notion that we are somehow unique and special for having done so. While some Homo erectus went on to become Homo sapiens, others went on to become an altogether different species. And in evolutionary terms, they were very successful.
For that reason, the discovery of H. floresiensis is not only startling, it is humbling. It means we now know that until very recently we were not alone but shared the world with people of another species. That realisation may give us a renewed sense of what it means to be human.