Indonesia was home to 'smaller than believed' hobbits 700,000 years ago, their fossils suggest...

The scientists stumbled upon the fossils of early human species which were only around 3 and a halffeet (1.07 metres) tall and hence were given the nickname “hobbits.”

This discovery was made 20 years ago. However, a new study has now claimed that the ancestors of the hobbits were shorter in height.

“We did not expect that we would find smaller individuals from such an old site,” said the lead author of the studyYousuke Kaifu a professor at the University of Tokyo, while reacting to the find in an email to the Associated Press.

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The original fossils of the hobbit date back to between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago. The scientists excavated the new fossils at the site known as Mata Menge, which is at a distance of 45 miles from the cave where the first remains of the hobbit were discovered.

The researchers suspected that the early humans may have been shorter in comparison to the hobbits in 2019 after they discovered a jawbone and teeth from the new site.

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After further analysis, it was discovered that the teeth and tiny arm bone fragment suggested that the ancestors of humans were only 2.4 inches (6 centimetres) shorter and existed 700,000 years ago.

“They’ve convincingly shown that these were very small individuals," Dean Falk, an evolutionary anthropologist at Florida State University, who was not involved with the research, told AP.

Homo floresiensis:Small humans who inhabited the Indonesian island

The 700,000-year-old fossilised remains were said to belong to Homo floresiensis, which was an extinct species of very small humans that once lived in Flores, an island in the south of Indonesia, as per a study published in the journalNature Communications on Tuesday (August 6).

"Acquiring a large body and largebrainand becoming clever is not necessarily our destiny," said lead authorKaifu, while speaking to Live Science.

"Depending on the natural environment, there were diverse ways ofevolutionnot only for animals in general but also for humans," he added.

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"The Mata Menge fossils we report here showed that the extremely small body size ofHomo floresiensisevolved within the first 300,000 years of their history on the island … and then after that, the small body size was maintained for more than 600,000 years. Why this happened is another difficult question," he said.

"We tend to think that humans are special among animals. But the evidence from Flores indicates that we humans are, like other animals, also under control of natural selection and could evolve toward unexpected directions," Kaifu added.

(With inputs from agencies)