ON A Tuesday in early September 2003, Benyamin Tarus struck bone. Digging through a cave floor on the Indonesian island of Flores, his trowel sliced into the left eyebrow ridge of an ancient human skull.
It soon became clear that Benyamin had uncovered evidence of an extinct, diminutive human relative unlike anything scientists had seen before. It was given the name Homo floresiensis and nicknamed the hobbit.
The find was described as “ in my lifetime” by one researcher, and justifiably so. H. floresiensis promised to overturn established ideas about the shape of our prehistoric family tree and the importance of big brains for the success of ancient humans. As importantly, the bones showed that south-east Asia had been a hotbed of ancient human evolution.
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You might expect that Indonesian researchers would have been as excited as anyone by the discovery on their doorstep. You would be wrong. After H. floresiensis was announced to the world, a leading Indonesian archaeologist condemned the international reporting of the discovery as “unethical”. A few days later, he surprised his colleagues by helping another Indonesian researcher take possession of the bones. When they were returned several months later, some were damaged beyond repair.
It has long been a mystery to many people why the Indonesian scientists reacted so strongly. My research can help. I have spent six years digging into the H. floresiensis story and talking to Indonesian scientists. Not only do I now have a greater appreciation of the scientific importance of the find, I also understand why it proved so controversial.
Obtaining an Indonesian perspective on H. floresiensis is challenging: in a country made up of over 17,000 islands, diversity rules. The islands are populated by people of distinct ethnicities, religions and languages. This variation is a source of pride, reflected in the national motto, bhinneka tunggal ika (“unity in diversity”).
This diversity is reflected at Liang Bua, the cave where H. floresiensis was unearthed. When I visited during the 2017-2019 field seasons – the latter being the most recent, because the covid-19 pandemic prevented researchers from working together – the site buzzed with the activity of people from vastly different backgrounds. University-educated archaeologists from the country’s capital, Jakarta, mixed with highly skilled excavators – like Benyamin – who live in villages a short walk from the cave. Among this diversity, a single, unifying characteristic was on display: a shared sense of purpose and experience.
Indonesian archaeology
And for good reason. Archaeological excavations have been a part of Indonesian life for more than 130 years. For instance, the first known fossils of Homo erectus – generally viewed as an ancestor of our species, Homo sapiens – were discovered on the Indonesian island of Java in the 1890s.
For decades, Indonesians received little credit for such finds, being viewed as mere labourers. In a country that had been largely under Dutch control since the 17th century, it was the European colonialists who directed excavations and became famous for the discoveries made there.
Understandably, many Indonesians resented this. After the country gained independence in a revolution during the 1940s, some Indonesian researchers were determined to free the country’s archaeological heritage from foreign control. They included , who worked at an institute in Jakarta that is now part of Indonesia’s Organization for Archaeology, Language, and Letters, and , who worked at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta.
For many years, they were successful. Their excavation teams began digging at Liang Bua in the 1970s and discovered a rich collection of artefacts for archaeologist Soejono to analyse. They unearthed several ancient skeletons in the cave, all belonging to H. sapiens. These were sent to the lab of Jacob, who was one of Indonesia’s leading palaeoanthropologists.
Few people are aware of this early research at Liang Bua, much of which was never published. I had to explore the archives of Indonesian research centres to read the field reports from the excavations – all, naturally enough, written in Indonesian. Within those reports are important details, including Jacob’s thoughts on an idea he became increasingly convinced was true: that the ancient H. sapiens who lived on Flores were unusually short in height. Such conclusions never made major headlines. But that was hardly the point. More important to Soejono and Jacob was that the excavations were finally under Indonesian control.
That changed at the turn of the century. Funding for excavations at Liang Bua had dried up and Soejono reluctantly admitted he would have to seek foreign help. He worried about the consequences. I found an account from the time in a local Indonesian publication in which Soejono expressed concern that scientists from abroad “will try to dominate the situation”.
Flores man
By 2001, excavations were under way again. Soejono was now working with , an archaeologist at the University of New England in Australia. Just a couple of years later, the team made the discovery that would shake up palaeoanthropology – and apparently convince Soejono and Jacob that they had been right to worry about working with international researchers.
It was an all-Indonesian team on site that day 20 years ago when Benyamin struck bone. The excavators soon realised they had discovered more than a skull: it was an almost complete skeleton. Archaeologist was the supervisor of that excavation pit. “We moved a little this way,” he recalls, gesturing excitedly 30 centimetres to the right “and dug: bone.” Moved a little another way, he adds, gesturing left, and “more bone”.
The Indonesian archaeologists told me that they worked into the night for three days to get the chunk of earth containing the skeleton safely out of the cave, lighting the deep pit with gas lanterns that filled their eyes with smoke. They then carefully carried the find across Indonesia to Soejono’s institution in Jakarta, where he and Morwood were working.
It was clear almost immediately that the skeleton was unusual. It belonged to an individual that was little more than a metre tall, though its worn wisdom teeth revealed it was an adult. To learn more, the team needed to consult a palaeoanthropologist. Soejono was keen to recruit Jacob, his long-time colleague and partner on research at Liang Bua, but Morwood insisted that was impossible. A contract he and Soejono had signed years earlier required any new finds from the cave to be analysed by scientists from either Soejono’s institution in Indonesia or Morwood’s institution in Australia – not the university where Jacob worked. Tense discussions resulted in the arrival of , a palaeoanthropologist from the University of New England.
Brown spent 10 days examining the skeleton and eventually concluded that it belonged to a very unusual human with a small body and – more significantly – a small brain. It was inconceivable, he argued, that the skeleton belonged to our species. He suggested placing it in a new species: H. floresiensis was born.
The conclusion was astonishing. It had long been assumed that human evolution had led to steadily increasing brain volume through time. But the evidence from Liang Bua seemed to suggest that H. floresiensis had survived until just 18,000 years ago – hundreds of thousands of years after small-brained hominins were thought to have vanished.
That wasn’t all. Stone tools and blackened bones at the cave indicated that H. floresiensis had a sophisticated set of behaviours and controlled fire to cook its food. Perhaps most surprising of all was that H. floresiensis had existed in south-east Asia rather than somewhere in Africa, where all other small-brained hominins we knew about had lived.
“This creature was beyond any area where we thought early humans ever got,” says at the Natural History Museum in London. “It was completely unexpected.”
In other words, H. floresiensis suggested that Indonesia had international significance for understanding human evolution. The discovery should have been a moment of triumph for Indonesian researchers like Soejono. But he didn’t see things that way.
In October 2004, the Liang Bua team published its findings in two research papers. Neither had an Indonesian researcher as the lead author – rather, and . The papers were unveiled in two press conferences, in London and Sydney. There was no press conference in Indonesia.
Soejono was incensed. In my research, I came across an article published in an Indonesian newspaper after news of the discovery broke – overlooked by many interested in the H. floresiensis story because it was written in Indonesian. It quoted Soejono blaming the Indonesian government for failing to provide “sufficient funds”. Morwood later said there had been a plan to hold a press conference in Indonesia, but it fell through.
Jacob was no less annoyed. In particular, suggest news reports from the time, he was unimpressed that Brown had studied the H. floresiensis bones . As researchers around the world began excitedly debating the significance of H. floresiensis, Soejono and Jacob reverted to their decades-old practice of working together. They packed the H. floresiensis bones into a suitcase, which Jacob then carried 425 kilometres east across Java to his own laboratory in Yogyakarta – without Morwood and much of the H. floresiensis team’s knowledge. When news of this act broke, the international media accused Jacob of theft.
A few months later, Jacob announced he had finished analysing the bones and was ready to return them to Jakarta. Holding his own press conference – in Indonesia – , albeit one with some unusual bone pathologies that gave it the deceptive appearance of otherness. “This is not a new species,” said Jacob. His viewpoint seemed bizarre to many researchers – but Jacob presumably saw the logic, given that he was merely continuing his earlier work that claimed Flores had once been home to a population of unusually small H. sapiens.
A thousand crumbs
An intellectual disagreement was one thing. But when the bones arrived back in Jakarta, some of the fragile remains were now broken. The hip bone had been shattered “into a thousand crumbs”, said Brown, and others were damaged. Jacob denied direct responsibility, saying the damage must have occurred while the remains were being transported from his lab in Yogyakarta back to Jakarta. But the conservator who came from the UK to work on the bones the following year, at London’s Natural History Museum, later told me there was evidence that Jacob’s team had caused some of the damage by trying to mould and cast the delicate specimen.
Left with the wreckage, the Liang Bua team tried to put the bones back together and mend relationships. Morwood regretted the lack of an Indonesian press conference and I was told by members of the research team that he privately vowed to do better. Excavations were paused in an attempt to ease tensions, only resuming in 2007.
Twenty years on from the moment H. floresiensis emerged from Liang Bua, it is possible to view the discovery with more clarity. It remains a startlingly unexpected find, but curiously enough, the species no longer stands alone as a bizarre outlier in the human family tree. In the years since H. floresiensis came to light, we have learned of two more species of small-brained human that were present on our planet at the same time as our species. Homo naledi, discovered in South Africa, was revealed to the public in 2015, while Homo luzonensis, unearthed in the Philippines, made headlines in 2019.
Researchers are now also more comfortable with the idea that small-brained hominins were capable of sophisticated behaviour: it has been suggested, for example, that .
That said, another reason why H. floresiensis is more acceptable today than it was in 2003 is that the researchers working at Liang Bua have walked back some of the claims made about the species at the time of its discovery. In 2016, they pushed H. floresiensis‘s extinction back to around 50,000 years ago, which is more in line with the accepted date for the disappearance of other ancient human species, as well as the arrival of modern humans in what is now Indonesia. The researchers also abandoned the idea that H. floresiensis controlled fire: “charred” bones that Morwood had identified were blackened naturally by soil minerals.
I never had the opportunity to talk to Jacob or Soejono, who died in 2007 and 2011 respectively. The passion they shared for scientific independence, forged in the years immediately following Indonesia’s revolution, burns a little less fiercely in the younger generations of Indonesian researchers – some of whom coordinated the excavations on the ground in 2003 but chose not to engage with the controversies that followed.
Those younger archaeologists – including Wahyu as well as and (who, like many Indonesians, has one name) – have themselves recently retired. They are, however, still involved with the Liang Bua excavations, along with co-team-leader at Lakehead University, Canada (Morwood died in 2013). Together, they have been training a new generation of Indonesian scientists.
Observing the team in recent excavation seasons revealed a group focused on exploring Liang Bua’s past in all its complexity. The cave sediments preserve a near-continuous record spanning 200,000 years, offering a rare opportunity to understand how H. floresiensis differed from H. sapiens in its interactions with the environment. In other words, the Liang Bua researchers today are less interested in rewriting the global story of human evolution. Rather, they are motivated by a desire to understand the nuances of Indonesia’s ancient prehistory. In a sense, their work is now more aligned with the research conducted at Liang Bua shortly after Indonesia gained its independence almost 80 years ago. Jacob and Soejono would perhaps have approved.
Paige Madison is a science writer based in Bozeman, Montana
