Drought may have doomed the ‘hobbits’ of Flores

Climate records show thousands of years of drying before their extinction

A bust shows what the face of Homo floresiensis, also known as hobbits, might have looked like.

In a cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia, there lived the “hobbits” (Homo floresiensis) (a reconstruction of a head, shown). But these human relatives vanished from the fossil record 50,000 years ago and a drought may have been partly to blame.

Karen Neoh (CC BY 1.0)

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