For over a decade, scientists have been trying to find an answer to a mystery found on the Indonesian island of Flores: the fossils belonging to an ancient race of humans nicknamed the "hobbits" because they were so small.
Researchers, however, recently claimed that they have already unlocked the secret of the hobbits, and it has something to do with the conditions of the environment they lived in.
One of the researchers, Gerrit van den Bergh, said they never thought they will figure out why this group of humans who lived on the Indonesian islands 700,000 years ago seemed to have shrunk.
"We had given up hope we would find anything, then it was 'bingo!'," Van den Bergh told the journal Nature, which published two papers from his team reporting the latest findings.
The mystery only had a simple answer, according to the researchers: When the "hobbits" arrived on the island of Flores about one million years ago, the resources were so scarce that their bodies adapted and shrunk "in just a few hundred thousand years."
Van den Bergh explained that the same shrinking of the body have earlier been observed among animals. The red deer of Jersey, he said, shrank to one-sixth their original size in just 6,000 years due to low supply of food sources. The same happened to some species of elephants.
Yousuke Kaifu, another researcher from Tokyo's National Museum of Nature and Science, meanwhile said the discoverer of the hobbits, Mike Morwood, was correct in his hypothesis that they were shrunken Homo erectus, the same species that eventually evolved to become us.
It was Morwood who unearthed ancient "hobbit" bones—particularly a partial lower jaw and six teeth, belonging to at least one adult and two children—in 2003 inside the Liang Bua cave on Flores island.
"The morphology of the fossil teeth also suggests that this human lineage represents a dwarfed descendant of early Homo erectus that somehow got marooned on the island of Flores," Kaifu explained, as quoted by CNN.
Not all members of the scientific community, however, were convinced by this explanation on the mystery of the hobbits. William Junger of Stony Brook University, for instance, said that these answers provided by the researchers seemed inconclusive.
"I don't believe these scrappy new dental specimens inform the competing hypotheses for the origin of the species one way or another," Junger also told Nature, as quoted by CNN.
