Australian scientists who found a new species of hobbit-sized humans who lived about 13,000 years ago on an Indonesian island said yesterday they expect to discover more new species of hominids on neighbouring islands. The partial skeleton of Homo floresiensis, found in a cave on the island of Flores in 2003, was of an adult female that was a metre (3 feet) tall, had a brain smaller than a chimpanzee’s, and probably lived alongside modern humans on the island.

Australian and Indonesian scientists have since unearthed seven small hominids called “Flores man” from the Liang Bua limestone cave, the youngest living 13,000 years ago. “The finding of this distinctive human species, this endemic human species on Flores, also implies that there will be similar endemic species on other islands in that vicinity,” project leader Mike Morwood, associate professor in archaeology at Australia’s University of New England, said yesterday.

“So, you’re likely to have a distinctive little hominid population on Lombok, on Sumbawa, on Timor, and on Sulawesi, and each of those will be distinct species, because they will have evolved in isolation,” he told a news conference in Sydney. “Flores man” is thought to be a descendent of Homo erectus, which had a large brain, was full-sized and spread out from Africa to Asia about 2 million years ago. The hominid family tree, which includes humans and pre-humans, diverged from chimpanzees about 7 million years ago. Morwood said the “Flores man” evolved in isolation, becoming so small because of environmental conditions such as food shortages and a lack of predators.

Scientists have pieced together an image of a hairless, dark-skinned dwarf species with a head the size of a grapefruit, sunken eyes, a flat nose and large teeth and mouth projecting forward with virtually no chin.

What surprised scientists was that despite the shrinking of the brain “Flores man” still performed complex tasks like making miniature stone tools, hunting miniature Stegodon elephants and giant Komodo dragons and using fire to cook. “They were making sophisticated stone tools, some of which appear to be directly associated with the hunting of big game like Stegodon, like Komodo dragon...and for butchering these large animals,” said Morwood. “So despite very, very small brains, this hominid population was doing sophisticated things,” he said. The remains discovered have been dated as old as 95,000 years.