The skull of the Hobbit, or Homo floresiensis. Photo: e_monk/Flickr
For the land-bound, the sea is a boundary. For sailors, it is a path to other shores. But how long have humans been sailing? We can be reasonably sure that humans have been sailing in rafts, boats or ships for tens of thousands of years, based on artifacts found on islands far enough out to sea to make either walking or swimming impractical. One unlikely group of now-extinct early humans may push the date of the first sailor back to one million years.
Homo floresiensis, Flores Man, is an extinct species of hominid discovered in 2003 on the island of Flores in Indonesia. Because Flores Man stood at only about one meter or around three feet tall, the species has been nicknamed, hobbit. The hobbits, apparently lived on Flores as recently as 12,000 years ago. Dating of stone tools suggests that the hobbits arrived on Flores roughly one million years ago. The unanswered question is, how did they get there? Flores is, after all, an island. Where the ancestors of the Hobbits the first sailors?
The two primary hypotheses as to how the hobbits arrived on Flores are that they either arrived by some sort of boat or raft, or that they washed ashore in a storm or tsunami. While the first seems far more likely, ecologist Graeme Ruxton of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and biologist David Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University in England have modeled both possibilities and concluded that either option could have been resulted in a viable population on Flores. As a sailor, migration by storm seems more than a bit far-fetched, though apparently the numbers work, if one accepts the academic’s assumptions. Personally, I’d bet on hobbit sailors.