PARIS, Oct 12: A tiny hominid whose discovery in a cave on an Indonesian island unleashed one of the fiercest debates in anthropology has suddenly been joined by several other sets of dwarf-sized beings.

At least nine other wee individuals lived in the cave, where thousands of years ago they skilfully butchered meat and handled fire, according to new findings.

The initial find at Liang Bua cave, reported almost exactly a year ago, became known as the Hobbit Hominid, after the pint-sized characters of J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories.

Now, though, Liang Bua has yielded more specimens, which adds a mighty weight to H. floresiensis’ credentials.

The new fossils consist of the right elbow and two bones of the lower forearm of the first skeleton; the mandible of a second individual; and assorted other remains, including two tibiae, a femur, two radii, an ulna, a scapula, a vertebra and various toe and finger bones.

In all, bits and pieces from at least nine individuals have been found, and dating of the remains suggest some were alive as recently as 12,000 years ago.

All seem to have been the same size as the original Hobbit. In addition, the new bones show that these people, for all their short size, had relatively long arms and, unlike H. sapiens, had no chin.

The finds thus prove that the first Hobbit “is not just an aberrant or pathological individual, but is representative of a long-term population that was present during the interval (of) 95-74,000 to 12,000 years ago,” the Australian-Indonesian team say.

But that’s not all. Gently extracted from Liang Bua’s floor were the remains of a dwarf elephant called a Stegodon, whose bones, marked by flints, showed that the hobbits were good at butchering animals.

There were also scarred bones and clusters of reddened, flame-cracked rocks, proof that the community was skillful at manipulating fire.

In a review of the study, Harvard University expert Daniel Lieberman said the new fossils backed the contention that the Hobbits were a previously undiscovered branch of the human family tree.—AFP