Discovery of the 'Hobbit'
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2025
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2003, archaeologists on the island of Flores, in Indonesia, discovered the skeleton of a new species of human - Homo floresiensis.
It was nicknamed the 'Hobbit', because they were just over a metre in height, and it's thought they became extinct around 70,000 years ago.
Rachel Naylor spoke to Peter Brown, the Australian paleoanthropologist who identified it.
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest; the disastrous D-Day rehearsal; and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.
(Photo: The skull of Homo floresiensis (centre). Credit: Jim Watson / AFP via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're listening to the BBC World Service, and now it's time to dig beneath the surface for witness history with me, Rachel Naylor. |
| 0:13.0 | We're the podcast that brings history to life through powerful archive and first-hand witness accounts. |
| 0:18.7 | New nine-minute episodes drop every weekday, so make sure you hit subscribe, share, |
| 0:22.6 | and turn your notifications on so you never miss an episode. |
| 0:25.9 | Today, I'm taking you back more than 20 years |
| 0:28.0 | to when the bones of an extinct species of human were discovered in Indonesia. |
| 0:32.4 | Homo Florysiensis, or The Hobbit, as it was nicknamed, |
| 0:35.6 | existed until about 70,000 years ago, |
| 0:38.1 | had been speaking to the scientist who identified it. |
| 0:43.1 | It's the 2nd of September 2003, an archaeologist, Mike Morwood and Madens Sujono, |
| 0:49.2 | are leading a dig in Liang Bua, a large cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia. |
| 0:54.0 | They're trying to trace how ancient |
| 0:55.6 | people travelled from mainland Asia to Australia, but so far they've not found anything of interest. |
| 1:01.6 | That is, until they find a small human skull. |
| 1:08.5 | Mike is excited. He estimates it's only 14,000 years old |
| 1:12.9 | and can't wait to tell his colleague Peter Brown, |
| 1:15.5 | a paleoanthropologist at the University of New England in Armandale in Australia. |
| 1:19.8 | He'd come back with a tooth, |
| 1:21.9 | and he bought the tooth down to my laboratory to show them me |
| 1:24.8 | and asked me what I thought about it. |
| 1:26.3 | And I knew straight away that while it was human-like, it can't have been from a human. This tooth had an elongated |
| 1:33.0 | crown and three roots fused into one. That's the kind of tooth root you find in early human |
... |
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