Episode 8

Don't Call Them Hobbits (Homo floresiensis)

Vacation season is here, and Anna and Amber are island-bound: To the site of Liang Bua, Indonesia! Join them as they get to know Homo floresiensis, our diminutive extinct cousins in Flores, and discuss their place on our complicated, ever evolving human family tree. Plus, local lore about small, hairy cave-dwellers said to steal food and/or children, and a brief moment of Hobbit (TM) Drama.

To learn more about this episode's topic, check out:

Bibliography and 3D tour of Liang Bua Cave

'Hobbits' on Flores, Indonesia (Smithsonian Institution)

Homo floresiensis (Australian Museum)

Van den Bergh, Gerrit D., et al. "Homofloresiensis-like fossils from the early Middle Pleistocene of Flores." Nature 534.7606 (2016): 245.

Ten Years On, the Flores “Hobbit” Remains an Evolutionary Puzzle (Smithsonian)

Where did we come from? A primer on early human evolution (Cosmos)

Origins of Indonesian Hobbits finally revealed (ScienceDaily)

Homo floresiensis (Smithsonian Institution)

Hobbit makers ban uni from using ‘hobbit’ (Newshub)

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The Dirt Podcast
Archaeology, Anthropology, and our shared human past.

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The Dirt Podcast

As science communicators in anthropology and archaeology, we hosts of The Dirt acknowledge that we hold a position of considerable privilege and opportunity, and commit ourselves to continuous learning, unlearning and reflection. We recognize that our disciplines, as well as our own lives, are rooted in and propped up by settler colonialism, white supremacy, and dispossession.

We now reside on the stolen ancestral territory of the Shawnee and Haudenosaunee and on the lands of the Muscogee and Cherokee Nations, but over its lifetime, The Dirt has also been produced on the unceded traditional territory of the Piscataway Conoy and Cedarville Band of Piscataway Indians, as well as that of the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, Patwin and Miwok peoples and all those dispossessed by Cession 296. We offer our show as a platform for Indigenous scholarship, history, and cultural expression, through citation and conversation, and we welcome the opportunity to host and compensate Indigenous scholars of archaeology and anthropology as interview guests.

Likewise, we encourage all listeners who reside in settler-colonial states to learn about on whose land they reside, their place in the ongoing process of colonization, and how to contribute materially to reparations and Indigenous sovereignty.