Once upon a Hobbit - The Fossil Chronicles - page 83

erning these decisions are presently unknown. Stone flaking at Liang
Bua was neither a random nor a casual exercise in rock-breaking. ” 24
Skeptical archaeologists have countered that the tools found at Liang
Bua and elsewhere on Flores were so sophisticated that they must have
been produced by Homo sapiens, even though there was no evidence
of modern humans on the island before 11,000 years ago. 25 Moore re-
sponded, “The case for a H. floresiensis toolmaker at Liang Bua is about as
good as it gets. . . . The most parsimonious interpretation of the physical
evidence . . . is that the stones were flaked by the hominin found in asso-
ciation with them, in this case H. floresiensis. ” 26 He also noted that the
tools that predated Homo sapiens on Flores were not that sophisticated. On
the contrary, most of them were made from cores or blanks by remov-
ing one flake after another with a hammerstone in a simple, repetitious
manner, which did not require the complex planning or “anticipatory”
preparation of cores that typified many of the tools knapped by Homo
sapi ens. If some of the tools associated with hobbits appeared “decep-
tively like highly-designed tools,” it was simply because they had over-
lapping scars that were caused by the relatively “mindless” chaining
together of simple strikes to the same stone. 27
Interestingly, the basic stone-working technology associated with the
humans who arrived on Flores by 11,000 years ago was the same as that
used by hobbits and other nonmodern hominins in Southeast Asia. 28
But Homo sapiens also made some changes on Flores. The amount of
accidentally burned stone increased dramatically in the cave, as did the
percentage of tools that were knapped from chert. For the first time,
tools appeared with residues on their edges that gave them a polished
look, which suggests that they may have been used to cut or split rela-
tively soft canes or grasses for weaving into perishable artifacts. By
4,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had enlarged the Flores toolkit to include
rectangular adzes that were made mostly from chert and were ground
on their edges. Presumably, these tools were used for shaping wood.
What is particularly fascinating is that the simple tools associated
with Homo floresiensis look surprisingly similar to the earliest stone tools