BRISBANE, Australia, March 30 (UPI) -- Previous studies have suggested Indonesia "hobbits," Homo floresiensis, live alongside humans for several thousand years.
But researchers at Australia's Griffith University say theories that the diminutive species disappeared 11,000 to 13,000 years ago are incorrect.
In a new study published in the journal Nature, scientists suggest the hobbits, or Flores man, went extinct at least 50,000 years ago -- just shortly after the arrival of Homo sapiens.
The misinformation was a result flawed dating at Liang Bua, a famed fossil-rich limestone cave found on the Indonesian island of Flores.
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"The science is unequivocal,'' Aubert said.
"The youngest Hobbit skeletal remains occur at 60,000 years ago but evidence for their simple stone tools continues until 50,000 years ago," Maxime Aubert, a geochronologist and archaeologist at Griffith's Research Centre of Human Evolution, said in news release. "After this there are no more traces of these humans."
The early excavations that uncovered the first Flores man fossils were limited in size and scope. Scientists confused remains from an older layer with a younger overlying layer. More recent and comprehensive digs have offered greater clarity to the order and dates of archaeological layers in the cave.
"This problem has now been resolved and the newly published dates provide a more reliable estimate of the antiquity of this species,'' Aubert said.
The latest research didn't attempt to determine what happened to the hobbits 50,000 years ago, but the evidence suggests the species was pushed out by modern man.
"They might have retreated to more remote parts of Flores, but it's a small place and they couldn't have avoided our species for long," Aubert said. "I think their days were numbered the moment we set foot on the island."
