A study published in early June attempted to recreate the face of our ancient hobbit relatives.
The research, published by Ortog Online, builds off a discovery made in 2003 in a remote cave in Indonesia. Archaeologists working for some 20 years identified the human-like skeletal remains of a tiny female, who stood just 3 feet and 6 inches tall, LiveScience described. The new research offers new insight into what these small people might have looked like.
The human-ish creature is known as Flores and is believed to have lived some 18,000 years ago. Her face was reconstructed using detailed computer-generated markers. Though it is impossible to say what the exterior skin and/or hair, fur, could have looked like, the reconstruction builds off bone shape and structure for a general understanding.
Typically, researchers will simply compare the skull shape of human ancestors and relatives to more modern humans and build their models from there. In the case of Flores, there is literally no one like her, so all of the creative development had to be done seemingly originally. (RELATED: Eight New Types Of Ancient Human Discovered, Researchers Claim)
“We deformed [both] to adapt them to the structure of the skull of H. floresiensis and interpolated the data to get an idea of what [the hobbit’s] face could look like,” study co-author Cicero Moraes, told LiveScience. “The [hobbit] skull is almost complete, missing small parts in the region of the glabella (the part of the forehead directly between the eyebrows) and nasal bone, but fortunately it was possible to design them with the help of anatomical deformation.”
Video of the reconstruction was also shared online and is a pretty incredible glimpse into our past. She also looks like a weird number of men I know.