- This event has passed.
Hobbits & Hops: The Origin of Homo floresiensis
June 1 @ 2:00 pm – 5:00 pm America/Chicago
Location: Revolution Brewing – Brewery & Taproom
3340 North Kedzie Avenue Chicago, IL 60618
Tickets: Free | Registration required
Hobbits & Hops: The Origin of Homo Floresiensis with The Chicago Council on Science and Technology
Join the Chicago Council on Science and Technology, The Leakey Foundation, and Professor Adam Brumm, for an evening of socializing and science!
Our Hobbits & Hops Speakeasy is happening Sunday, June 1st, from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM at Revolution Brewing’s Brewery + Taproom on Kedzie. Doors will open at 2:00, and the talk will kick off at 2:30.
Registration is not required but is appreciated.
This event is family-friendly and open to all ages. Alcoholic beverage sales are restricted to guests aged 21+. Food and drink will be available for purchase.
Featuring a talk by Adam Brumm, professor of archaeology and founding member of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University.
In October 2004 the discovery of fossils from a new species of extinct human, Homo floresiensis, was announced to the world. The fossils were excavated from Liang Bua Cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. They belong to a very diminutive human with a tiny brain. This creature’s unusual traits bedevilled the efforts of scientists to trace its evolutionary origin. One idea was that Homo floresiensis was the dwarfed descendant of larger-bodied Homo erectus from Java. Another theory was that the Flores ‘Hobbit’ was the remnant of a much older line of primitive, small-bodied hominins, perhaps close relatives of Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis). Testing these theories had not been possible owing to the lack of human fossils at the oldest hominin sites on Flores—these dated to at least 1 million years ago, but had previously yielded only stone tools.
In recent years, however, a handful of extremely old human fossils have been found at Mata Menge, a site located in tropical grasslands east of Liang Bua. At about 700,000 years old, the Mata Menge fossils are ten times older than the Liang Bua ‘hobbit’, and they belong to even smaller-sized hominins with similarly peculiar traits. In this talk, Professor Adam Brumm from Griffith University—a leading member of the Mata Menge team—will discuss the discovery of these new human fossils, the oldest known from Flores, and consider their implications for our understanding of how Homo floresiensis evolved.
About the speaker
Adam Brumm is a professor of archaeology at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. His contributions to the field span 21 years of research in Indonesia, including extensive fieldwork on Flores and Sulawesi, two islands that loom large in our understanding of early humans. In Flores, his team unearthed fossils of archaic hominins that are the oldest found on the island and seem to represent a form ancestral to the celebrated ‘Hobbit’ (Homo floresiensis). In Sulawesi, his discoveries, with numerous colleagues, of a series of ‘ice age’ cave paintings were deemed to be among the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year on two occasions (2014 and 2019) by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Brumm completed his PhD at the Australian National University in 2007 and has since held several postdoctoral research fellowships, including at the University of Cambridge.
Sponsors
This lecture is in partnership with the Field Museum and Chicago Council on Science and Technology and is generously sponsored by the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, Camilla and George Smith, and the Joan and Arnold Travis Education Fund.
