In what may have been a product of evolutionary downsizing, scientists have found the fossils of a tiny species of human that lived 13-18,000 years
ago on the Indonesian island of Flores. Dubbed Homo floresiensis after that island, this species evolved independently, and their diminutive
stature most likely being the result of limited resources on the island. Scientist feel confident that this is not a "freak" finding due to seven
individual remains being found at one site and having the same physical attributes.
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Not only did anthropologists find the skeletal remains of a hobbit-sized, 30-year-old adult female, in this fairy-tale-like discovery they also
uncovered in the same limestone cave the remains of a Komodo dragon, stone tools and a dwarf elephant.
Subsequent finds of other similarly sized, 3-foot-tall humans with brains the size of grapefruits in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores suggest
these 18,000-year-old specimens weren't a quirk of an ancient hominin, but part of an entire species of miniature people whose existence overlapped
with that of modern Homo sapiens.
"We now have the remains of at least seven hobbit-sized individuals at the cave site, so the 18,000-year-old skeleton cannot be some kind of
'freak' that we just happened to stumble across first," said Bert Roberts, an anthropologist at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales,
Australia, and co-author of the study about the find in this week's issue of the journal "Nature."
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A rewrite of the textbooks may well be in order, and the conspiracy theorist given new hope with the revelation of an independent species evolving
from Homo erectus in a isolated eco system may well lend credence to some of the other mythical permutations of mankind such as Bigfoot and the
Yeti.