18,000 Year Old Hobbit Remains Found in Indonesia

As an archaeologist (especially one who worked/works in Egypt), one of the most frequent questions I ever got was: "is there really anything left to find?" Well, file this under "there are more things that have yet to be found then there are things that have been found." In the most recent issue of the journal Nature, researchers are reporting that the remains of a tiny species of human, which has been named Homo floresiensis and lived at least 18,000 years ago, have been uncovered in a rock shelter called Liang Bua on the island of Flores. And when I say tiny, I mean tiny. The skeletons that have been found measure at around 1 meter in height, and the craniums are about the size of a grapefruit.

The discovery is prompting increased scrutiny of sites on other Southeast Asian islands, both to look for more of the same species and to place it in context with Homo sapiens and Homo erectus, our closest relative. Homo erectuswas found to have lived on the nearby island of Java as long as 1.6 million years ago; the Australian archaeologists who made the find (and authored the article in Nature) suggest that the Flores hominids may be their descendants.

Suffice it to say, this is a phenomenally important discovery which will undoubtedly generate a whole series of questions that human evolutionists, paleoanthropologists, and archaeologists never thought they’d be asking themselves.

Click on over to Nature.com’s coverage of the story @ http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041025/full/4311029a.html