The 'hobbit' Homo floresiensis is announced

On 28 October 2004 a team of Australian and Indonesian archaeologists reported in the journal Nature the discovery in Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores of the skeleton of a tiny adult woman, about 1.06 metres tall, with a brain the size of a grapefruit. Nicknamed the 'hobbit', Homo floresiensis lived on Flores between about 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, and probably descended from an earlier population of Homo erectus which shrank by 'island dwarfism'. It made stone tools and hunted dwarf elephants. Some scientists argued that it was a diseased modern human, but further finds support the status of a separate species.

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