Lost race of human 'hobbits'

The discovery is published in this week's edition of Nature.

Science - www.theage.com.au: "The story of man is being rewritten. Australian and Indonesian scientists have dug up skeletons of a previously unknown human species - real 'hobbits' that stood only a metre tall - that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores, west of Timor, until relatively recently.

The scientists found the first skeleton in September 2003 in Liang Bua, a large limestone cave on the island. The one-metre-tall female, aged about 30 and dubbed "Hobbit", lived about 18,000 years ago. Six similar skeletons were later found, some of whom lived in the cave just 13,000 years ago. The scientists have speculated that the species may have lived on Flores - which they dubbed the "lost world" - until the 16th century.

The new species has been officially named Homo floresiensis, and it is the most recent living human relative by far: until this week, the only other human species known to have coexisted with modern humans (Homo sapiens) were Neanderthal man and Homo erectus. Neanderthal man lived in Europe, becoming extinct 30,000 years ago. Homo erectus lived in Asia, becoming extinct possibly 100,000 years ago, although this figure is disputed.

Professor Roberts said the discovery would redraw the human family tree. "It's one of the most important (discoveries) because it shows there was diversity among humans until very, very recently. If you go with the previous models, people say for the past 30,000 years we've been the only human species to inhabit the planet, whereas in fact that's rubbish.

The Liang Bua cave was inhabited from 95,000 years ago, he said, but archaeological evidence indicated that the species arrived on Flores hundreds of thousands of years before. They would have needed rafts to get to the island, but they were probably much bigger than they later became - genetic isolation over the millenniums causing them to shrink. By contrast, pygmies - the shortest members of Homo sapiens - are about 1.3 metres tall. The scientists say Homo floresiensis is descended from Homo erectus, who first arrived on Flores about 840,000 years ago, after leaving Africa about a million years ago.

A major unresolved question is whether the new species shared Flores with Homosapiens. Homo sapiens left Africa about 100,000 years ago and had reached Australia, south-east of Flores, about 50,000 years ago. Professor Roberts said a layer of volcanic ash at the site suggested a volcanic eruption killed the species 12,000 years ago.

However, Colin Groves, of the Australian National University, said the skeletons had some extremely primitive features, and could be related to an even earlier human ancestor, Australopithecus, which predated all Homo species and was thought not to have left Africa. Professor Roberts said the team would continue to dig on Flores and other isolated Indonesian islands to see if other human species existed and whether Homo sapiens may have lived alongside them."