Long live the real Bilbo Baggins, the first Little People of the World, Homo floresiensis and Homo sapien archeologists Michael Morwood, Peter Brown and Professor Soejono!

A team of Australian-Indonesian archaeologists, led by Michael J. Morwood and R.P. Soejono, have found a new species of hobbit-sized humans who grew no larger than a three-year-old modern child (approximately one meter tall), and who lived about 18,000 years ago and as recently perhaps as 500 years ago.

New South Wales University archaeologists discovered eight unearthed remains of a dwarf-like skeleton last fall in a limestone cave on the east Indonesian volcanic island of Flores. They have given these people the name Homo floresiensis. Their discovery in the Liang Bua cave of Indonesia, however, was not announced until yesterday.

The scientific journal Nature first published the news in their October 28, 2004 edition. The title: "Short For Her Age...Flores Man: Human Evolution writ small."

Today, the three-foot rainforest-dwelling "hobbit" which "rewrites the history of mankind" has graced the front pages of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal Marketplace, and other news sources around the world.

The Independent said the discovery of remains of a "new species" of human in Indonesia challenges the idea of what it means to be a human being.

A remnant population of this apeman, says the Daily Telegraph, may still be living in south-east Asia rainforest.

But the Guardian suggests the tiny beings fell foul of volcanic eruptions 12,000 years ago.

Could they have persisted somewhere else on the island inhabited today by 2 million people? And could a form of these beings remain alive today?

Geochronologist Professor Bert Roberts of Wollongong University, a member of the Australian-Indonesian team who surprised the world yesterday said, "Yes."

Roberts added:

There are lots of local folk tales in Flores about these people, which are consistent and incredibly detailed.

We had been looking for the remains of the earliest modern humans in Indonesia, so when we found the skeleton of a completely new species of human, with so many primitive traits and that survived until so recently, it really opened up a whole can of prehistoric worms.

The discovery of Homo floresiensis was sweet serendipity.

Photo by Peter Brown of Floresiensis Skull, a Human-like Relative

Dr. Peter Brown, a paleo-anthropologist from the University of New England in Armidale, NSW, says: "I would have been less surprised if someone had uncovered an alien."

He added, "People of this body size were supposed to be extinct three million years ago."

Today, Morwood and Brown, along with Soejono of of the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta, the 35+ researchers on their team, and other human palaeontologists are hoping to find new evidence regarding the Homo floresiensis.

One question they have: Did European explorers co-habitat with the hobbits as early as the 1500s?

"The stories suggest there may be more than a grain of truth to the idea that they were still living on Flores up until the Dutch arrived in the 1500s," said Roberts.

Associate Professor Michael J. Morwood said he has now started excavating on neighbouring islands to West Flores such as Sulawesi, Lombok, Timor and Java.

The scientists believe their ground-breaking find is just the tip of the iceberg.

"We look forward to finding other species," said Professor Morwood, leader of the Australian-Indonesian team of archaeologists who is also the author of Vision from the Past: Archaeology and Australian Aborginial Art. "I wouldn't be surprised if modern humans consumed them. I look forward to finding grisly archaeological evidence of that."

Mike Morwood (center) with elders of the local Manggarai people, at a ceremony to ensure good fortune for the excavation

The University of New England's Morwood added:

Sulawesi has got to be another real cracker of an opportunity. We haven't had the planet to ourselves for all that long.

We are simply not that unique any longer. The difference between us and them is getting incredibly small.

Hobbit Hair DNA

The discovery of the hobbit's hair has raised scientists' hopes of obtaining their DNA.

"If it's hobbit hair, we will be screaming with delight," said Bert Roberts.

Professor Roberts said that even if the hair in the cave, unearthed at the same depth as the new humans, had come instead from the extinct pygmy elephants they hunted, it would still be an exciting scientific first if DNA could be extracted.

Professor Morwood said a world expert on ancient DNA at the University of Oxford, Alan Cooper, is keen to assist the team in obtaining DNA from the new species, Homo floresiensis.

Professor Cooper told the media it was "jaw-dropping stuff" that a form of archaic human, Homo erectus, had survived until so recently, undergoing a dwarfing process similar to the elephants on the island.

Our species, Homo sapiens, is also descended from Homo erectus, so studying remains of the new species opened the way for a genetic analysis of what our ancestors looked like a million years ago, he said.

All the bones discovered so far of Homo erectus have been fossilised, so there is no DNA. But the bones of seven members of Homo floresiensis found in the cave are so young they have not yet turned to stone, making it much more likely genetic material could be extracted.

Professor Roberts said it was also exciting that Professor Cooper has been able to isolate ancient DNA from plants and animals up to 400,000 years old from sediments in some other archaeological sites. "So all you need is dirt to get DNA," he said.

This raised the tantalising prospect of finding hobbit DNA in dirt on stone tools found near at the same level as their remains.

One of the most surprising things about the skeleton is its size: in life, no more than a meter tall, about the same size as one of the giant rats. Living in a hole in the ground and chased by lizards of mythical proportions, the creature has, perhaps inevitably, been nicknamed "hobbit" by some of the researchers - a reference to the tiny, hole-dwelling heroes of The Lord of the Rings.

For Brown, it was the smallness of the skull that showed that Homo floresiensis was truly different.

When he measured the skull volume and found it a chimp-sized, he says his jaw "dropped to my knees.

Small stature is easy to accommodate, but small brain size is a bigger problem - it still is."

Why Did They Shrink In Size?

The islanders were separated from the rest of humanity for over 800,000 years - the longest period of human isolation ever known.

Michael Morwood said, "'The dwarfing of large mammals on isolated islands occurred all round the world. However this is the first clear example where long-term isolation of a human population has led to significant size reduction - to the point where the Liang Bua humans are the smallest known people anywhere in the world."

And yet these tiny-brained creatures were skilled enough to make finely crafted stone tools.

Previous archeological digs on the island Flores turned up primitive stone tools and fossils dating back 900,000 years.

The fossil find, published in Nature yesterday, brought a mostly enthusiastic reaction from scientists around the world.

Henry Gee, a London columnist, senior editor of Nature, who founded the Nature News Service, and author of Jacob's Ladder The History of the Human Genome (published July 2004) wrote today:

Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London, says: "One of the first things I thought of, on learning about the Flores skeleton, was a possible parallel with the orang pendek (found in Sumatra)."

Bert Roberts offers hints of new discoveries just below the research horizon: "When I was back in Flores just three weeks ago, Gert van den Bergh (from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research at Texel, and the team's expert on the fossil elephants) and I headed off to a village in central Flores where we heard the most amazing tales of little hairy people whom they called ebu gogo: ebu meaning "grandmother" and gogo "he who eats anything".

"The ebu gogo were short - about a metre tall - long-haired, potbellied, with ears that stuck out, walking with a slightly awkward gait, and had longish arms and fingers. They murmured at each other and could repeat words parrot-fashion. They could climb slender trees but were never seen holding stone tools, whereas we have lots of sophisticated artefacts associated with Homo floresiensis. That's the only inconsistency with the archaeological evidence.

Gert had heard of these stories 10 years ago and he thought them no better than leprechaun stories - until we unearthed the hobbit."

Could the ebu gogo still be alive? Roberts thinks it is possible.

"The villagers said that the last hobbit was seen just before Dutch colonists settled that part of Flores in the 19th century," he said, adding that searches of the remaining rainforest on Flores, and the caves specifically associated with the ebu gogo stories, could turn up samples of hair or other material, if not living, breathing specimens.

Many believe the Australian-Indonesian archeologists' discovery on the tiny island of Cabo da Flores will revolutionize anthropology.

Professor Bernard Wood, of George Washington University, said it was "probably the most significant thing that has happened in my professional lifetime".

Congratulations Team Australia Indonesia and all the other archeologists who are inspired to learn more about this new human species.

Get ready for a paleo-anthropological head rush!

A cast of the new species' skull is on display at The Science Museum in London.

The hominid aka "hobbit's" name: LB1

Inspire & Be Inspired (R).

Here's to healthy, adventuresome, soulful and hobbit-sized living!

~ Jennifer Carolyn King

P.S. The photo at the top of this story was taken by Reuters.

To learn more about the nation of Indonesia and its 17,000 islands, consider: Indonesia: Peoples and Histories, or the 200 specially drawn colour maps in Historical Atlas of Indonesia by Robert Cribb, or the guidebook Lonely Planet Indonesia.

For an interview with Morwood and Brown and other fascinating details, go to: