In 2003 paleoanthropologists made a discovery on the Indonesian island of Flores that shook up the world of early human studies like no other in recent years. Inside a cave, under a thick blanket of sediments, they unearthed fossil bones of a three-foot-tall human. The fossil appeared for all the world not to have been that of a diseased modern human or Homo sapiens, but rather an entirely new species, which its discoverers named Homo floresiensis. The debate over just what this so-called hobbit and its kind were has only just begun.
