Hobbit, Not Dwarf

For more than a century, anthropologists have debated the evolutionary origins of modern humans, and the relationship between early populations in Indonesia and later humans in the Pacific.A paper published in 'Nature' in 1998 intensified this debate with the discovery of stone tools dated to 840,000 years at Marta Menga on Flores, eastern Indonesia.On current evidence Flores, a relatively small island of 14,000 km² in the midst of Wallacea, has always been isolated from the Sunda Shelf is the continental extension of the Asian mainland, the original source of most of the animals found on the south-east Asian islands, including humans.Some obvious questions arise from this.• How did hominins get to Flores?• Was this migration intentional or accidental?• Was the maker of the stone tools 'Homo erectus'?• Did the presence of hominins on Flores imply advanced communication skills?