Abstract
October 28th, 2004, was a big day for paleoanthropology—the study of human evolution. On that day two papers were published in the scientific journal Nature announcing the discovery of what has become known as the “hobbits” of human evolution. With a tiny brain and an estimated height of about three and a half feet, the first hobbit described was an almost complete skeleton recovered from a cave on an isolated Indonesian island. The authors of the Nature papers proclaimed that these remains were so different that they represented a new species, Homo floresiensis. If that were not remarkable enough, this hobbit was buried deep within the cave and dated to 18 thousand years ago! The shock-waves of this discovery rippled rapidly through the paleoanthropological world as the hobbits took an immediate and well deserved place in the public consciousness. When I first heard this incredible news, I was standing in a hotel lobby while attending meetings of the Canadian Association for Physical Anthropology. My eyes suddenly caught a glimpse of a CNN news
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