The explosive discovery of a tiny, enigmatic hominin in an Indonesian cave in 2003 captivated the world. Now, 20 years later, scientists are still struggling to understand the hobbit’s place in the human family tree.
Indonesian archaeologist Thomas Sutikna was nursing a fever in a hotel room on September 2, 2003, when a coworker shared news of what turned out to be a once-in-a-generation discovery. Earlier that day, a colleague’s trowel had hit a tiny human-like skull encased in 6-meter deep sediment in Liang Bua, a large cave in the highlands of the Indonesian island of Flores that Sutikna and his colleagues had been excavating since 2001.
The subsequent discovery of two other small-bodied and small-brained hominins that lived relatively recently — Homo naledi in South Africa and Homo luzonensis in the Philippines — and the much larger Denisovans has led to a wider acceptance among paleoanthropologists that there have been many, diverse species of human, including several that coexisted with our own species, Homo sapiens.
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