Could 2007 see some new hobbits? I certainly hope so. In October 2004, a team of scientists announced they had found bones of a hominid from the Indonesian island of Flores. They came to the astonishing conclusion that the bones belonged to a new species, which they called Homo floresiensis, which stood only three feet tall, lived as recently as 12,000 years ago, had a chimp-sized brain, and could use stone tools to hunt. That announcement launched an extraordinary debate, with scientists arguing in favor of tiny hominids (nicknamed Hobbits), or a dwarf with a birth defect, or an unusually evolved population of humans. For a timeline, see this post I wrote in this past October, surveying two years of controversy.
It's been a quiet winter on the H. floresiensis front, but for some odd reason a few pieces of intriguing news have come up in just the past couple ...
