Likely ancestor of mystery 'hobbit' found

Half-sized humans who lived 700,000 years ago were almost certainly the ancestors of enigmatic "hobbits" whose fossils were found on the same Indonesian isle in 2013, scientists stunned by their own discovery reported today.
Two studies, published in Nature, fill a huge gap in our understanding of these diminutive people, whose tortuous evolutionary saga hit a dead-end some 50,000 years ago.
A modest haul of teeth and bones from an adult and two children has bolstered the theory that the hobbits, known to scientists as Homo floresiensis, arrived on Flores island as a different, larger species of hominin, or early man, probably about a million years ago.

And then, something very strange happened.
These upright, tool-wielding humans shrank, generation after generation, until they were barely half their original weight and height.
The process, called "island dwarfism," was well known in animals, with some species shrinking as much as six fold in adapting to an environment with fewer resources.

Indeed, Flores was also home to a miniature race of elephant-like creatures -- possibly hunted to extinction by the mini-men -- called Stegodons.
This is the first hard evidence of humans becoming smaller after being marooned on a spit of land transformed into an island by rising seas.
"The hobbit was real," said Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at the Research Centre of Human Evolution at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, and lead author of one of the studies.

"It was an ancient human species that is separate to ours and that no longer exists on the planet today."
The new fossils were unearthed in central Flores in 2014, about 100 kilometres from the 2003 discovery of the hobbit remains.
The find provided partial answers to key questions: from which species did H.