Who Were the Hobbits?

     Did you ever watch The Lord of the Rings and laughed at the little men called hobbits? Well actually, a race of people nicknamed hobbits lived on the Islands of Flores in Indonesia! The proper term for them is Homo floresiensis, Homo for human and floresiensis after the location they were found in. Even though they are the same genus as us, they are not our direct ancestors, just another branch of the genus. They were found in 2003 in the cave of Liang Bua. Archeologists estaimate that the hobbits lived from about 38,000 to 18,000 and possibly even 12,000 years ago. They were about 1 meter tall which is the size of today's 4-year olds but were able to hunt Komodo dragons. They had small brains compared to Homo sapiens, actually their brains were only 400cc which is the size of a brain of a modern chimpanzee. Frankly,  evidence of complex activities such as mastering fire and cooperation during hunts that was found proves that they were very smart considering how small their cranial volumes were. There have even been speculations that their tools were made by Homo sapiens as they seem complicated for the little brains of the hobbits and looked nothing like any tools made by Homo erectus. These speculations were disproved as the relationship between hobbit fossils and the tools seemed too strong. The hobbits were also fully bipedal like modern humans and many experts believe that they were just a shrunken version of Homo erectus and not a new species at all. This is possible as even other animals shrunk when they migrated to the islands. Some scientists say that this theory is wrong because Homo erectus would have to shrink a great lot. They suggest that the hobbits rather evolved from another specie of small hominins such as Homo georgicus, whose fossils were found in Georgia. Another theory is that they could be simply humans with a disease that caused them to be small. This theory is rather wrong as people with such disease usually don't even reach childhood and have other distinctive features which weren't found on the skeletons of the hobbits. Another interesting thing is that evidence shows that humans and hobbits lived on the islands at the same time and most likely got in contact.Some Indonesian folk stories talk of little people that were less evolved than humans called Ebu Gogo. However, these folk tales could easily be just a result of the people's imagination.
The discovery of the hobbits proves that we can still find new species of humans and discover more about our ancestors. And also the fact that they lived only 18,000 years ago shows that possibly another specie of humans could be living somewhere out there.