Some 13,000 years ago, on a tropical island at the heart of the Indonesian archipelago, an extraordinary group of dwarf-sized people lived alongside dwarf elephants and giant lizards. They belonged to a species whose existence has been revealed to the world for the first time this week. It is a species of human utterly new to science. In two papers in Nature, a team of researchers from Australia and Indonesia detail the discovery of Homo floresiensis. So far the skull and some bones of one female, tentatively called LB1 or Ebu, and fragments from up to six other specimens of this extraordinary relative of ours, have been unearthed from the Liang Bua limestone caves 25 kilometres north of Ruteng on the western edge of the island of Flores in central Indonesia.
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