THE tiny, human-like creature living and using tools in Indonesia just 18,000 years ago really was a distinct species, not just a malformed modern human.
That is the clear implication of a study which reports that the so-called “hobbit” had wrist bones almost identical to those found in early hominins and modern chimpanzees, and so must have diverged from the human lineage well before modern humans and Neanderthals arose.
Palaeontologists have battled bitterly over the diminutive skeleton ever since its discoverers described it three years ago as a new species, Homo floresiensis. Its tiny brain simply did not…
