Taking the measure of a hobbit

Study of fossil skull suggests ancient creature could have been Homo sapiens

There’s just no getting ahead when you’re a hobbit. Anthropologists are arguing yet again over whether a tiny 18,000-year-old Indonesian skull represents a separate species of little human cousins, or an ordinary Homo sapiens with an abnormally small head.

HUMAN OR HOBBIT? Its discoverers claim that a tiny skull from the Indonesian island of Flores (left, with human skull on right) represents a new species of hominid.