"Anthropologists have argued, sometimes bitterly, since the discovery of Homo floresiensis -- dubbed "the hobbit" due to its size -- as to the identity and origins of these distant cave-dwelling cousins.Many scientists have said H. floresiensis were prehistoric humans descended from homo erectus, stunted by natural selection over millennia through a process called insular dwarfing.
Others countered that even this evolutionary shrinking, well known in island-bound animals, could not account for the hobbit's chimp-sized grey matter of barely more than 400 cubic centimetres, a third the size of a modern human brain.
And how could such a being have been smart enough to craft its own stone tools?
Recent archeological evidence from Kenya shows that the modern foot evolved more than 1.5 million years ago, most likely in Homo erectus.
So unless the Flores hobbits became more primitive over time -- a more-than-unlikely scenario -- they must have branched off the human line at an even earlier date."
