A Big Discovery about Little People

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Long ago, many species of humanlike creatures shared space on Earth. These different types of humans walked upright and had intelligent minds. At some point, however, all but one of those species went extinct. We, members of the species Homo sapiens (H. sapiens), were the sole survivors.
For years, scientists thought they knew when H. sapiens became the only kind of human species in existence. The scientists thought that the big change happened about 24,000 years ago, with the extinction of the Neandertals (Homo neanderthalensis).

Recently, however, scientists have found evidence of a previously undiscovered species of humans. The scientists made the find on the island of Flores in Indonesia.

The newly discovered species, called Homo floresiensis after the island of its discovery and nicknamed \"hobbit\" because of its tiny size, lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. Many scientists consider the hobbit to be the most important discovery in anthropology in 50 years.

The finds on Flores indicate that for thousands of years, \"we were not alone as a human species,\" says Bert Roberts, a senior research fellow at the University of Wollongong in Australia. \"Until very recently, there would have been another type of walking, talking, interacting kind of human running around the planet,\" he adds. Roberts was a member of the team that discovered H. floresiensis.