This is interesting, they seem to have found the remains of very small humans dating back 13,000 years ago on an isolated island. This leads to speculation of multiple species of humans. They're about 1 metre tall.

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996588

They found halfling bones?

I was just reading a couple of articles about this, it is interesting when new finds come up :).

Hey, maybe that island is Middle Earth?

Ah yes... the long lost Little Folks culture. Legend has it that internal political conflict resulted in a mass exodus from the island. The remaining community was too small to survive and died out. The more entrepreneurial emigrants followed their leaders to Africa and became Pygmies and Bushmen (groan).

Thicket

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/10/27/dwarf.cavewoman.ap/index.html

There's the CNN link to the story.

1 meter tall? Isn't that like 4 feet? Doesn't seem so short to me.

It's 3.2 feet.

Closer to 3 feet like it says in the article. They also talk about it having features that make it diffrent from a "little person" today. What I thought was strange is that they say this finding, "smashes the conventional wisdom that modern humans began to systematically crowd out other upright-walking species 160,000 years ago." I mean Europe had no clue that American existed until ~500 years ago. Who's to say that humans knew about this "remote Indonesian island." It also made me laugh that they used the term "hobbit-sized." Guess they're trying to leech of Lord of the Rings.

And how tall are the pygmies in Ituri forest? nearly the same height...

/shrug
doesn't seem all that earth shattering to me...

That's what I was thinking too. But, they're calling this an entirely different species whereas I don't think pygmies are.

It's pretty earth shattering. It challenges a lot of assumptions in anthropology, sociology, biology, mythology, archaeology, and probably a few other ologies and well.

Scientology! Scatology... maybe it'll shake up a few religions too....

On second thought... probably not that last one.