Alas poor Hobbit......we did not know you well!

Anthropology is comparing this small hobbit skull to that of it's square jawed Homo Sapien cousin and coming to differing views.

The tale of Homo floresiensis, aka 'the hobbit' is beginning to read less like a Tolkien epic and more like an Agatha Christie whodunit.

Two studies have added a new and interesting twist to the plot. One claims that the skeleton's ape-like feet push back its ancestry near the dawn of Homo. Another argues that the hobbit is a later offshoot of Homo erectus, dwarfed by aeons of island isolation, just like the British!

"Either answer is pretty damn exciting," says William Jungers, a palaeoanthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York, who led the analysis of the foot. "It's telling us something pretty amazing about human evolution."

The Hobbit skeleton

Researchers unearthed the hobbit's 18,000-year-old skeleton in Liang Bua Cave on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. Then in 2004 partial remains from at least a half dozen individuals were uncovered.

Much of the subsequent research has focused on the skull, which encased a 417 cubic-centimetre brain; about the size of a chimpanzee's and a third the size of a human adult brain.

Allegedly, island species, separated from their mainland kin, tend to shrink over evolutionary time, so the main thrust of the "hobbit as a separate species" arguments have focussed on its small brain. However another theory holds that the skull is simply that of a diseased Homo sapiens.