"Hobbits"

Recent studies showing that the "hobbits," Homo floresiensis, found on the Indonesian isle of Flores weren't "diseased" (see the BBC story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4308751.stm)
should really surprise nobody that knows a little mythology. Stories from around the world have spoken of elves, faeries, dwarfs, and other strange little people who were distinct from the modern human residents of the areas in question.

Typically, those tales were brushed off as fantasy, sometimes even hallucination, or, among more scholarly types, maybe given some creedence as symbolic representations of the ancestors. This discovery should call some of those interpretations into question-- maybe some of the stories were true when they started being told. That was usually millennia ago, but there have been reported sightings well into recorded historical times, including among the villagers of Flores.

In most cases, the "little people" were probably local versions of today's Mbuti or San peoples of Africa -- small, but very much Homo sapiens. But it's possible that H. floresiensis hung on in other isolated locations if they survived on Flores for as long as they did. Today's world has numerous species that have lingered in small numbers in very hard to reach places for far longer than that, some of them (like the Coelcanth, a deep ocean fish) discovered alive after being labelled extinct. Human ancestors could be among them.

Of course, the probability of finding any living hobbits is very remote. By now, modern humans have occupied almost every square meter of Earth's surface several times over (but not always at once), and even the Mbuti have been bigger and more advanced technologically than the hobbits for millennia now. Most likely, hobbits simply couldn't compete in the evolutionary game.

Finding evidence of hobbit survival, if it exists, will depend a lot on luck. We wouldn't have found these hobbits if their cave hadn't been buried in volcanic ash, and many places with "little people" legends aren't volcanic. Given when H. sapiens occupied various parts of the globe, the timescale means that the Americas would be most likely to harbor such evidence, if the hobbits ever lived here. (H. sapiens found the Americas maybe as early as 25,000 yrs ago, while hobbits still lived on Flores, but archaeology has so far only found H. floresiensis's probable ancestor H. erectus in the Old World.)