Little People and a lost world

By Linda Goldenberg

IN September of 2003, a team of archaeologists digging in a cave on Indonesia's Flores Island made a startling discovery: the skeleton of a grown woman that stood only three feet tall.  Small hominids with this type of skull structure and brain size were supposed to have become extinct three million years ago- but radiocarbon dating showed their find to be only 18,000 years old.  The scientists, it seemed, had unearthed an entirely new species of early humans.