That possibility makes the Hobbit ever more interesting. From what I have read of the Flores studies of their tools, they were expected to be about as advanced as Homo erectus. At least their tool technology was.

However, if it was found they had boats we’d really have to rethink what these little guys were capable of.

Also there’s the question of language.

This blogger does a good job summarizing the idea here.

Just thought I might add that I was a missionary for a couple of years in southern Luzon and Mindoro islands in the Philippines and they have tons of stories and superstitions about dwendes (I suppose that’s how they would spell it.) They are little people who live in the forests.

Most people said that when you got sick or bad things happened to you that you had offended the dwendes. They claimed that they lived in dirt mounds in some places.

I don’t know if there’s more superstition than fact to their stories, but a lot of the rural Filipinos take them very seriously.

Mr. Gee also said in a recent NOVA documentry that “The world is full of undiscovered hominids, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, one day, somebody sent a paper to Nature saying they found one alive, living somewhere in Sumatra or Vietnam or somewhere. I would be very, very excited, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”

It’s finds like that in Flores that really “rattle the cages” and get researchers to blink their eyes and try to look at things differently, whether they want to or not.

Just making headway with the hominid fossil record is an exciting prospect. If a living example was to be found! Looks like the odds are better. There were local legends in Flores that pointed to a hominid and now they have the bones!