Hobbits

Research conducted at Princeton University studied if there was a possible link of modern pygmy population that lives in an Indonisian island. On this island it was found hobbit remains or scientific name Homo floresiensis fossils. (1)

H. floresiensis  were on average 3.5 feet tall, these short hobbits lived 17,000 years ago. The fossils recovered where not well preserved and scientists found it difficult to extract DNA that was viable for testing. Once DNA was sequenced they wanted to compare that to the modern pygmy population that are on average 15 inches taller then H. floresiensis, the thought that they may have similar ancestry.
They decided to develop a tool that would "help find archaic genetic sequences in modern DNA".(1)
There was this thought that since many humans share DNA from Neanderthals, and even Denisovans that just maybe these modern pygmy people have H. floresiensis DNA.
"But if you want to look for another species, like Floresiensis, we have nothing to compare, so we had to develop another method: We 'paint' chunks of the genome based on the source. We scan the genome and look for chunks that come from different species -- Neanderthal, Denisovans, or something unknown." said Serena Tucci (1)
After looking through 32 modern pygmies Tuci states " they definitely have a lot of Neanderthal, and a bit of Denisovan. We expected that, because we knew there was some migration that went from Oceania to Flores, so there was some shared ancestry of these populations."
No Homo floresiensis  was found in these people suggesting the modern pygmy population evolved independently.
"Islands are very special places for evolution, this process, insular dwarfism, resulted in smaller mammals, like hippopotamus, and elephants, and smaller humans. This is really intriguing, because it means that evolutionary, we are not that special," Tucci said. "humans are like other mammals, we are subject to the same processes."
This I believe is an important step to helping know our place in the world. We are subjected to environmental changes like any other species and adapt to survive.

resources:
1- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180802141558.htm
2- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180802141719.htm
3- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170421084917.htm
4- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248417300866?via%3Dihub

A new species of human , the "Hobbit"

Scientists have made the startling discovery of a lost world of small archaic humans only a meter tall (3 feet) , who hunted dwarf elephants and Komodo dragons on an Indonesian island as recently as 18,000 years ago. The researchers uncovered the skull and skeleton of an adult human female with a brain the size of a grapefruit and a body the size of a Hobbit. This diminutive new species lived on the tropical island of Flores , dubbed Homo floresiensis.

Something didn't add up for the scientist though, Now, many of the same scientists who made the discovery have revised their estimate of the fossils age, based on an exhaustive new analysis of the cave’s geology. Instead of living 18,000 years ago, as they originally reported, the hobbit lived between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago some 10,000 years before H. sapiens arrived in the region . The original date of 18,000 years ago would have put the "Hobbit" living hand in hand with homo sapiens.

To get the new dates of 60,000 and 100,000 years old the scientist went about it with a new method. Instead of carbon dating the bones found the scientist carbon dated the sediment around it. Dating on the gravelly sediment layer containing the fossils suggested it was deposited between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago. Just above it is a layer of volcanic ash that was dated to about 60,000 years ago. This suggests that the fossils themselves couldn’t possibly be younger than 60,000 years old, disproving the 18,000 year old date.

With this new data, it is not thought that homo sapiens to have spread to Southeast Asian islands and into Australia 50,000 years ago. The teams report of the much older sediments as well as the fossils themselves suggest the fossils could have not belong to homo sapiens. There is evidence of homo sapiens in the cave 11,000 years ago, whether homo floresiensis survived long enough to interact with modern humans is the question to ask now.

Shrunken head. A new human species (right-hand skull) is much smaller than its putative ancestor, Homo erectus.