Consider Frodo Baggins our relative. A study released today confirms that homo floresiensis, colloquially known as "the hobbit" for its tiny stature, is a genuine ancient human ancestor and not a genetically flawed version of modern humans.

Anthropologists from the Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York completed the analysis for the study, published in Significance magazine.

Australian and Indonesian scientists discovered a series of small-brained, small-bodied, female hominin [human-like] fossils in 2003 on the remote island of Flores in the Indonesian archipelago and unleashed the controversy about the hobbit's human connections. 

The remains of LB1, nicknamed “Little Lady of Flores” or “Flo,” stood about 3-feet tall but she has captured the large-scale interest of evolutionary scientists. 

Anthropologists William Jungers and Karen Baab led the Stony Brook team of researchers to settle a series of debates over the controversial and enigmatic fossil. The primary debate centers on whether Flo represents a new species related to humans or an isolated community that was stunted or deformed. 

The collection of partial hobbit fossils, stone tools and Flo's skeleton was found in a cave in a layer of sediment dating back about 18,000 years. The fossils represent a bipedal, immediate but extinct ancestor of modern humans, according to the Stony Brook findings. 

“We’ve shown that this is not a modern person, normal or pathological,” Jungers said, “but a very primitive member of the homo species.”

Jungers is a professor and chair of the Anatomical Studies Department at Stony Brook. His research is focused in functional morphology, paleoanthropology and primate evolution.

“I’d like to think our study goes a long way that pathology can’t explain.  It can’t explain all this primitive anatomy,” Jungers said. 

In the past, Jungers has referred to the hobbit as, “the black swan of paleontology—totally unpredicted and inexplicable.”

But not everyone agrees. Robert Martin, provost of the Field Museum and an accomplished primatologist, has been a longtime advocate of the alternative “sick hobbit hypothesis.”  Martin previously argued that the hobbit’s brain was too small for it to be a scaled-down member of the  human species and that the stone tools found with the LB1 fossils are too complex to be associated with such a small-brained creature.

Martin is out of the country and was unavailable for comment on the newest study.

Skeptics, or “the deniers” as Jungers calls them, also argue that the hobbit is either the result of an island dwarfing phenomenon or microcephaly, a wide range of conditions related to dwarfing.

“Attempts to dismiss hobbits as pathological people have failed repeatedly because the medical diagnoses of dwarfing syndromes and microcephaly bear no resemblance to the unique anatomy of homo floresiensis,” Baab writes in the study. It is published in the December issue of Significance, the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society.

The scientists did a statistical analysis of all the available information on brain size, body height and weight and other features to draw their conclusion.

The island dwarfing theory suggests that a species, isolated by its environment, regressed into the three-foot-tall bipedal freaks with brains the size of grapefruits.

Anthropologist Dean Falk of Florida State University previously performed detailed CT-scans of LB1 and concluded that the brain was not microcephalic but “normal,” and resembled the brain of homo erectus. 

“This [study] completely means that we have to rethink the big picture of evolution. The textbooks will have to change. Up until now, it’s been thought that the genus homo left Africa 2 million years ago,” Falk said.

Existence of the hobbit suggests that a species distinct from either modern homo sapiens or our homo erectus ancestors migrated out of Africa as recently as 18,000 years ago.

Jungers and Baab argue that the hobbit is not a re-evolved species but they stated they suspect that they retained traint from more primitive relatives .

Jungers and Mike Morwood, an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong in Australia and one of LB1’s discoverers, were recently awarded a five-year grant from the Australian government to return to Flores for additional expeditions.

“The deniers are kind of a shrinking crowd right now as more evidence is accumulated. We’re published in the best peer-reviewed journals that I know of,” Jungers said.  “I’ve known [Martin] for years but, the ball is in his court.  He’s gotta produce evidence that proves [the hobbit] is microcephalic.”