https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-hobbit-at-15/

A little more than 15 years ago, the world was introduced to a new, pint-sized member of the hominin family that shook the science of human origins. It was the discovery of a single, tiny skeleton named Homo floresiensis and nicknamed “the Hobbit.” There was no one thing that made the find shocking. Instead, detail after detail generated a perfect storm of commotion. First, there was the creature’s anatomy: standing at just over a meter tall, with a tiny, chimpanzee-size brain, the hobbit was surprisingly little. It also had an odd combination of features, a mixture of traits that usually appear solely in either ancient human ancestors or modern ones.

Then, there was the place of discovery. The volcanic, Indonesian island of Flores lies across a deepwater straight and is thus inhabited only by creatures able to make treacherous water crossings. The timeframe was perplexing as well: the hobbit was proposed to have existed only 18,000 years ago. This was a time when modern Homo sapiens were thought to have been left alone on the planet, the final upright-walking ape left standing. It was also a time when and were known to have been in the area.