9 Jun 2016

New hominid fossil find in Indonesia

From Afternoons, 1:15 pm on 9 June 2016

An international team behind the discovery of the hobbit species in Indonesia have now found what they believe to be the ancestors of the diminutive hominin - after finding skull fragments dated at 700,000 years old.

The remains of a female hobbit or homo floresiensis, were discovered in Liang Bua cave in 2003 - she is believed to be between 60 thousand and 100 thousand years old and would have stood at about a metre tall.

But the new fossil finds predate her by more than half a million years.

Brent Alloway of Auckland University is part of the team talks to Jesse Mulligan.