Hobbit

It seems that the Little People are real after all.

The remains of a diminutive cousin of modern Man, nicknamed "the hobbit", that lived only 12,000 years ago have been unearthed by scientists, in a spectacular find that rewrites the story of human evolution.

The discovery on a remote Indonesian island shows that Homo sapiens shared the Earth with more primitive relatives not long before the dawn of recorded history, and suggests a tantalising explanation for the myths of elves, dwarves and "wild men of the woods" that are popular all over the world.

Stranger than fiction