The 13,000-year-old hobbit-size hominids found on an Indonesian island add a new branch to the sprawling human family tree first theorized by RICHARD LEAKEY and other scientists after a flurry of discoveries in Africa in the 1970s.
Named after the Beatles' song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, Lucy was a small creature, not much more than a meter tall, with a brain capacity about a third of that of modern man. Lucy's skeleton gave scientists their best clues yet to the proportions of Australopithecus, and revealed her to be surprisingly short-legged. But the find left no doubts that she walked...