An artist?s impression of Homo floresiensis or ?Hobbits?. (AFP)

London, Oct. 28: The remains of a new species of human have been discovered on a remote Indonesian island ? a spectacular find that could rewrite the story of human evolution.

The diminutive cavewoman shows that another kind of human walked alongside us much more recently than thought. This questions current ideas about intelligence, further undermines traditional ideas about modern humans being unique, and even hints that other species of Homo may have survived into recorded history.

The 18,000-year-old skeleton, nicknamed ?the Hobbit?, has provided the first glimpse of a lost world east of Java inhabited by little people who crafted stone tools, roasted elephant, built rafts and probably used language.

The discovery also raises the extraordinary possibility that a remnant population of this previously undiscovered species of the toddler-sized human could conceivably be living today in the remote and impenetrable rainforests of Southeast Asia.

The near-complete, 3-foot-tall skeleton with a human face was found in a cave by Indonesian and Australian scientists on the island of Flores, where the woman and her fellow tribe members hunted dwarf elephants and lived alongside full-sized Komodo dragons and an even larger species of lizard.

The find represents a new and surprising twig on mankind?s family tree. It is often claimed that new fossils rewrite the textbooks, ?but in this case it is no exaggeration?, said Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, London.

The skills the cavewoman managed with her little brain ? still very much a matter for speculation ? may overturn understanding of intelligence and ?what it means to be human?, he said.

Most fascinating of all, local legends suggest that the ?Hobbits? may have survived until modern times, at least until the 16th century, when Dutch traders arrived in the Spice Islands, and perhaps even more recently.

?All over Indonesia are limestone cave systems that are barely explored,? said Henry Gee, the senior editor of the journal Nature who handled the ?Hobbit? paper. ?Who knows? In remaining patches of rainforest, one might find relic populations.? ?It is possible, though not likely, that some of these creatures still survive.?

The remains of the tiny cavewoman, which may also yield DNA for analysis, were found last year during a dig in Liang Bua, a large limestone cave on Flores, 370 miles east of Bali. The skeleton was of a female, aged 30, who died around 18,000 years ago.

She is now the ?type specimen? ? the first of its kind ? for a new human species called Homo floresiensis, described in detail today in Nature. Seven of these dwarf humans have now been found by the team, led by Radien Soejono, from the Indonesian Research Centre for Archaeology and Mike Morwood, from the University of New England, New South Wales.