Credit: AFP

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"It's just another day for us," Thomas Sutikna tells me, boarding a beat-up minibus bound for Middle Earth. He and his team from the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology spend their days hunting 'hobbits' – a race of extinct, metre-high humans whose remains they discovered in Liang Bua Cave on the remote Indonesian island of Flores. The only thing different about this day is that Sutikna and crew will have 40-odd experts peering over their shoulders and into their digs, debating if and how their work should rewrite what it means to be human.

Since the announcement of the new hominid species Homo floresiensis on the front cover of U.K. journal Nature in October 2004, scientists have argued fiercely about the implications of a few handfuls of tiny bones. A majority of researchers welcome the Flores fossils as a new species of human. They embrace the view that we were not alone, at least not until recently, and that some of the hallmarks of humanity – big brains atop long legs – stand to be revised. A vocal minority, meanwhile, rejects the new species. They say the Flores fossil is one of us, a modern Homo sapiens, albeit diseased and deformed.

The debate became personal at the end of 2004, when emeritus professor Teuku Jacob from Indonesia's Gadjah Mada University 'borrowed' the Liang Bua bones from Jakarta's Centre for Archaeology and debunked Homo floresiensis in the media.

Australian anthropologist Mike Morwood, of the University of Wollongong in New South Wales and a partner on the Liang Bua find, cried foul on an institutional agreement regarding management of the bones. The brouhaha descended to "a level of shouting and name-calling that you do not often hear in Indonesia," Morwood would later report. Most distressing, however, was that the bones were returned to the centre scarred, broken and clumsily repaired. A member of Jacob's lab confessed that the damage was the result of botched efforts to cast the crumbly remains.

Political fallout led to closure of the Liang Bua dig site for two years. But 2007 has seen a flurry of renewed activity in and around the cave. Sutikna and Morwood returned for their fifth season of excavations while Jacob sent a team to size up local pygmies, claiming that they're the living descendants of hobbits. Then, in July 2007, Jacob held an international symposium on palaeoanthropology that focussed on Flores and climaxed with a field trip to the cave.

Scientific disciplines are rarely as contentious as palaeoanthropology – a field plagued by the unusual circumstance of having fewer fossils to work with than people who study them. Naturally, I wondered what would happen when global rivals in the hobbit conflict converged on Liang Bua. Would researchers compromise? Or convert? And most importantly, would they behave? I tagged along to the symposium to find out and to get the big picture on the little people of Flores.

THOMAS SUTIKNA SITS in a hotel room in Ruteng, his base camp and make-shift bone lab for the Liang Bua dig. A table is stocked with tools — dental picks, tinctures, and toilet paper to wrap fragile specimens. In one corner boxes overflow with the dusty bones of beaver-sized rats, pygmy Stegodon (an extinct elephant relative) and stone tools awaiting entry in a database. In another corner sits a suitcase that looks overdue for retirement. It's the original suitcase that carried 'LB1', the female type specimen of Homo floresiensis, out of Flores and back to his lab in Jakarta.

Sutikna's colleague Wahyu Saptomo joins him in recounting the discovery. "I had a joke with Mike [Morwood]," says Saptomo. "I told him that if he left for Jakarta, we would find something big." And sure enough, on the next-to-last day of the 2003 field season, local digger Benyamin Tarus scraped a trowel through damp clay and hit bone. Tarus called over Saptomo, who in turn called in the bone expert, Rokus Awe Due.

Awe Due has worked at Flores digs since 1963 and looks like a living fossil in his own right. But he had no trouble scrambling down 5.9 metres into the shored-up mine shaft that the team had dug over the precious two months. There he fixed his eyes on a bulging brow ridge and told Saptomo he was "200 per cent certain" they were looking at an archaic human.

The bone was as soft as the clay it was buried in and Sutikna knew drastic measures were needed to secure it for excavation. So he scoured Ruteng to buy UHU glue and nail polish remover – every bottle he could find. Sutikna rummages through his tinctures and produces a dainty vial of 'Tokyo Night'. "All the people think we're crazy," he laughs. But Sutikna's home-brewed hardening agent allowed the team to recover a nearly complete ancient hominid skeleton – one of just a few throughout the world – and deliver it to their hotel-room-turned-bone-lab. There he, Awe Due and Saptomo stayed up all night, carving at the clay with satay sticks. Their operation revealed a tiny skull, no bigger than a jumbo-sized grapefruit.

Awe Due had first reported to Morwood that they had discovered a young child. But now he saw worn teeth and fused sutures on the skull. He was forced to conclude that this was a tiny adult woman – about the height of a contemporary five-year-old.

"I was stunned," Morwood recalls for the benefit of an Australian film crew working alongside me in Flores. Granted, he was familiar with the 'island rule', whereby large animals shrink, over generations, due to limited resources and an absence of predators. "But the mere thought that you could have a species of human undergoing the same processes of evolutionary downsizing was dumbfounding."

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