Enigma Man a Stone Age Mystery Page #2

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In Europe, they encountered

the Neanderthals,

our closest ancient human cousins.

But most anthropologists

believe that by the time

modern humans arrived in Asia,

all previous human species

there had died out.

Then in 2004 on the island

of Flores in Indonesia,

scientists discovered fossils

of an ancient creature.

No more than a meter tall

and with a tiny brain.

Homo floresiensis revolutionized

the long pound theories

of human evolution.

It came to be known as the hobbit.

When the hobbit was found, many of us

just couldn't believe

what was being proposed.

It was something that look

like human like creatures

of three million years ago

surviving until 17,000 years ago

in Indonesia are on a highland

with sophisticated culture.

It didn't make any sense.

The hobbit really threw

things up in the air

because that was the first of its kind

being something really completely

outlandish being found.

Professor Bert Roberts was part

of the original team that

discovered the hobbit.

In the recent past, that

was in the last few

tens of thousands of

years, we thought it was

much simpler situation.

There's us Homo sapiens,

there's Neanderthals

in Western Asia or in Europe

and the rest of the world

was pretty much empty

of other human species

and suddenly out of nowhere we

got a brand new type of human

who's still surviving

until very, very recently

and yet such an ancient design.

You think wow, if we can

find this brand new species

just below the ground today,

how many are we missing out there?

Maybe we'll be misidentifying

things in the past.

Maybe we just haven't been

looking in the right places.

There are vast expanses

of unexplored territory across Asia.

Scientists have barely

scratched the surface

of what lies beneath.

In 2008, Darren and Ji

made their first journey

back to the Red Deer Cave.

We didn't really know how the site was.

When we started working here,

there were suggestions

that it could had been towards

the end of the Ice Age

that there was a very little chance

that it could have been considered be older

and that was an exciting

prospect, exciting opportunity.

When you start digging a site like this,

you're aware of the fact that

you're actually the first

people to be exposing

things from the ground.

You're the first people to see these things

since the people who actually used the cave

tens of thousands of years ago.

And it gives you a real

connection to your ancestors

to the way that we lived

for millions of years

in our evolution.

And there's always the

excitement if you don't know

what's gonna be revealed by the next stroke

of the trail of the brush there.

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