Alien From Earth

NARRATOR: It is the dream of every archaeologist who slogs through backbreaking days of excavation, the find that changes everything.
ABC NEWS REPORTER (Archival Footage): A team of Australian and Indonesian archeologists has discovered the remains of what's believed to be a new species of human.
HENRY GEE (Nature Magazine): This is a major discovery.
CHRIS STRINGER (Natural History Museum, United Kingdom): It implies we are missing a huge amount of the story of human evolution.
NARRATOR: Paradoxically, the discovery is huge because its pieces are not: a skeleton of an adult, the size of a three-year old child; a skull one-third the size of a modern human's. Could a race of tiny creatures, soon nicknamed "hobbits," have thrived at the same time as modern humans?
To many, the evidence is irrefutable.
BILL JUNGERS (Stony Brook University): This is not a little person. Absolutely, we're looking at a new species. NARRATOR: But some scientists just aren't buying it.
RALPH HOLLOWAY (Columbia University): It just invites tremendous skepticism.
JAMES PHILLIPS (Field Museum of Natural History): I don't believe it.
MACIEJ HENNEBERG (University of Adelaide): There is only one skull, so that's not a proof of anything at all.
NARRATOR: So is the hobbit a momentous find or a career-wrecking blunder? The answer may overturn our understanding of how we became who we are.
PETER BROWN (University of New England): I think we may have to rewrite the human evolutionary story. At the present, every textbook on the planet is wrong.
NARRATOR: An astonishing discovery, a bitter controversy.
CHRIS STRINGER: In this situation, one group of people are going to be 100 percent wrong, so it really is quite an extreme case.
NARRATOR: And now, four years after the unearthing of the hobbit, new evidence that may finally solve the riddle of its existence. Alien from Earth, up next on NOVA. PBS Airdate: November 11, 2008