By Stephen Beech
The earliest evidence of man's ancestors on Hobbit Island's neighbor - dating back over one million years - has been discovered.
But exactly who the now extinct people living on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi remains a mystery, say archaeologists.
Recent findings show that early hominins made a major deep-sea crossing to reach Sulawesi much earlier than previously established, based on the discovery of stone tools dating to at least 1.04 million years ago at the Early Pleistocene - or ‘Ice Age’ - site of Calio.
A field team, led by Budianto Hakim from the National Research and Innovation Agency of Indonesia (BRIN), excavated a total of seven stone artefacts from the sedimentary layers of a sandstone outcrop in a modern corn field at the southern Sulawesi locatio