There have been great debates about the lineage of Homo floresiensis. A new unpublished study in the Journal of Human Evolution used imaging to re-examine the layers of the Liang Bua 1 (nicknamed LB1) skull. lead author Antoine Balzeau, a scientist at France’s Natural History Museum and Philippe Charlier, a physician and anthropologist at Paris-Descartes University, computed maps of bone thickness variation from LBI 1 and came to the definitive conclusion that they were not Homo sapiens based on their analysis. Using this modality, however, they could not exclude the possibility that the “hobbit” was a tinier Homo erectus, which arrived on Java some million years ago, nor could they be sure that it was not a species it its own right. Confusing…
H.foresiensis = islandisized H.erectus? Island forms typically become smaller & evolve much smaller brains. Early-Pleistocene (or late-Pliocene?) archaic Homo dispersed to different continents & islands along the coasts (coastal dispersal model, S.Munro) & then entered the inland along the rivers (google: original econiche Homo). In this model, H.floresiensis is not unexpected.
The Flores hobbits were an isolated highly inbred small population of AMH Homo sapiens sapiens on Flores, in my opinion.