In October 2004, Matt Toccheri was a graduate student, studying human evolution at Arizona State.

He was at a hotel in London, Ontario, for a biological anthropology conference

when he came upon a piece of news that would change his life forever.

I remember coming down one morning, ready to grab a coffee and maybe a small bite to eat before heading to the morning sessions.

And I walked past the bar area and I saw TV off in the distance and CNN was on.

I couldn't hear it.

And I saw the words come across the screen like new hominin species

discovered on some Indonesian Isle or something like that. And I just thought, that's got to be

some kind of joke. There's no way. Like, it just doesn't sound right. Am I still asleep? Am I

daydreaming or something? And then one of my other friends came down and I mentioned it to her

and she said, yeah, look at this. And she had actually printed off the paper because it had come

out in nature. And I remember looking at it and I read through it and I sat there. And then I

just looked up like with this blank stare and just said, wow, what a, what a wonderful time to be alive.

This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. I'm Meredith Johnson.

Matt Tocherry is now a professor of anthropology at Lakehead

University. He's a leaky foundation grantee who's part of an international team of scientists

studying one of the most remarkable fossil hominin species ever found. It's called homo-fluoresian

due to its discovery on the Indonesian island of Flores.

But it's better known as the Hobbit.

In 2003, archaeologists found a single small skeleton in a cave called Liang Bua.

They called the specimen LB1, because it was the first hominin ever found at Liang Bua.

This tiny human relative radically changed our understanding of the human story.

...