Skeletons of a new human species, Homo floresiensis, have been discovered in a cave on Flores, an island 370 miles east of Bali, by archaeologists.

The finding was “among the most outstanding discoveries in paleoanthropology for half a century,” said anthropologists Dr. Marta Mirazon Lahr and Dr. Robert Foley of the University of Cambridge.

The little (three and a half feet high) people were a downsized version of Homo erectus, the eastern cousin of the Neanderthals of Europe, who disappeared 33,000 years ago. Their discovery means that archaic humans, who left Africa 1.5 million years earlier than modern people, survived far longer into recent times than was previously supposed.