Homo floresiensis was merely a modern human with a disease or growth disorder.

When the partial skeleton known as LB1 was announced from the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004, it immediately caused controversy.

LB1 belonged to an adult only about a meter tall and had a brain far smaller than expected for a recent member of the genus Homo. The discoverers proposed a new species, Homo floresiensis.

Other researchers suggested a very different explanation: perhaps LB1 was an anatomically modern human with a medical condition. One proposal was microcephaly; others involved endocrine or developmental disorders.

This was a real scientific dispute rather than a simple case of an old consensus being overturned.

The disease explanation became harder to maintain as more fossils were studied. Remains from additional individuals showed similarly small body size, while the anatomy of the skull, teeth, wrist, shoulder, foot, and limbs included a mixture of features that did not fit well with a single pathological modern human.

Most specialists now accept Homo floresiensis as a distinct archaic human species.

Its exact ancestry is still debated. The population may have descended from Homo erectus and evolved a small body on an island, or it may represent an earlier branch of human evolution. No ancient DNA has yet settled that question.

What has changed most strongly is the narrower claim that the Flores fossils can be explained simply as diseased Homo sapiens.