My grand--grand--pa was a disabled caveman

THE remains of a fossilized Stone Age pygmy, hailed as a new species of human when it was found two years ago, probably belonged to a disabled but otherwise normal caveman, researchers have claimed.
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The discovery of the 18,000-year-old “homo floresiensis” on the Indonesian island of Flores was thought to be a major development in tracing human evolution when it was announced in 2004.
However, a new analysis of the 3ft skeleton, nicknamed the “hobbit”, along with other remains found at the site, has indicated they probably belonged to an early human suffering from microcephaly, a condition that causes an abnormally small head and other deformities.
“The skeletal remains do not represent a new species, but some of the ancestors of modern human pygmies who live on the island today,” concludes a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of America’s most respected scientific institutions. “The individual exhibits a combination of characteristics that are not primitive but instead regional and not unique but found in other modern human populations.”
The creature was found with fossils of animals including a snake, frog, monkey, deer and pig. “Here we have a creature that is substantially different from modern humans, a totally new species of our genus that lived almost into historical times.
Some researchers had already expressed doubts over the original findings. Earlier this year Robert Martin, a primatologist at the Field museum in Chicago, said: “If you plot a graph of all of the data we have on brain sizes of hominids against time, [floresiensis] is the only one that falls right off the curve. It’s an anomaly.”
Jonathan Leake and Tom Baird
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article614383.ece