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I’ve always had a bit of a thing for Pygmies. There’s just something about whole tribes of really short folk living in rainforests that seems impossibly exotic. Post colonial theorists would shake their heads disapprovingly, murmuring about a morbid fascination with an archetypal ‘other’.

After all, who could be more different from a westernised city slicker than small rain forest dwellers? They might have a point, but I reckon all things miniature have always enthralled because as a gawky 12 year old I hit my adult height of 1.78m. Ying, yang, opposites attract. I impulse buy baby aubergines and gem squashes at Woolworths.

My interest, politically sanitized or not, in all things pygmatious has been reawakened in the last few months by the debate around whether the discovery of a tiny female skeleton on the island of Flores in Indonesia represented a new species of human. The latest findings, presented last week in the online version of the journal Science by expert Dr Dean Falk of Florida State University, suggest that the small hominid, nicknamed the “hobbit”, wasn’t just one of our current human variety suffering an unpleasant brain ailment, but was a distinct species.

It was her small head that prompted the new-type-of-human vs. sick common-or-garden-variety Homo Sapiens debate. Seeing as she was only 1m tall though, the scientists seem to have concluded that, in fact a regular sized human head might have looked kooky balancing on her tiny frame and hence the tried and tested, ‘yeah, she’s looking good, she’s looking fine’ theory won out. I may have extrapolated somewhat on the hard science presented by Dr Falk, but believe I’ve captured the essence of it.

Although, debate around the discovery of Homo floresiensis has prompted a flurry of discussion around such deep and probing topics as ‘what does it means to be human?’, ‘does this prove evolution?’ and ‘will Camilla fix her hair before the big day?’ by those prone to existential ramblings, there is much of interest we can chew on enthusiastically without having to put hand to chin and make like a Rodin sculpture.

Whatever being human entails and regardless of the profound mysteries around Camilla’s bizarre, yet enduring hairdo, one thing we know is Flora and her kin were keen hunters of pygmy elephants and komodo dragons. Not only that, but the rats back then were huge, about the size of a full grown beagle if I am to believe the proportions of the artist’s impression in the Sunday paper. With skulls the size of grapefruits, but according to Dr Falk, capable of higher thought patterns characteristic of humans, these little folk were having a field day with bizarrely proportioned mammals and could probably have contributed in their own way to musings on human nature and Camilla’s hair.

And these komodo dragon slaying hominids could have co-existed with modern man as recently as the 16th century when the Dutch sailors arrived in the Spice islands and heard tales about diminutive forest dwellers. Those were heady days of adventure and the discovery of cayenne pepper for those explorers and tales of strange and mysterious beings must have been thick on the ground. They were seduced by cumin and basmati rice and the window of gathering priceless archeological data narrowed quietly as aromas of chicken korma and lamb vindaloo wafted into Europe.

No one really knows how the little folk disappeared and to this day in Flores there are legends of small people venturing out of the forest and being spotted by the locals. No hard evidence of their current day existence has been found, but the stories abound. Maybe when the rats got smaller and the elephants got bigger, things grew difficult for the hobbits.

Or maybe, if they came into contact with modern humans, the nature of what it means to be human was put to the test and it became obvious the small guys had drawn the short end of the evolutionary stick.

I like to think they’re still there, deep in the forest, kickboxing komodo dragons and cultivating petite vegetable gardens and big rats. What’s sobering is that I probably know more about the daily habits of hobbits that were most likely wiped out by the aggressive colonisation of their habitat by taller islanders, than I do about contemporary short tribes living a bit further north on my continent, facing the same plight. The nature of man, how easily we get distracted from the important issues by shiny fruit and intoxicating spices.