Inside a gaping mouth of limestone on a remote island in the country of Indonesia a team of scientists were meticulously excavating a cave.
They were in the Liang Bua cave in Flores with low expectations but what they found in 2003 shattered long standing beliefs surrounding the human evolution.
The team gently priced a human skull from the earth before they came face to face with a new species of human.
Professor Peter Brown of the University of New England, Australia said at the time that he would have been less surprised if someone would have uncovered an alien.
A partial female skeleton of a humanoid creature that stood less than 4ft high was exhumed and promptly named 'the Hobbit', after J.R.R. Tolkien's diminutive creation.
Even more shocking was the fact that the discovery of the human hobbit was given the scientific name Homo floresiensis was the fact it may well have existed alongside humans.
Almost 20 years since that discovery, rumours are still circulating that hobbit people never died out at all.
The rumours suggest that the hobbit people have been living in Eastern Indonesia in the remote mountains.
Dr Gregory Forth, a British professor of anthropology and former Oxford academic has shared the details of his efforts to date some of which go back to before the bones were uncovered.
He has also revealed that there have been some eye-witness sightings by over 30 people.
He said: "I conclude that the best way to explain what they told me is that a non-sapiens hominin has survived on Flores to the present or very recent times."
Back in 2001 Dr Forth visited the Lio people which is an ancient tribe of people who live in isolated huts in Flores thousands of metres above sea level.
It was on that trip that he heard many stories about the creatures that are sighted by the local people on occasion.
Now the last time that Dr Forth reported a sighting of the creatures was back in 2017 when a woman in Flores said she had seen an ape-man crossing a field.
Several sightings of the creatures from people in the area one of them is from a person called Tegu, "a man of 50 years who held a bachelor's degree in agriculture" from an institution in Bandung [the capital of West Java], described "a human face whose naked body was covered with fine hair … like a puppy's".
"It could not, he confirmed, have possibly been a monkey, but he was equally sure it couldn't have been a human," writes Dr Forth.
Then in 2017 a video emerged of bikers in northern Sumatra chasing a naked man who then ran into overgrowth. It is believed to be part of the Mante tribe.
The mountain caves of Eastern Indonesia's remote islands are still untouched territory who can know what they may contain.
"No field zoologist is yet looking for living specimens of H. Floresiensis," Dr Forth adds.
"But this does not mean they cannot be found."
