Get to know that little skull. Scientists are going to be talking about it for centuries.

As researchers report in tomorrow’s issue of Nature, the skull–and along with other parts of a skeleton–turned up in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. Several different dating methods gave the same result: the fossil is about 18,000 years old. (Additional bones from the same cave date back to about 38,000 years.) If all you had was the 18,000 year figure and this picture to go on, you might assume that the skull belonged to a small human child. After all, there is plenty of evidence that Homo sapiens had already been in this part of the world for 25, 000 years. But