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A new facial approximation offers insight into what one of humankind’s extinct relatives, Homo floresiensis —nicknamed “the hobbit,”—may have looked like when it lived on the Indonesian island of Flores approximately 18,000 years ago.

Over 50,000 years ago, giant carnivorous storks would have competed with ancient hominins for food on a tropical island.

Between about 700,000 years ago and 60,000 years ago, a diminutive early human walked the island of Flores, in what is now Indonesia.

Early on their quest to reach the Lonely Mountain in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), Bilbo Baggins and company cross paths with an enormous, shape-shifting warrior named Beorn.

The extinct human lineage nicknamed “the hobbit” may not be a distant relative of modern humans as previously thought. Instead, hobbits may be members of the mysterious close relatives of modern humans known as Denisovans, and may have interbred with ancestors of modern humans on the islands of Southeast Asia, researchers say.