You know about the Hobbit. Not The Hobbit (TM) but the hominid from Flores, Indonesia. Mike Morwood was a key investigator in that research (though he did lots of other research as well).

He was born …

… in Auckland, New Zealand, studied archaeology at the University of Auckland and gained his PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra. From a position in the Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Islander Advancement – the public service body with responsibility at that time for Aboriginal cultural heritage – he joined the University of New England (UNE), in Armidale, New South Wales, in 1981, and worked there until 2007. Mike then moved to the University of Wollongong, also in New South Wales.

In his PhD thesis, on the rock art and archaeology of the Carnarvon Ranges in Central Queensland, Mike had pioneered the inclusion of rock art into other archaeological studies, and continued to work on projects which sought such integration until his death. He turned his UNE course on the archaeology of rock art into the book Visions from the Past (2002).

And there is much more to his bio than that.

In fact, you can read about the “Archaeologist whose discovery of a ‘Hobbit’ skeleton sparked a controversy over human evolution” in this writeup by Iain Davidson, in The Guardian.