The diminutive “hobbit” species, Homo floresiensis, was recently in the news because of a new analysis that suggested the species predated the arrival of modern humans to the region. But the discovery left a big unanswered question: how did the hobbit fit into the human family tree? A discovery described in today’s issue of Nature helps piece together more about the species’ history, shedding light on its ancestry and suggesting that it was present in Indonesia as early as 700,000 years ago.

When first found, the tiny bones discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores were dated to around 20 kya (20 thousand years ago). That date was revised earlier this year, placing them between 100kya and 60kya. Since modern humans probably moved through the region around 50 kya—and since other species of humans have tended not to last long once our own species moves into the neighborhood—the older dates helped to resolve the mystery of how the hobbits had lived alongside us for so long. Basically, they hadn’t.

Still, this left a lot of other questions open. How long did hobbits live on the island? If hobbits and modern humans coexisted for even a short period of time, is it possible that they shared some of their genes with us like Neanderthals did? The latter question depends partly on their ancestry—if hobbits descended from Homo erectus, its evolutionary distance from humans would make interbreeding unlikely. The new finding suggests that’s the case.