Ten years ago, Mike Morwood was a leader of archaeological excavations in a limestone cavern on the Indonesian island of Flores, about midway between the continents of Asia and Australia. That was when he had the experience of a lifetime, as he said many times, the discovery of what he called “a new human.”

When an Indonesian team member struck bone deep in the cave floor, the archaeologists slowly uncovered the pieces of a tiny skull and jawbone of an adult female and parts of her skeleton. She and other individuals had lived there 18,000 years ago. By the size of the skull, her brain was about the size of a chimpanzee’s. Limb bones were those of individuals no more than 31⁄2 feet tall.

These were remains of what became known as the little people of Flores, thought to be a previously unknown extinct species of the genus Homo. Along with his colleagues, Morwood, who died on July 23 at 62, announced the discovery in 2004 and with them assigned the specimens a new species name: Homo floresiensis. Almost immediately, the species acquired a nickname, the hobbits, after J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional creatures.

It was among the most outstanding discoveries in paleoanthropology in half a century, two prominent British anthropologists said at the time. Skeptics were not so sure; some still contend that the small-bodied, small-brained people were nothing more than modern Homo sapiens suffering growth disorders. But recent research appears to support the distinct-species hypothesis.

The team that made the discovery at Liang Bua cave was composed of Australian and Indonesian researchers, but it was Morwood who was most closely identified with it. He had become an archaeologist after working for many years as a leading authority on aboriginal rock art, a scholar who followed his curiosity to neighboring islands in the north in search of traces of the first human migrations into Australia.

Morwood died in Darwin, Australia, former colleagues said. News reports there said the cause was cancer.

The discovery

At the time of the Liang Bua discovery, Morwood and a member of the team, the paleontologist Peter Brown, were on the faculty at the University of New England, in Armidale, Australia. Morwood had since moved to the University of Wollongong, on the coast south of Sydney, as a professor at the School of Earth and Environmental Studies.

His friends said that in recent years Morwood had continued research on H. floresiensis, searching for more remains at other caves on Flores and nearby islands, hoping especially to find a second skull to establish that the first one had not been a deviant specimen. The day before he died, a former colleague recalled, Morwood was talking of plans for further research.

“Mike’s love and passion for his science was inspiring and contagious,” said William Jungers of Stony Brook University in New York, an anatomist who had examined the hobbit skeleton in detail. “He literally changed the face of Southeast Asian paleo-anthropology for the better.”

An Australian author and journalist, Ashley Hay, wrote in 2008 that Morwood had “a touch of Indiana Jones about him.” The image of the movie adventurer was fortified by the vigor and enthusiasm of his explorations in rugged country and his partiality for his own battered floppy hat.

His survivors include his wife, Francelina; a daughter, Catherine; and two grandchildren.

Early life and career

Michael John Morwood was born in Auckland, New Zealand, on Oct. 27, 1950. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in archaeology at the University of Auckland before moving in 1976 to Australia, where he earned a doctorate at Australian National University.

After several years of research for the Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Islander Affairs, he joined the faculty of the University of New England in 1981. His lectures on rock art became the basis of an authoritative book, “Visions From the Past,” published in 2002.

By that time, Morwood had turned his attention to the Indonesian islands. Inspired by accounts of the discovery of Java Man in the late 19th century by Eugene Dubois, Morwood started digging at other sites most likely to have been inhabited by Homo erectus, an archaic forerunner of Homo sapiens. He was drawn to the Liang Bua cave on Flores by the stories of more recent Dutch explorers who had found stone tools.

Morwood’s first excavations established that H. erectus had arrived on Flores by 880,000 years ago, leaving its distinctive stone tools. On further investigation at Liang Bua, archaeologists in 2003 uncovered similar tools in the sediments containing the hobbit skulls and bones. There was one striking difference between H. erectus tools and those at the cave: The latter were shaped for use by tiny hands.

Evidence of hobbits

Besides the initial discovery of the 18,000-year-old skull and skeleton, other remains indicate that the hobbits had lived in the cave from 95,000 to 13,000 years ago. The more recent date is well after the extinction of Neanderthals and H. erectus, once thought to be the last of the hominids sharing the world with modern humans.

Ian Davidson, an emeritus professor of archaeology at the University of New England, wrote in an obituary posted on the Internet that the dating of the H. floresiensis find “was remarkable.” It seemed to suggest, he said, “that the hobbits were in Flores long after the arrival of modern humans in Australia, and yet there were no remains of modern humans in Flores until after the hobbits became extinct.”

Although many questions about the strange little people of Flores remain unresolved — where they came from, who were their ancestors, what their relationship to humans is -Davidson said that “recent definitive publications have disposed of many of the stupidities that were published subsequent to the initial announcement, vindicating both Morwood and Brown.”

Morwood’s own account of his discovery, written with Penny Van Oosterzee and published in 2007, is titled “A New Human.”