In a review of the study, Harvard University expert Daniel Lieberman said the new fossils backed the contention that the Hobbits were a previously undiscovered branch of the human family tree.
Still unclear, though, is where these tiny hominids came from.
One theory is that they evolved from Homo erectus by island dwarfing, a phenomenon that is well known in the animal kingdom.
Under this, a large species that arrives on an island where there is little food becomes progressively smaller in population numbers and in physical size in order to survive.
But this jibes with the discovery that the Hobbits were apparently good hunters and had mastered the means of keeping warm -- in other words, they had used human skills to buffer themselves against the pressures of natural selection.
"The finds from Liang Bua are not only astonishing, but also exciting because of the questions they raise," said Lieberman.
The study, lead-authored by Mike Morwood of the University of New England at Armidale, New South Wales, was published last Thursday in Nature, the British science journal.
In a news item on its Web site, Nature said Indonesia had refused to renew the researchers' access to the cave.
The country's anthropological establishment, which has close ties to the government, bitterly opposes the theory that the Hobbits were a separate species, it quoted them as saying.
"My guess is that we will not work at Liang Bua agin, this year or any other year," Morwood reportedly said.
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