Sometimes I really wonder whether they make totally off the wall statements just to get their names in the News cycle.
The Discovery of the Hobbit - Mike Morwood and Penny Van Oosterzee
"Since then, bones belonging to at least eight more individuals have been found, ranging in age from 95,000 to 12,000 years old. Our own species has been alive for at least 100,000 years, in case you were wondering. "
If all the samples found over a range of 83,000 years exhibit the same charactistics...I wouldn't expect that only the bones of the diseased one would survive.
"These bones are such a conglomeration of the primitive and the modern, so tiny, and so recent, that many scientists thought they were a hoax. "If you told me an alien space craft had landed in a field in Flores I would have been less surprised," said experienced paleoanthropologist Peter Brown, who studied the bones.
Stranger In A New Land (Archaeology)