"This means the ocean levels were lower than today, and it may be that the Indonesian archipelago was actually in many places a contiguous land mass, or at least consisting of islands much closer together (perhaps separated by swamps or mangrove forests rather than ocean.)" An area the size of present day India, around Indonesia went under water at the end of the Ice Age...It is named Sundaland.
An excellent book on the subject is: Eden In The East: Drowned Continent Of Southeast Asia, by Dr Steven Oppenheimer
Australian DNA Challenges Human Origin Theories
Thank you for the link to the Australian DNA work. With this Flores research, people in Europe and North America may be forced to look at it & take it more seriously. The whole science of human origins has suddenly gotten VERY interesting.
What really sends shivers up my spine is the possiblity that some of these Flores Men might actually be around today, on some remote Indonesian island.