A new discovery in Indonesia could catapult the “hobbits” of J.R.R. Tolkien from the pages of fiction into the annals of science fact.

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Researchers were brought a 700,000-year-old molar by a local worker on the Indonesian island of Flores in October 2014, according to the academic journal Nature. The startling find was then followed by the discovery of more teeth and a partial jaw.

The jaw is described as “unusually petite,” and the teeth are from at least one adult and two children.

The research of Gerrit van den Bergh, a palaeontologist at the University of Wollongong, Australia, comes more than decade after the discovery of fossils of a diminutive ancestor of modern humans was found on the Indonesian Island of Flores.

(More: Visit a Real Hobbit Village)

“It is conceivable that the tiny Homo floresiensis evolved its miniature body proportions during the initial 300,000 years on Flores, and is thus a dwarfed side lineage that ultimately derives from Home Erectus,” van Den Berge said in a statement.

While a full “hobbit” skeleton was found in a Liang Bua cave in 2003, it generated much skepticism as to what it said about the species in question. The skeleton is thought to be of the Homo floresiensis.

(More: Were Unicorns Real? New Fossil Shows When Ancient Creature Lived)

Some researchers assert the remains are of a shrunken Homo erectus, according to a report from CNN, as opposed to some distant link between the species and past ancestors.

"We had given up hope we would find anything, then it was 'bingo!'," van den Bergh told Nature. The journal published two papers from his team reporting the latest findings.

Yousuke Kaifu, from Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science, said in a statement that all the fossils are indisputably hominin and they appear to be remarkably similar to those of Homo floresiensis.

“The morphology of the fossil teeth also suggests that this human lineage represents a dwarfed descendant of early Homo erectus that somehow got marooned on the island of Flores,” Kaifu said. 

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