The existence of Homo Floresiensis is one of the primary things that motivated Human Contact when we first started playing it. This is a three-foot tall hominin that’s been discovered in Indonesia that, while it had a cranial capacity two thirds smaller than ours, was clearly a tool-using, cultural creature, and it looks like major neural architecture evolved into some sort of denser, perhaps more efficient form than ours. It would appear that the last ancestor we shared with these guys was Homo Habilis. That means that these people (for lack of a better term) who existed into the “modern human” era around 12,000 years ago, shared an ancestor with us no more recently than 1.8 million years ago. To give you an idea of how long ago that was, this is what elephants looked like then:
So, while these were certainly people, they were not human. They had culture and tools, and probably a language, but no speech! Maybe sign language? That big face looks awfully expressive to me. I bet they could communicate a lot with it.
If you want, read the Wikipedia article I linked. But when you’ve got an hour, you must sit down and watch Alien from Earth. Not only is it a fascinating story about these previously unknown people, but it’s a lot about how science is done.