Soft features adapted to the tropics are rather universal amongst living hominids.We have no idea how accurate it is, since we have no living hobbits in the flesh to compare it to.
I don't doubt they had dark skin, since they lived in the tropics, and possibly had curly hair, but I mostly mean other features like ears, lips, and to a less extent the nose and other soft tissues that are hardly to impossible to really reconstruct with only a skull. There have been studies trying to find where the science of it starts and where artistic licence ends.
Having a population have an even longer time navigating an equatorial environment and their predecessors living in a tropical environment makes me believe while there may be some benefit in curled body hair to wick perspiration in a way to facilitating greater cooling it isn't all that necessary either.
Pygmies have body hair, much more than their neighbors and they are influenced by archaic non-human Hominid ancestry. But they seem to have a very fine blonde silky body hair and then the rest is peppercorn, that coils into itself and is in tufts.
Given that it seems "silky" (1a to 3c) hair is neotenic and a later adaptation I'd think any previous Homo species but especially Hobbits would have coiled tufts like archaic influenced Baka/Aka
The shock would be looking at children or adolescent sized adults.The Negritos are still about a foot taller than the Hobbits that's a big difference. Not to mention their body mass was much smaller too estimated to weigh only 55 lbs or so.
Physically they were closer to the proto-hominids from 3 million years ago than any pygmy.
Also I was referring to Europeans first encountering the Hobbits and that shock.
Oh, I wasn't thinking about Europeans. I was thinking first contact with humans.