The theory that hobbits awoke together with Men is weak.
Letter 131 tells us that “Their origin is unknown (even to themselves) for they escaped the notice of the great, or the civilised peoples with records, and kept none themselves, save vague oral traditions”. The only thing suggestive about this is that they know equally little about their first days as Men and Elves; the difference here being that hobbits definitely never “awoke” like the other two, but evolved from humans (physiognomically, one might think of such races as the Drúedain), and therefore could hardly have a fixed date where they stopped being Men and started being hobbits (or whatever they called themselves at that time).
Also note that while Gollum is able to remember sucking eggs with his grandmother, he apparently does not recognize Bilbo as being of the same race as himself, which makes it highly likely that the hobbits evolved quite much in just the few centuries that separate Gollum’s and Bilbo’s birth.
The hobbit tribes did not drop out of nowhere either, their ancestors simply migrated, and came only therefore first in contact as a folk distinguishable from humans and yet in contact with other people that had written record (the men and perhaps Elves in Eriador); the Éothéod in the Anduin vales do not remember people related to the Shire hobbits, and know the latter only as a rumour of fairy-tale like value. The Elves of Mirkwood, the vague area from which the ancestors of the hobbits came, in turn, do not record hobbits either, which means that in the time they migrated, they were not considered different from Men. Or maybe they were just not their study.
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