News & Views item - October  2004

 

 

Australian and Indonesian Palaeoanthropologists Discover "A new small-bodied hominin from the Late Pleistocene". (October 28, 2004)

    Peter Brown from Australia's University of New England and T. Sutkna from the Indonesian Centre for Anthropology are the senior authors of the lead article in today's  Nature which has engendered world-wide interest by the popular media.

The Sydney Morning Herald - "Found - the newest members of the human family"

 

ABC online - "'Hobbit' joins human family"

 

The Australian - "Hello, stranger," and adds, "

 

The Australian and Indonesian researchers are rather less flamboyant but more informative in their summary in Nature:

ScienceNow reports, "'My [first] reaction was that this is a hoax,' says Harvard University paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman. 'But after I read the paper, I realized it is a normal skull that happens to be very small. There is no apparent evidence for pathology. It is wonderful.'"

 

Nature has made extensive material available online, much of it accessible to non subscribers.  The full article is also availed, together with supplementary material, online, but to subscribers only.