News & Views item - September 2006

 

 

The Indonesian Island of Flores and its Early Inhabitants are in the News Again. (September 4, 2006)
Details of the H. floresiensis skeleton suggest that it may be descended from H. erectus.
Credit: Science/Susan Larson

    On 28 October 2004 the Journal Nature published as its lead article "A new small-bodied hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia" by P. Brown1, T. Sutikna2, M. J. Morwood1, R. P. Soejono2, Jatmiko2, E. Wayhu Saptomo2 and Rokus Awe Due2

1. Archaeology & Palaeoanthropology, School of Human & Environmental Studies, University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales 2351, Australia

2. Indonesian Centre for Archaeology, Jl. Raya Condet Pejaten No. 4, Jakarta 12001, Indonesia

The authors' summary said in part "Here we report the discovery, from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia, of an adult hominin with stature and endocranial volume approximating 1 m and 380 cm3, respectively—equal to the smallest-known australopithecines. The combination of primitive and derived features assigns this hominin to a new species, Homo floresiensis."

 

Almost immediately the media referred to Homo floresiensis as the hobbits.

 

It wasn't long before questions were raised as to the authors' assertion that a new and extraordinary species of hominin had been discovered and the suggestion made that the find was nothing more than the remains of a pigmy with a type of developmental malady that results in microcephaly.

 

Now the major gainsayers have published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (T. Jacob et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi:10.1073/pnas.0605563103; 2006) and present their reasons for concluding that the find, which consists in the main of a single nearly complete skull, represents a microcephalic female.

 

Time magazine in its September 4 issue writes:

Henry Gee, a senior editor at Nature who was responsible for overseeing publication of the original Flores article, calls the PNAS paper "very interesting" but argues that it "cherry-picks the evidence" to support the microcephaly theory. Ultimately, he says, "I don't think the new work dents the contention that Homo floresiensis is a new species of human."

Alan Thorne one of the PNAS paper's authors comments, "[H. floresiensis] are just like hobbits, they're the products of someone's imagination."

Liang Bua cave

© C. Turney, Univ. Wallongong

 

But one of the author's of the Nature paper, Peter Brown, has fired back in an e-mail to Time that the PNAS paper "provides absolutely no evidence that the unique combination of features found in Homo floresiensis are found in any modern human," and goes on to state that the asymmetry of the skull, which is made much of by their antagonists, was caused not by disease but by deformation as a result of being buried under 9 meters of sediment.

 

Another of the coauthors of the PNAS paper Robert Eckhardt, a Penn State University geneticist, has also commented on the finding of pigmies living a short distance from the original excavation sight. He told Time "If you look throughout the area, there are plenty of populations where the average male is under a meter and a half and the females are shorter. If the people there are short now, so were the people who lived there 20,000 years ago."

 

As far as Peter Brown is concerned he told Discover magazine this past January that Eckhardt is "thick as a plank."

 

Leaving aside the mild abuse (in the nineteenth century cytologists were known to have hurled inkpots at one another during at least one meeting) the really serious obstacle to resolving the issue is that for the past two summers no new data have been able to be obtained because Jakarta has banned further excavations at Flores' Liang Bua cave where the initial discoveries were made.