On October 28 TFW reported:

 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, "Australian and Indonesian scientists have discovered an unknown -- and very short -- member of the human family."

 

The New York Times' headline reads "Scientists Find Skeletons of Miniature People" and follows it up with the somewhat histrionic first paragraph, Once upon a time, but not so long ago, in a tropical island midway between Asia and Australia, there lived a race of little people, whose adults stood just three and a half feet high. Despite their stature, they were mighty hunters. They made stone tools with which they speared giant rats, clubbed sleeping dragons, and hunted the packs of pygmy elephants that roamed their lost world.

The Australian and Indonesian researchers were rather less flamboyant but more informative in their summary for Nature and the research continues. The Australian Research Council (ARC) awarded one of its 2005 Discovery Grants for a "project, involving international collaborative links between Australian universities and Indonesian universities and institutions, [which] is at the cutting edge of palaeoenvironmental research and will provide valuable training as well as information which will be of great benefit to other researchers in the region. Being focused on prehistoric patterns of resource exploitation, land use and management issues, it is relevant to current important issues about the environment, human impact and sustainability, and will help promote awareness of these issues in the Australian and Indonesian communities."

Perhaps not unexpectedly, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, made no public comment with regard to what the world's two most prestigious scientific weeklies headlined and virtually trumpeted in their pages.

As for the Minister responsible for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson, the silence was deafening. In fact the only media release referring to Flores at all comes in list of ARC Discovery Grants mentioned above.

On the other hand Science says of the work of Australian Peter Brown and his Colleagues:

Sometimes big discoveries come in small packages. In October, the startling news that a team of Indonesian and Australian researchers had found a new species of tiny hominid in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores made headlines all over the world, and some researchers described it as the biggest discovery in half a century of anthropological research. If the team is right, the remains of Homo floresiensis, as the species was dubbed, suggest that modern humans shared Earth with other hominids as recently as 18,000 years ago. The skeleton's very small brain--a mere 380 cubic centimeters, compared with about 1400 cm³ for H. sapiens--led its discoverers to hypothesize that it had evolved from an earlier population of H. erectus that got stuck on the island and then shrank in size to make maximum use of scarce resources.

Science goes on to recognise that there is current controversy with respect to the conclusions reached by the research team and point out "Just how quickly the debate is resolved remains to be seen, because the best way to solve it--analyzing still-unpublished fragments of other hominids found in the cave--is now threatened by a fresh controversy over who has the right to study the tiny remains. But the discoverers of H. floresiensis predict that there are many other small hominids on the islands of Indonesia just waiting to be found."

Nature for its part has devoted a large section of its online space to the discovery including a multimedia interactive graphic.

Click on the graphic to go to the Nature site. Then work through the material at leisure.

And Australasian Science devotes three pages of its Jan/Feb 2005 issue to an article by Peter Brown who together with Mike Morwood was one of the senior Australian researchers.

In short this discovery is a big deal, perhaps even bigger than Warnnie breaking the record of most test wickets taken.

Alex Reisner

The Funneled Web