As reported by the discovery team led by Michael Morwood of Australia's
University of New England and Tony Djubiantono of the Indonesian Centre for
Archaeology, the hobbits stood about three feet tall, and had surprisingly small
brains for critters that seemed to have scattered tools around Liang Bua cave on
Flores. Flores suffered a massive volcanic eruption around 12,000 years ago.
That may have wiped the creatures out but they have become the stuff of legend,
with islanders telling stories about the little people who once lived
there.
First reported in the journal Nature, the vituperation among
paleontologists surrounding the hobbit discovery has been almost as remarkable
as the hobbits themselves. For example, a competing archaeologist ran off with
LB1, the fossil hobbit described in the Nature report and bones from another,
returning them only after making damaging molds of the soft bones. (LB1 is the
"holotype" for the new species, sort of the gold standard by which a species is
recorded, making the damage more troubling.) Whether the hobbits are offshoots
of humanity or just brain-damaged pygmies has become a new scholarly debate in
the field of human origins.
What's all that about? What happened to honest scientific investigation?
Based on the analysis of microencephalic skulls, the team rules out the most
likely form of microencephaly for LB1. But the rest of the bones are too big a
mix to come to a definite conclusion about the ancestry of the hobbits, other
than to say, judging by their "primitive" features, they must have spent a long
time on Flores, say two million years, even further back than Homo erectus. How
hobbits got there is another mystery. But "it's attribution to a new species,
Homo floresiensis, is supported," they conclude, even if we don't quite know
what they are.
Maybe the truth is still out there?
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