All,
Here are some words on the status of Homo floresiensis’ (aka “Hobbit”) most recent tribulations.
First, a brief Nature News piece:
Dalton, Rex. 2005. Fossil finders in tug of war
over analysis of hobbit bones. Nature 434: 5.… which is rather bland and reads as if Nature felt an obligation to talk about the sequels of its original papers. It can be read
HERE.
The other article is from the Canberra Times and is much more informative and interesting for people who really want to know more about the intricacies of this unfolding palaeoanthropological reality show:
The Hobbit inspires an all-in academic brawl
The Canberra Times -- Wednesday, 2 March 2005
When 60 Minutes does a science story there has got to be more to it than an interesting discovery. So it was last Sunday when the program devoted a segment to one-metre tall humanoid skeletons found on the Indonesian island of Flores, dated to around 18,000 years ago, which have been dubbed "hobbits".
An extinct race of hobbits is perhaps enough to attract populist journalism. But the program was more about the sometimes vicious interpersonal and professional conflict between several Australian anthropologists and archaeologists, with a side serve of Indonesian intrigue.
The team of scientists from the University of New England and the Indonesian Centre for Archaelogy who conducted the dig described the skeletons in Nature last October as evidence of a previously unknown human species, an interpretation which has gained broad endorsement of their peers.
But Dr Alan Thorne, formerly of the ANU's Department of Archaeology and Natural History in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, is an implacable dissenter. He told 60 Minutes that it was "crystal clear, no shades of grey at all" that the skeleton was of a homo sapiens, just like us, who suffered the disability of microencephaly.
"It's a modern human, albeit one with many problems," Thorne said. "The striking clue immediately was this is a person with a brain that is less than half the size of a normal human being. That should have set the bells ringing and it didn't."
Thorne and another dissenter, Professor Maciej Henneberg, a paleopathologist at the University of Adelaide, had been invited to study the skeletons by professor Teuku Jacob, who is regarded as the doyen of Indonesian archaeology. Soon after the Nature article was published, Professor Jacob had used his influence to take possession of the material and deny the original researchers access to it, despite the fact that he had had no involvement in the project.
One insider says that this action was consistent with Jacob's reputation for "playing games" with other researchers by withholding access to specimens. "He is really on a power trip," the insider said.
Professor Jacob echoed Thorne's criticism of the work of the original researchers. "They are not fools, but they are a little careless and too hasty," he told 60 Minutes.
At the core of this dispute are two issues, one professional and one personal. The professional issue is Thorne's adherence to a theory that modern humans did not come out of Africa but evolved separately in several parts of the world from earlier homo species. The personal issue centres on enmity between Thorne and one of the two lead researchers, Professor Peter Brown.
Brown was Thorne's Phd student in the 1980s but they became estranged when Brown showed that skulls found at Kow Swamp in northern Victoria were of modern humans - homo sapiens - which had been artificially cranially deformed. This cultural practice, believed to involve the regular pressing of a child's head by the mother in the first 12 months of its life, was observed in Aborigines in Cape York in the 19th century.
Thorne had previously interpreted the shape of these skulls to be descendants of a homo erectus, a precursor of homo sapiens.
"They really fell out on this," says Dr Colin Groves, a senior lecturer at the ANU's School of Archaeology and Anthropology. "The two have just scrapped ever since. If one says one thing it automatically ensures that the other will say the opposite."
Interviewed yesterday, Brown was not holding back in his criticisms of Thorne and Henneberg, who had written an article for an Adelaide newspaper expressing his doubts about the published findings before examining the skeletons.
"I only take scientific comments when they are peer-reviewed rather than being published in a small local newspaper or scratched on a toilet wall somewhere," Brown said. "They have their own agenda, which has to do with an outmoded model of human evolution.
"They have been unable to get anything published in a peer-reviewed journal, they have been rejected several times.
"The initial two papers were reviewed by 12 leading scientists from around the world, and Alan Thorne simply isn't in that hierarchy."
He said an article will be published in Science later this week "which points out why they are completely wrong", but his most scathing attack centres on their willingness to accept Jacob's invitation to study the skeletons in his possession.
"They knew damn well the circumstances under which Jacob had the material. They knew that he had material which was the scientific property of another group of people and hadn't been described by the excavators and the people who made the investment in recovering it, yet they went there and had a look at this material.
"That's grossly improper, and runs contrary to all standard ethics of scientific behaviour. Thorne is retired now and there's not much that anyone can do about him, but I think Henneberg should be severely censured by the [Adelaide] university.
"There is going to be a huge stink about it in the very near future, which I'm quite pleased about."
Thorne did not return calls yesterday (he has previously been dismissive of this writer's work), but Professor Henneberg emphatically rejected Brown's attack.
He said that he and Thorne were invited by Jacob to study the hobbit skeletons in the spirit of the original agreement between the Indonesian Research Centre for Archaeology and the University of New England.
"This memorandum of understanding states that each side has the right to consult any third party they wish," Professor Henneberg said. "They insisted on me coming, initially I didn't want to come because I am very busy with other things."
He said that scientific debate should be about facts.
"We never raised any ethical issues. We raised issues of academic and scientific fact and interpretation, whereas, I am sorry to say, the other side, instead of continuing academic debate about fact and interpretation turned it into an ethical and legal attack, as if to obscure and hamper debate of scientific fact."
As a paleopathologist, his expertise is the diagnosis of disease from the evidence of ancient bones.
"Pathologies can mimic evolutionary processes and evolutionary changes," he said. "My comparisons showed that I cannot exclude that possibility. I had an opportunity to see the skeleton and confirm my diagnosis."
Dr Groves, who recently gave public lectures on the hobbit discovery in Canberra and Sydney, reflects the mainstream professional view that Thorne and Henneberg have limited their interpretations of the skeletons to suit their wider theory of human evolution.
He said that the small brain was just one characteristic of the hobbit that distinguishes it from modern humans. While microcephalics have a "beakier" face than normal homo sapiens, with a pointy chin, but this was not the case with the hobbit's skull which has a receding chin.
"Even in flat-faced people like Japanese, the [microcephalic] face is really beaky compared to the so-called hobbit," Groves said.
The hobbit had long arms in proportion to its legs, not a characteristic of microcephalics, and the hobbit's lower jaw has internal buttressing that is similar to earlier homo species such homo erectus and homo habilis, but not homo sapiens.
Perhaps the most telling evidence is yet to come. It is understood that at least one more jawbone found at the site has the same characteristics. The odds against finding two microcephalic skeletons are so high that this effectively rules that analysis out.
"There's no chance," Groves said. "The describers were perfectly correct to describe it as a new species."
Whatever tribulations the hobbit people endured in their own lives, they could never have imagined the ruckus they would cause amongst grown-up big people 18,000 years later
Click
HERE for the original article.
Jacques Cinq-Mars
PS By the way, note the journalist’s characterisation of this intense bickering. That of the Euro-whatever scientists involved is described as
“sometimes vicious interpersonal and professional conflict”, in contrast to that of the Indonesians which is relegated to the level of
“intrigue”. Amazing!
