Skullduggery

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When a team of Indonesian and Australian palaeontologists discovered a nearly complete but very strange 18,000‐year‐old human skeleton in an Indonesian cave in 2003, the find provoked questions about modern human origins. Do these ancient bones belong to a new human species? Are they, as many have claimed, the most important find in hominid palaeontology for decades? Or is this creature—indelibly christened ‘the Hobbit’ because it is so tiny—simply one of an isolated people who suffered from a deforming malady? The huge stakes in this competitive, caustic debate can be summed up succinctly: money and fame. But Hobbit investigations may eventually have less impact on the study of human evolution than they do on the standing of palaeoanthropology, and on the continuing crusade against the Darwinian account of how life on Earth evolved. > …Hobbit investigations may eventually have less impact on the study of human evolution than they do on the standing of palaeoanthropology… The bizarre story so far: In 2003, a joint Indonesian–Australian team, digging in Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, found hominid bones and a nearly complete skeleton. The skeleton, designated LB1, was childishly tiny, but tooth wear showed the hominid to have been aged about 30 at death. In 2004 at the same site, the team uncovered another mandible and more bones and bone fragments, from a total of eight individuals. Dates inferred indirectly from materials around the finds range from about 94,000 to 12,000 years ago. This suggests that the hominids lived there for a very long time, overlapping with fully modern Homo sapiens on Flores for many thousands of years. LB1 was declared female and dated at 18,000 years old. ![][1] In 2004, Nature published the 2003 discovery to unprecedented commotion (Brown et al , 2004; Morwood et al , 2004). The authors … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif