Posted on 03/05/2007 3:18:25 PM PST by blam
Monday, 5 March 2007
Author Mike Morwood.
THE DIG: The bones in Liang Bua cave, Flores, where the hobbits were found.
Surviving the Hobbit Wars
Simon Grose
Dr Mike Gagan will be getting into more than one of the world's most exciting archaeological digs when he abseils down to an ancient graveyard on the Indonesian island of Flores in June. The Australian National University palaeoclimatologist will also be entering a drama that has a reputation for fierce personal and ideological rivalries, international intrigue, stolen goods of priceless value, broken and mended agreements, intense media interest, and a central theme which raises questions about the very nature of what it means to be human.
The recently discovered chamber is 23m below the floor of the Liang Bua Cave, where a team led by Australians Mike Morwood and Peter Brown found remains of the now famous Hobbit Homo floresiensis in 2003.
Gagan's preliminary investigation when the chamber was found last year revealed bones of many extinct prey species in the top layer of an estimated 5m-deep mud floor. Cut marks showed that the animals had been butchered, indicating that the find was probably the Hobbits' rubbish tip. It could contain remains 80,000 years old.
Morwood and his team will return in July to further excavate the main site. He hopes that more Hobbit bones will be uncovered. If so, and if DNA can be extracted from them, the often heated debate over whether the Hobbit was a separate species or a tribe of congenitally deformed Homo sapiens could be resolved.
"That would show that it was a new species and you would be able to extrapolate back to work out when they hived off from our evolutionary line," Morwood said.
The first Hobbit specimens are not reliable sources of DNA because they could have been contaminated by DNA from many handlers. And any DNA they still had was probably destroyed by an acetone-based preservative or storage in tropical conditions. "If you were looking for conditions to break down DNA, that would have been it," Morwood said.
He expects DNA analysis to support the view held by most experts who have considered the evidence that the Hobbit was a distinct species that arose two to three million years ago as a mutation of Homo habilis, a direct ancestor of Homo sapiens. It is like a sidetrack from our family line that came to a dead end.
Dissenters, led by Dr Alan Thorne, formerly of the ANU's Department of Archaeology and Natural History and Professor Maciej Henneberg, a palaeopathologist at the University of Adelaide, argued from the beginning that the Hobbit was a Homo sapiens who suffered the disability of microencephaly.
"It's a modern human, albeit one with many problems," Thorne told 60 Minutes in 2005.
Thorne is a boundary rider of anthropological circles. He argues that Homo sapiens did not emerge from Africa but evolved separately in several parts of the world from earlier Homo species. In sometimes contrary ways, he seems to interpret new findings in ways that bolster that theory.
Morwood, whose account of the Hobbit discovery has just been published, said he was "a bit puzzled by the resistance from a very small number of people". He believes the idea that Hobbits were microcephalic humans will soon be "of quaint historical interest".
"I guess people who have taken entrenched positions find them difficult to give up. I'm surprised that, given the weight of evidence available, that people are still able or keen to hold an alternate position."
In 2005, when the controversy was still simmering, Morwood's co-author, Peter Brown, was less forgiving when Thorne who supervised Brown's PhD attracted media coverage for his views.
"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."
Morwood's account also details the drama of disputes over ownership and access to the Hobbit bones. Professor Teuku Jacob, Indonesia's "undisputed king of palaeoanthropology" assumed ownership of some of the key specimens, had them brought to his laboratory in Yogyakarta, and enabled Thorne and others who were not involved in the Morwood-Brown project to study them.
After lying peacefully for 12,000 years or more, the bones of at least three individuals, including the most complete LB1 (LB from the name of the cave) skeleton, spent several months in strange places before the ownership was resolved.
Considering the importance of these first specimens of a new hominid species, the gross physical damage inflicted by mouldmakers and others is appalling. Morwood records finding pieces of latex attached to the bones, other places where the outer layer of bone had been pulled away, and worse: "Long deep cut marks were etched along the bottom edge of the LB1 lower jaw on each side, where the latex had been cut away with a sharp instrument. An attempt had been made to conceal the cuts by infilling them with some substance." Which makes finding new specimens and treating them properly all the more important.
Excavation of the Hobbit cave is destined to go on for many years, governed by agreements between Australian and Indonesian individuals and institutions which have evolved since the project began. Morwood said they began with a written agreement about intellectual property rights to any discovery.
"Most people have adhered to it most of the time. It was not adhered to on a couple of occasions, with very unfortunate consequences," he said. "Certainly I'd be recommending that other people in the field make sure that agreements are written down so everybody knows what the rules are. Without that written agreement we would not have been able to retain the material, study it, or publish on it."
He now has "a very good working relationship" with the Indonesian Centre for Archaeological Research, the controller of the cave site, which is protected by a barbed-wire fence, a locked gate, and a custodian.
"I've learnt a lot about archaeology from my Indonesian colleagues, and vice versa," he said. He has also learnt a lot about dealing with the media from Nature and National Geographic to 60 Minutes and newspapers and colleagues and rivals in his field.
"Normally the stakes in archaeology are pretty low and nobody really cares much, but that changes when the stakes are raised by a major discovery like the Hobbit."
GGG Ping.
Yeah, but has he found the ring?
No ring.
I believe they found a shell necklace though. I read (only once) that it was 80,000 years old. That means the 'Hobbits' survived the Toba eruption (nearby) 75,000 years ago that almost snuffed out human life on earth.
Several interesting papers, including some on the Hobbits. The page numbers are the pages in the pdf file linked above:
p. 63: Homo floresiensis Cranial and Mandibular Morphology
p. 79: A Howells Grasp on Prehistoric and Recent Japan: A Precursor to the Kennewick Connection
p. 104: More than meets the eye: LB1, the transformining Hominin [Flores cranium]
p. 106: LB1 is not a microcephalic
p. 122: The taxonomy of the Flores hominin: An historical perspective
p. 125: Understanding human races: The retreat of neutralism
p. 127: Acceleration of adaptive evolution in modern humans
p. 151: Misconceptions about the postcranial skeleton of Homo floresiensis
p. 154: Ecological correlates of the initial spread of hominids from Africa
p. 163: Collaboration with a Native American Community reveals novel insight into mitochondrial DNA history of Native North Americans [British Columbia; first discovery of haplogroup M]
p. 177: Homo floresiensis and Homo sapiens size-adjusted cranial shape variation
p. 192: The incredible shrinking molar: a study of metrics and morphology of upper third molars
p. 226: Genetic evidence concerning modern human origins
p. 232: Ancient population structure and migration in Africa inferred from genome-wide genetic markers
p. 236: Infection and human evolution
Some very interesting articles will come out of this meeting.
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Are we doomed?
But do the skeletons have big hairy feet?
I keep wondering if many archaeologists read conclusions into their finds that they would like to see rather than what is truly there.
Menehune?
Hobbit Homo floresiensis
I guess that means I can be scientifically correct calling them hobbits when I bring up the subject with my beer drinking rat hunting buddies.
I keep wondering if many archaeologists read conclusions into their finds that they would like to see rather than what is truly there.
That's why science has rules, that's why peer review is so important, and that's the difference between feeling and thinking. Science helps to counter our normal human tendencies to imagine things that may not be there.
This is true but as with the 'scientic conclusions' on global warming, they drew the conclusions they wanted to see rather than what was truly the cause, the sun.
Sorosauron...
ping!
Yes, you make my point. Anthropogenic global warming is not science, and is a great example of how to misunderstand and misuse science.
It may be that Hobbits survived and filled a niche, because of their small size, and lesser nutritional needs.
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