A new report released on Thursday disputes scientists’ claims that bones of a dwarf human discovered on an Indonesian island are those of an entirely new human species.
The 18 000-year-old bones found on Flores Island in 2003 were given the scientific name Homo floresiensis, and the nickname ”Hobbit” after the diminutive figures in JRR Tolkien’s novel. Anthropologists from Australia and Indonesia said it was an entirely new human species derived from the primitive Homo erectus.
The discovery of a new hominid excited scientists around the world, especially since the age given to the bones meant that a separate human species remained on the Earth just as modern man, Homo sapiens, was flourishing throughout the same region.
But a group of scientists led by primatologist Robert Martin said in an article in Science magazines’ May 19 issue that, far from being a new species, the bones were of Homo sapiens suffering from the pathological condition microcephaly, which results in small brain and body size.
Martin said that research based on the brain size of ”LB1”, the skeleton of a one-metre woman which provided the main evidence for the discovery, was faulty and poorly undertaken.
”The tiny cranial capacity of LB1, which is smaller than in any other known hominid younger than three million years old, is demonstrably far too small to have been derived from Homo erectus by normal dwarfing,” Martin said.
Martin, a curator at the Field Museum in Chicago, a centre of natural history research, said the original analysis dismissing microcephaly as an explanation for LB1’s small size was based on faulty models and comparisons, and he criticised the scientists responsible for that analysis.
”There has been too much media hype and too little critical scientific evaluation surrounding this discovery, and it is simply unacceptable that papers should be published without providing proper details of the specimens examined,” Martin said in a summary of his research.
”The principle of replicability is fundamental to good science, and it has not been respected in this case.”
Martin’s team also argued that sophisticated tools found with the Flores bones could not have been created by a race with such small brains.
”These tools are so advanced that there is no way they were made by anyone other than Homo sapiens,” said anthropologist James Phillips, also of the Field Museum.
Phillips further argued that it is ”inconceivable” that a distinct human species was living on the eastern Indonesian island at the same time that Homo sapiens was in the region. Homo sapiens had ”almost certainly reached Flores by that time”, the report said. – AFP
