Posted on 05/23/2007 2:26:08 PM PDT by blam
The Discovery of the Hobbit - Mike Morwood and Penny Van Oosterzee
By NICOLA JENNINGS - Sunday Star Times
Wednesday, 23 May 2007
Long after homo sapiens invented art, porn and sailing, another kind of human scampered about in Indonesian forests.
We know this because a team led by one of the writers of this fascinating book, Australian archaeologist Mike Morwood, discovered the creature's skeleton in 2003, in a cave on the remote island of Flores.
Since then, bones belonging to at least eight more individuals have been found, ranging in age from 95,000 to 12,000 years old. Our own species has been alive for at least 100,000 years, in case you were wondering.
These bones are such a conglomeration of the primitive and the modern, so tiny, and so recent, that many scientists thought they were a hoax. "If you told me an alien space craft had landed in a field in Flores I would have been less surprised," said experienced paleoanthropologist Peter Brown, who studied the bones.
The creature has been nicknamed "the hobbit", which is apt, as it was tiny, lived in a cave, and had very large feet. Although the owner of the first skeleton found was about 30 when she died, she stood only a metre tall - the height of a human three-year-old. That's half a metre shorter than the average African pygmy. Poignantly, fragments of a 50cm five- year-old have also been found.
But how smart was a hobbit? An adult's brain was only the size of a small chimp's: puny, even for its size. Despite the lack of neurons, Morwood believes hobbits made the stone knives and axes found with them. This, he writes, is their ticket to our own genus, the very exclusive Club Homo, reserved for primates who eat with a knife (fork optional). He has rather boringly bestowed the scientific name Homo Floresiensis. Homo Hobbitus would have been easier to remember.
Morwood emerges from this first person account as a down-to- earth, plain-speaking but careful fellow, particularly when it comes to Indonesian cultural sensitivities. This was fortunate, as it helped him to manage a remote rural dig site and a cranky, urban Jakartan old-boy network.
He needed all his diplomatic skills. Scientific debate surrounding the bones quickly reached record levels of vitriol, even for paleoanthropology, an enjoyably bitchy science. And nowhere more so than in the halls of Indonesian archaeology.
To Morwood's mortification, several scientists, including "the undisputed king of paleoanthropology in Indonesia", Teuku Jacob, declared that the hobbit's skull displayed microcephaly - a birth defect which causes deformity of the skull and mental retardation - and did not belong to a new species at all.
This theory has not gone away, despite Morwood's team finding more tiny individuals separated widely in time. He is not the only one to point out that it seems unlikely a race of imbeciles could survive so long on an island swarming with meat-eating lizards three times bigger than they were, although he needs to find another skull to prove his point.
A few of the proponents of the microcephalic theory have axes to grind and Jacob is accused, sensationally, of grabbing then damaging the hobbits' bones. The fog of war has been compounded by Indonesian v Australian politico- cultural complexities and newspapers that have given equal time to every theory, whether it met the test of peer review or not.
This book is timely. It clarifies events which have been glossed over in other media, including damage done to the only extant hobbit skull, a jawbone and a pelvis. Although neither Morwood nor fellow writer Penny Van Oosterzee could be confused with Tolstoy, the book is intelligent, pacey and evocative.
Morwood is unexpectedly good at describing the local characters who worked on the dig in Flores, from the woman who made the coffee to the guy who sang love ballads during breaks. Being a true bloke, he lingers lovingly over DIY aspects of the dig, proudly describing a technique new to the locals of shoring up excavation shafts with timber - picked up from workmates who had attended a grave-digging course in Sydney.
But the book's central theme is Morwood's passionate desire to learn more about the ancient beings who lived in South-East Asia and the Pacific, and their relationships. How could a brain the size of a grapefruit conceive of the tool to peel one? Where did our ancestors evolve? What does it take to be human? Are humans subject to the same forces which shape other animals? How many types of human lived at one time? Why did they disappear? Did we kill them?
GGG Ping.
Very cool, thank you sir.
How did Tolkien know?
They probably just had a skull disease combined with dwarfism.
Primordial Dwarfism is hereditary. Perhaps they were so inbred that PD was the norm?
Next they’ll find Gollum.
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