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The archaeologist who helped discover the extinct Homo species Flores Hobbit, Professor Mike Morwood, has died after a struggle with cancer. New Zealand-born Professor Morwood, who was based at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Wollongong, was also a world expert in Australian rock art. Professor Morwood was based at the University of New England in 2003 when he and a team of Indonesian researchers excavated the Liang Bua Cave on the island of Flores and found a set of curious bones that came to be known as Homo floresiensis or the Hobbit. The discovery...

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...

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...

Hobbits may be earliest Australians Carmelo Amalfi and Leigh Dayton December 08, 2005 THE tiny hobbit-like humans of Indonesia may have lived in Australia before they became extinct about 11,000 years ago. The startling claim comes from archaeologist Mike Morwood, leader of the team that in 2003 uncovered remains of the 1m-tall hominid at Liang Bua cave on Indonesia's Flores island. They believe the pint-size person - known officially as Homo floresiensis and unofficially as the "Hobbit" - was wiped out by a volcanic eruption that spared their Homo sapiens neighbours. Speaking at a public lecture in Perth, Professor Morwood...

An archaeologist, who discovered the "Hobbit", an ancient human like species, on an Indonesian island in 2003, has determined that a relative of the species may have existed in northern Australia. The Hobbits, or Homo floresiensis, who were only about one metre tall and weighed just 30kg, existed on the remote Indonesian island of Flores until about 12,000 years ago. The specie was dubbed as "hobbits" because of its small size and big feet. Now, according to Professor Mike Morwood, who had made the finding in 2003, these ancient species could have had relatives living in northern Australia. "We are...

[T]wo of the original Australian discoverers of the hobbit, Professor Peter Brown and Professor Mike Morwood from the University of New England, have lashed out at the researchers, rejecting arguments put forward in the latest paper. Professor Brown also criticises the journal itself for publishing the research. He says the paper's conclusions are "unsupported by any published evidence" and that the paper makes "misleading comments" about previously published papers. Australian National University taxonomist Professor Colin Groves, who was not involved in the research, also rejects the PNAS paper. "Most of their claims of pathology are not substantial," says Professor Groves,...

Research on human fossils generally proceeds at a leisurely pace. Those who discover new bones sometimes take years to analyze them, while their colleagues and rivals wait impatiently to get a good look. But that's not the case with the 18,000-year-old "hobbit" skeleton of Indonesia. Ever since the Australian- Indonesian team that discovered the bones made the startling claim that they are the remains of a species of small, archaic human, Homo floresiensis (Nature, 28 October, p. 1055), the bones have been analyzed and reanalyzed at a breathtaking pace. For the past 3 months, however, the studies have been directed...

Newly found species goes missing again By Stephen Cauchi Science reporter February 10, 2005 The disputed Homo Floresiensis. Photo: Robert Pearce The remains of an extinct metre-high human species have become virtually as hidden as they were before their discovery last year rocked the world of palaeontology. One of Indonesia's leading palaeontologists is refusing to hand back the remains to the team that found them on the Indonesian island of Flores. As reported last year, Professor Teuku Jacob, of Gadjah Mada University, grabbed the remains of the seven creatures - dubbed "hobbits" - and locked them in his safe, refusing...

Hobbit cave digs set to restart Researchers had not been able to excavate at the cave Archaeologists who found the remains of human "Hobbits" have permission to restart excavations at the cave where the specimens were found. Indonesian officials have blocked access to the cave since 2005, following a dispute over the bones. But Professor Richard "Bert" Roberts, a member of the team that found the specimens, told BBC News the political hurdles had now been overcome. The researchers claim that the remains belong to a novel species of human. But some researchers reject this assertion, claiming instead that the...

LONDON (Reuters) - Australian scientists said on Tuesday they have discovered more remains of hobbit-sized humans which belong to a previously unknown species that lived at the end of the last Ice Age. Professor Mike Morwood, of the University of New England, in Armidale, Australia, stunned the science world last year when he and his team announced the discovery of 18,000-year-old remains of a new human species called Homo floresiensis. The partial skeleton discovered in a limestone cave on the remote Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 was of a tiny adult hominid, or early human, only one meter (3...

Scientists: Hobbit Wasn't a Modern Human Sep 20 04:18 PM US/Eastern By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID AP Science Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - Scientists, wringing their hands over the identity of the famed "hobbit" fossil, have found a new clue in the wrist. Since the discovery of the bones in Indonesia in 2003, researchers have wrangled over whether the find was an ancient human ancestor or simply a modern human suffering from a genetic disorder. Now, a study of the bones in the creature's left wrist lends weight to the human ancestor theory, according to a report in Friday's issue of the...

A unique book that purports to explain the past existence of giant beings referred to in the Bible as the Nephilim is skyrocketing up online best-sellers lists, now appearing in the top 15 at Amazon.com. Published by Xulon Press, "The Nephilim and the Pyramid of the Apocalypse" presents an explanation for an unusual verse in the first book of the Bible, Genesis 6:4, which reads: "There were giants (Nephilim) in the Earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men and they bare children to them." The book's author,...

Researchers say they have found "Hobbit" tools on an Indonesian island near where the remains of nine ancient individuals were found. The researchers have excavated more than 500 stone tools within several miles of the remains of Homo floresiensis, believed to have inhabited the site from an estimated 95,000 to 12,000 years ago, the BBC reported Friday. "At Mata Menge there are hundreds and hundreds of in situ stone artifacts with Stegodon fossils," Mike Morwood, of the University of New England, director of the excavations, told the BBC News. Last year, the announcement that a partial skeleton about three feet...

Chief Epiradus Dhoi Lewa has a strange tale to tell. Sitting in his bamboo and wooden home at the foot of an active volcano on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, he recalls how people from his village were able to capture a tiny woman with long, pendulous breasts three weeks ago. "They said she was very little and very pretty," he says, holding his hand at waist height. "Some people saw her very close up." The villagers of Boawae believe the strange woman came down from a cave on the steaming mountain where short, hairy people they call Ebu...

Richard Roberts, discoverer of the Hobbit, says local tales suggest the species could still exist When I was back in Flores earlier this month we heard the most amazing tales of little, hairy people, whom they called Ebu Gogo - Ebu meaning grandmother and Gogo meaning 'he who eats anything'. The tales contained the most fabulous details - so detailed that you'd imagine there had to be a grain of truth in them. One of the village elders told us that the Ebu Gogo ate everything raw, including vegetables, fruits, meat and, if they got the chance, even human meat....

<p>Bad Thyroid?</p> <p>March 5, 2008 -- Anthropologists have fired another salvo in a feud about diminutive "hobbit" people whose fossilized remains were found in a cave on a remote Indonesian island four years ago.</p> <p>Combatting a bid to have the hobbits enshrined as a separate branch of the human family tree, they argue the tiny cave-dwellers were simply Homo sapiens who became stunted and retarded as a result of iodine deficiency in pregnancy.</p>

Fossil finds of early humans in southeast Asia may actually be the remains of an unknown ape. Russell Ciochon says that many palaeoanthropologists -- including himself -- have been mistaken. Fourteen years ago, a Nature paper by my colleagues and I described a 1.9-million-year-old human jaw fragment from Longgupo in Sichuan province, China1. The ancient date in itself was spectacular. Previous evidence had suggested that human ancestors arrived in east Asia from Africa about 1 million years ago, in the form of Homo erectus. Longgupo nearly doubled that estimate. But even more exciting -- and contentious -- was our claim...

The "hobbit" humans that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores some 18,000 years ago were actually a population of modern humans stricken with a genetic disease that causes small brains, a new study says. The argument is being made by a group of scientists who have analyzed all the scientific evidence presented so far about the evolution of the proposed species Homo floresiensis. The discovery of the hobbit-like human—so-called for their small stature—was first announced in 2004 after a fossil skull and bones of several individuals turned up on Flores. Preliminary analysis of the remains pegged them as belonging...

Old tools shed light on hobbit origins Tiny toolmaker or microcephalic? The 'hobbit' debate continues. Michael Hopkin They may have been tiny, but the hobbits of the Indonesian island of Flores are still the focus of the biggest controversy in anthropology. The latest twist in the tale suggests that these one-metre-tall hominids, with a brain the size of a grapefruit, were the final members of a tool-making tradition stretching back more than 800,000 years. But amid fresh doubts over the species' evolutionary history, the idea that the curious creatures were deformed modern humans refuses to go away. Tools from Liang...

Florida State University Date: January 29, 2007 Anthropologist Confirms 'Hobbit' Indeed A Separate Species Science Daily — After the skeletal remains of an 18,000-year-old, Hobbit-sized human were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, some scientists thought that the specimen must have been a pygmy or a microcephalic -- a human with an abnormally small skull. Not so, said Dean Falk, a world-renowned paleoneurologist and chair of Florida State University's anthropology department, who along with an international team of experts created detailed maps of imprints left on the ancient hominid's braincase and concluded that the so-called Hobbit was...