Natural Science Forum / Biology / Paleontology / August 2007

Peter Andrews

A New Human: The Startling Discovery and Strange Story of
the "Hobbits" of Flores, Indonesia. Mike Morwood and Penny van
Oosterzee. xiv + 256 pp. Smithsonian Books, 2007. $25.95.

The discovery of a new hominin species in human ancestry is always
exciting, never more so than when it is completely unexpected. And
certainly no one anticipated that the fossil remains of such a
species would be found in 2003 in Liang Bua, a limestone cave on the
Indonesian island of Flores. But that year a team of archaeologists,
anthropologists and geologists from Australia and Indonesia working
at Liang Bua uncovered the bones of a tiny woman, whom they
eventually concluded was a hominin of a new species, Homo
floresiensis. That bold claim has ignited considerable controversy
among paleo-anthropologists.

[Photo captioned, "click for full image and caption." The larger
version is a photo of the LB1 skeleton laid out, and the caption
is, "This near-complete skeleton, recovered during the
archaeological excavation of Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island
of Flores in September 2003, is believed to be that of a small-
bodied, small-brained adult female who lived about 18,000 years ago
and may represent a distinct hominin species.  From _A New Human_."]

Now one of the members of the team that found the specimen, Mike
Morwood, has written a book titled A New Human, with science writer
Penny van Oosterzee as coauthor. Their fascinating account of how
the large-scale, multidisciplinary excavation was set up and run
shows just how such an investigation should be conducted. They cover
everything: the preliminary groundwork to find out who has to be
approached to get permissions, with all the politics and
administrative matters that are an unavoidable adjunct to such forms
of scientific inquiry; the actual business of excavation and the
dating of the deposit; and finally, the process of publishing a
description of the fossils and their context. Anyone thinking of
undertaking such a project would do well to consult this book.

Two years of excavation at Liang Bua turned up not just the early
human skull the team had been hoping to find but nearly the whole
skeleton that went with it. The discoveries were so significant that
they generated massive media attention. What is it about the Flores
woman (nicknamed "Hobbit") that is so important?

First of all, she lived relatively recently—only 18,000 years ago.
Other fossils found subsequently show that similar beings lived on
Flores up to 95,000 years ago.

Second, there is controversy over how she should be classified. She
has been assigned to a new species of the genus Homo, but at 380
cubic centimeters, her brain would have been only about one-third as
large as that of a modern human. Brain size is usually considered
one of the defining attributes of humans, and prior to the discovery
of the Flores woman, the smallest skull to have been classified as
belonging to the genus Homo indicated a brain size of 500 cubic
centimeters. The choice then was either to change the criteria for
Homo to include a brain size as small as Hobbit's or to exclude her
from the genus. Not surprisingly, there was some disagreement among
team members over which of these options to choose, and the article
they submitted to Nature initially put her in a separate genus. But
the scientists who refereed the article encouraged them to assign
her to Homo, and ultimately they did so.

Third, although the Flores woman was only about one meter in height,
she was clearly bipedal, walking upright on two legs. Her limb
proportions differ from those of modern humans: She had short legs,
relatively long arms, and uniquely long feet puzzling to scientists.

Finally, the circumstances of her discovery—that she was found on an
island where there is evidence of dwarfing of associated animals
such as the proboscidean Stegodon—are significant. They suggest that
many of her attributes, particularly her small stature and shortened
but very robust legs, may have been the product of island dwarfism—
the phenomenon of animals isolated on remote islands evolving to
have body sizes much smaller than those of their recent ancestors.
(There is also an inverse form of the process, in which small
animals breeding in isolation become larger.)

All this evidence provides the basis for rich scientific discussion,
and there has indeed been extensive debate. Along with it has come
the predictable outcry against the unexpected.

Scientific method rests on acquiring and organizing information
about the natural world and making it available to others. This
depends on asking relevant questions, using appropriate methods to
find the answers, publishing the results in scholarly journals and
making the material studied available for independent testing. As
described in A New Human, the research on the Flores woman carried
out by the team who found her has followed this procedure to the
letter. Their findings have inspired an impressive amount of
critical but informed discussion, with many possible alternative
interpretations being aired.

Unfortunately, because other people wanted to get in on the act,
departures from the scientific method occurred after the Nature
article was published. Most notably, Teuku Jacob, an Indonesian
anthropologist who was not a member of the team, precipitously
removed the skull, lower jaw and femur of the Flores woman, along
with another lower jaw found at Liang Bua, from the lab where they
were being kept. He then restricted access to the specimens and
dismissed them as the remains of modern humans with the pathological
condition known as microcephaly. According to Morwood and Oosterzee,
Jacob essentially hijacked the remains, claiming falsely that
Morwood had agreed to their transfer. The authors also complain that
when Jacob finally returned the fossils, the bones had been
mishandled and irreparably damaged.

However unethical the process by which Jacob arrived at his
conclusion, it remains the case that if his hypothesis were to be
proved correct, the Flores hominins would not have any evolutionary
significance. On the other hand, history tells us that similarly
negative reactions have greeted other unexpected hominin fossils,
such as the first Neandertals found in the 19th century and the
first australopithecine in the early 20th century.

This well-written, entertaining book is both scholarly and
accessible to the general public. Morwood and Oosterzee make the
case that the Flores hominins occupy a unique position in human
evolution. The authors counter some but not all of the evidence for
microcephaly. Chapter 3 contains an interesting but short account of
the faunal movements across Indonesia during the Pleistocene,
especially with reference to the Wallace Line along the eastern edge
of the Asian continental shelf, to the west of which are found
Asiatic species, and to the east, mostly Australian ones. Oceanic
barriers and climate change had an immediate impact on those
movements. Morwood and Oosterzee subscribe to the belief that in the
past, cooler periods coincided with reduced precipitation; however,
present-day climatologists are predicting that in tropical
environments, drier climates and loss of rain forest will be
associated with global warming, not cooling. Which view is correct?
The authors also rely on the now-outdated savanna hypothesis, which
posited that early hominins evolved when the replacement of African
forests by savanna grasslands made upright walking advantageous. In
fact, evidence is increasing that early hominins evolved and lived
for quite some time in woodland environments.

Scientists working in Asia have a natural tendency to assign greater
importance to their fossils than to those found in Africa (as Eugène
Dubois notoriously did with his 1891 discovery of Pithecanthropus
erectus in Java). So it is unsurprising that Morwood and Oosterzee
devote chapter 6 to showing that the genus Homo may have originated
in Asia, rather than Africa as is generally believed. They claim
that Homo ergaster in Africa had no known ancestry, and they assert
that populations of hominins emigrating from Africa to Indonesia
around 1.8 million years ago encountered "other" hominins already
resident in eastern Europe and the Middle East. However, no
information is provided (because none is yet available) as to the
origin of these "other" hominins. And the evolutionary pedigree of
ergaster is, in fact, well documented in the African fossil record,
as indeed is acknowledged later in this book.

The Flores discovery, although it throws no light on this particular
issue, opens up many new lines of inquiry as to the nature of human
evolution. I am sure it will not be the last surprise to come in the
ambitious project of investigating our origins.

Reviewer Information

Peter Andrews is a research scientist at the Natural History Museum
in London and a professor in the department of anthropology at
University College London. He is the author of Owls, Caves and
Fossils (University of Chicago Press, 1990) and is coauthor with
Chris Stringer of The Complete World of Human Evolution (Thames and
Hudson, 2005).

Op 08-06-2007 03:28, in artikel
1181266125.664861.258810@j4g2000prf.googlegroups.com, Lee Olsen
<paleocity@hotmail.com> schreef:

No answer.

I rewrite it more politely, but you will still be unable to answer:

Writing things like "Let's see now, H&P spit +_5 Ma, so H went into the
water and came out on the savanna, catching antelope, eating meat, and
sweating a lot, all in 2.4 My. There isn't time for both, and Gona is real,
not imaginary----you lose" is not very sensible:
1) You confuse "Homo" & "our ancestors".
2) Nobody ever claimed human ancestors underwent a fully aquatic phase.
3) No sensible PA still follows the savanna idea (Stringer, Tobias, Wood,
Andrews etc.etc.). These are popular stories for the general public, but
without scientific basis.
4) Early hominids 2.6 Ma or so may have butchered prey, but there's no
evidence they caught it.
5) Whether the hominids at Gona sweat is unknown. Claiming such things show
a complete ignorance of anthropology.
6) Whether our ancestors 2.6 Ma sweat is unknown. Same remark.
7) "There isn't time for both" show a complete ignorance of evolutionary
science.
8) Nothing of what was found at Gona contradicts AAT. To the contrary.

It is for me.  Trying to learn another language, I just end up memorizing
words and tire of it.  Also, I have a hard enough time reading what you
write in English - it's highly technical.  I just responded to you and
Sylvia - I THINK you are agreeing with me in your articles (as I stated) and
I also stated where you just said what I just said (same page, I said).  But
"WKing" and things like that, I have no idea what you are talking about
there.  It's over my head.

I'm surprised you didn't explain baboon marker to Sylvia.  I did.  Now, that
is NOT over my head :)

I googled it, but I didn't find any chart.  I found a few articles, one
requires a login and all that.  It's more or less what you wrote right here.

I wish I could see a literal chart, with lines, like family tree chart.
That would be great.  If you have one, can you supply the specific url?  I
googled aquaboreal and most of what came up was abstracts and usenet
articles.

I did read that when I finally found it. As I told Sylvia, you agree with
what I said to her, but I based what I said on hunch, nothing more.

Question.  Were Homo in Africa at this time - or had their ancestors left
prior to that?  I'm thinking about that baboon marker - that virus broke out
around the time of the homo pan split.  Perhaps that split was NOT in Africa
at all.  When it comes to something like this virus, I mean, the ancestors
of homo could have left TEN YEARS prior to the outbreak.  I don't think
there is anyway to pinpoint dates like that.  One thing, it was air borne -
so they couldn't have been too close by at all at the time.

Again, this is the dating for that virus.  Homo ancestors couldn't possibly
have been where these other species were.