The Fossil Chronicles by Dean Falk

Author:Dean Falk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2012-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

THE MICROCEPHALIC QUESTION

And focused on the microcephalic question they were. In various news stories about our report on LBI’s brain, skeptical scientists reiterated their views that LBI was a pathological human being rather than a new species. James Phillips, an archaeologist from the University of Illinois at Chicago who had once been one of my professors (and a good one at that), told the Washington Post that the tools and artifacts found with LBI’s skull “were made by [fully competent] modern humans. . . . This individual could not mentally have made them.”31 His colleague from the Field Museum of Natural History, primatologist Robert Martin, was even more outspoken, telling reporters that our brain-scan study was “trivial,”32 adding, “I’m suggesting the Flores discovery is a pathology, and I’m surprised they would publish this with such limited information.”33 Martin was especially concerned about the RBS of LBI, which he thought was too small to be the result of island dwarfism (the hippopotamus study described above had not yet been done), and he was also critical of the particular microcephalic specimen that we had included in the study. As detailed in the next chapter, we would be hearing much more from Martin.

Meanwhile, another news story related to Hobbit was also unfolding. The day after our paper was published, the Los Angeles Times reported:

While researchers investigated the creature’s brain structure, anthropologists in Indonesia were locked in a months-long squabble over custody of the bones. They were returned to their rightful repository at the Center for Archeology in Jakarta only last week, archeologist Michael Morwood, who led the team that made the discovery, said Thursday. “Some of the most important material has been damaged,” said Morwood. . . . This is not the activity of responsible scientists. This is appalling, irresponsible behavior.34

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