Once upon a Hobbit - The Fossil Chronicles - page 93

Figure 13. Scooter and I were thrilled to meet some of our Indonesian collab-
orators when we visited Liang Bua during the summer of 2007. Left to right:
Dean Falk, Rokhus Due Awe, E. Wahyu Saptomo, Thomas Sutikna, Charles
“Scooter” Hildebolt. Photograph by Louise Hildebolt.
debate was that assigning LB1 to a new species contradicted a school of
thought, dubbed “multiregional evolution,” which held that Homo sapiens
evolved simultaneously on different continents and was the only species
of hominin on the planet at the time LB1 was alive . 55 Maciej Henneberg,
of the University of Adelaide, and Alan Thorne, from the Australian
National University, were among the first multiregionalists to voice
skepticism about the attribution of LB1 to a new human species. In a
November 2004 non-peer-reviewed commentary in the online journal
Before Farming, they suggested that the tools found at Liang Bua were
made by Homo sapiens. They believed that, rather than representing a
new species, LB1 was simply a small, pathological human being who
had suffered from a growth disorder called microcephaly, which causes
“short individuals with normal-sized faces and very small braincases.” 56