Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
the microcephalic question
And focused on the microcephalic question they were. In various news
stories about our report on LB1's brain, skeptical scientists reiterated
their views that LB1 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
LB1's skull “were made by [fully competent] modern humans. . . . This
the Field Museum of Natural History, primatologist Robert Martin,
was even more outspoken, telling reporters that our brain-scan study
ogy, and I'm surprised they would publish this with such limited infor-
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, anthropolo-
gists 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
So far, the handful of scientists who were asserting that LB1 was a
microcephalic human had produced very little, if any, evidence to sup-
port their claims. We knew that in order to address the issue, we would
have to do a second investigation on a reasonable number of micro-
cephalic virtual endocasts. Toward that end, we began locating skulls of