Sick Hobbits, Quarrelsome Scientists - The Fossil Chronicles - page 137

was hobbit sick in the head?
As discussed in the previous chapter, my team's description of LB1's
virtual endocast in Science provoked a highly questionable commentary
from colleagues in Germany, who claimed that they had measured an
endocast that was from the skull of a human microcephalic and looked
identical to LB1's. 18 Because our strenuous efforts to locate the endocast
were unsuccessful and for other reasons noted earlier, we did not find
this comment to be credible. Science subsequently published a comment
by Robert Martin and his colleagues in response to our report, which
also asserted LB1 was a microcephalic human rather than a member of
a previously unknown species . 19 Although, as detailed below, we were
unconvinced by the reasoning behind it, this comment at least iden-
tified the locations and specimen numbers of the two microcephalic
endocasts that his team compared with that of LB1. One of these was an
endocast from the skull of a 32-year-old “Basuto woman” from South
Africa in the collections of the Field Museum, and Martin kindly pro-
vided us with a copy of it. 20
The heart of Martin's commentary rested on simple line drawings
of two skulls and two endocasts—the right side of LB1's skull, the left
side of a half-skull of an adult male microcephalic from India, a half
endocast from that specimen, and the left side of the endocast from
the microcephalic Basuto woman. The drawings of the two skulls were
claimed to be similar in overall size and proportions, and those of the
two microcephalic endocasts were both said to “have relatively normal
external appearance despite their very small size.” 21 The reasoning in
the comment was that LB1's endocast must have been from a microce-
phalic, because LB1's skull resembled the half-skull of the Indian micro-
cephalic, which produced one of the two similar-looking microcephalic
endocasts! However, neither a drawing nor a photograph of LB1's endo-
cast was included in the comparison, although it was the focus of the
discussion, and images could easily have been reproduced from our
Science article. Had an image of LB1's endocast been included, it would
have been immediately apparent that it looked nothing like those from