Sick Hobbits, Quarrelsome Scientists - The Fossil Chronicles - page 155

had examined the remains of LB1 when they were borrowed by the
late Teuku Jacob in 2005, his startling assessment of her dentition was
not made until later and, then, only from photographs. In April 2008,
Henneberg claimed that LB1's lower left first molar contained a man-
made filling consisting of whitish cement rather than metal amalgam.
The implication was that the filling was a temporary rather than a per-
manent one and that it had been placed in LB1's tooth by a dentist prac-
ticing on Flores at some point during or since the 1930s . 74 As Scooter
the-former-dentist put it: “Hmm. This means that LB1 probably died
within a year of receiving the filling, because temporaries don't last much
longer. Then, after she died, someone took her into the cave, dug a hole
that was 19 feet deep, and buried her.” Henneberg's conclusion was that
Hobbit could not be 18,000 years old but, rather, was a pathological Homo
sapiens who had lived recently.
This provocative suggestion demanded scientific scrutiny. That scru-
tiny came from Peter Brown, the lead author on one of the two original
papers that announced Hobbit in Nature . 75 Brown recalled that he had
“cleaned the teeth of LB1 using brushes and soft probes, while wearing
magi [magnifying] glasses. Grain-by-grain, it was a delicate and slow
process. There was no filling in the crown of the mandibular left first
molar, or any other teeth. ” 76 Brown's response includes numerous pho-
tographs that illustrate the wear found on teeth in skeletal remains from
archaeological sites of hunter-gatherers. His photographs and CT scans
of Hobbit's teeth make it clear that the purported temporary filling was
nothing more than chalky-white dentine that is typical for teeth found
in remains of hunter-gatherers from limestone caves. Another Hobbit
skeptic, Alan Thorne, was quoted in the press as saying, “If it is a tooth
that has been worked on [by a dentist], then the whole argument is gone,
finished.” 77 But this logic can go both ways. As Brown concluded in his
assessment of the so-called filling, “Of course the reverse should also be
true. As the claim is a complete fabrication, without any substance, then
there are implications for . . . credibility.” 78
I doubt very much that anyone now takes the dental-filling hypoth-