Whence Homo floresiensis ? - The Fossil Chronicles - page 157

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Whence Homo floresiensis ?

The Queen: “It's a poor sort of memory that only works
backward.” Lewis Carroll

I would have been less surprised if someone had uncovered
an alien. Peter Brown

A few scientists continue to insist that Hobbit was a pathological human
rather than a new species, but their numbers are dwindling. If Hobbit
was simply a sick human, the malady she had is unknown to modern
medicine. As Bill Jungers and Karen Baab, of Stony Brook University,
put it, “There are no known sick humans that look like Homo floresiensis
because no known illness reverses the evolutionary changes of a species.
The hobbits therefore cannot be a diseased sub-population of healthy
humans.” 1 This goes a long way toward explaining why most scientists
now seem to accept that Homo floresiensis represents a legitimate, if sur-
prising, new twig on the human family tree .
In April 2009 at Stony Brook University, Richard Leakey hosted a
public symposium sponsored by the Turkana Basin Institute and titled
“Hobbits in the Haystack.” 2 This meeting brought together the discov-
erers and other researchers who have analyzed the various parts of
Hobbit's skeleton. Remarkably, the nine speakers had independently
arrived at the same conclusion, whether they had studied Hobbit's anat-
omy (brain, teeth, wrist, shoulder, and feet), associated artifacts, or the
evidence related to sick-hobbit proposals. The consensus was that this

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