Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
covered the archaeology and dating of
Homo floresiensis,
and its senior
author was an Australian archaeologist and coleader of the team that
of irony, however, because the artist's now-famous image of what a hob-
bit looked like was clearly male, despite being based on LB1's female
skeleton (figure 9)!
“The reason I'm calling,” Hamlin continued, “is because John Gurche
is reconstructing Hobbit's face for our film, and when I asked who we
should get to do the endocast, Mike Morwood suggested you.”
I asked whether I would actually get to study LB1's endocast. He
replied that it was an invitation to participate in the film and to conduct
the relevant research. To put it mildly, I could not believe my luck.
“Sure, sure,” I thought, “like I'm really going to get to do this. No way. I
just know they'll change their minds.”
But they didn't. During the following weeks, David and I got to know
each other during frequent phone conversations about the progress on
his film script and about anthropology in general. His plan was to mail
a replica of LB1's skull to me so that I could prepare a rubber (latex)
more about the evolutionary questions that LB1 was raising, as well as
the paleopolitics surrounding her discovery.
perplexing questions
Nothing about Hobbit made sense. Her tiny brain size and peculiar
body proportions (long arms, short legs) differed dramatically from
other humans—recent or fossil. Although all of the
Homo floresiensis
remains were dated between 95,000 and 17,000 years ago and came from
only one cave (Liang Bua), stone tools like those from the cave were
found elsewhere in the site of Wolo Sege, on Flores, in deposits that
one of the main reasons why Morwood decided to excavate at Liang
Bua in the first place. Clearly,
somebody
had made those tools, and he