Discovery
Still searching
By Massie Santos Ballon
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:29:00 09/06/2008
MANILA, Philippines—For four years, scientists have been debating the case of the so-called “hobbits” of Indonesia’s Flores Island. While the skeletal remains of very short people have been given a separate species name, other researchers argue that these are just the bones of very short humans who had a medical condition.
Two studies published this year in the online journal PLoS ONE have added to the arguments on either side. One paper appeared earlier this year and comes from a South Africa-based paleoanthropologist and his team based on his discoveries on the island of Palau two years ago.
While kayaking in the Pacific Ocean, Lee Berger discovered human bones on Palau, which lies 600 kilometers west of the Philippines and about four times that distance from Flores Island.
The older bones suggested that the early Palauan settlers were only about four and a half feet high, and Berger attributed their size to “insular dwarfism,” proposing that the inhabitants were smaller than normal because environmental conditions had made that size ideal.
Some researchers argue that if Berger is right and the Palau settlers shrank, then maybe the Indonesian hobbits were not a separate species after all but just short humans.
Refuting Berger’s findings
Last week American and Australian researchers published a paper—again in PLoS ONE—systematically refuting the findings from Berger’s team.
Scott Fitzpatrick and his colleagues argued that the early settlers on Palau were actually hunter-gatherers of normal human size, and they said that if Berger and his team had examined more bones from other sites on the island, they’d have realized it as well.
In countering Berger’s theories, the American and Australian researchers also add weight to the idea that the Flores Island remains are of a different species instead of just being extremely short humans.
“In a sense, we have used a ‘sledgehammer to crack a nut’ by detailing numerous lines of evidence to refute narrowly constructed research,” wrote Fitzpatrick and his colleagues in their paper. An anthropologist whose doctoral dissertation was based on Palauan culture, Fitzpatrick undoubtedly helped provide the cultural context of the Palau remains, while his co-authors responded to other areas of Berger’s research.
Without analyzing data
University of Oregon anthropologist and study co-author Greg Nelson said in a statement that he thought Berger had simply been rushing to publish without carefully analyzing the data before him.
“He did not take the time to understand the area in which he was working—its entire history, not just the skeletal stuff,” Nelson said. “Any time you work anywhere, you have to understand this history. You just can’t walk in and cowboy it, pull some stuff out and draw conclusions in the absence of understanding the bigger picture.”
Given the criticisms from Fitzpatrick and his co-authors, it seems just a matter of time before Berger and his adherents fire off a rebuttal based on further research of their own, which will then be countered by additional evidence to the contrary, and so on.
Long quest for proof
If this long quest for irrevocable proof one way or another seems tedious and discouraging though, consider how believers in certain mythical creatures have felt this past month.
Bigfoot, for example, was supposedly spotted in America, Canada and Malaysia, but Bigfoot hunters in California were dismayed to find the dead body of one such giant, hairy creature delivered in ice was really a rubber costume. And last week, the Scottish Loch Ness monster was also supposedly spotted in Sweden, except it didn't quite look like Nessie on video.
Still, despite such false leads, the Bigfoot and Nessie hunters still believe that they will ultimately find conclusive evidence that these creatures exist. And if they can do that, then the scientists reconstructing the lives of early island settlers based on the bones at Palau and Flores Island can do no less.
E-mail the author at massie@massie.com.
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