"Hobbit wars" heat up

Eckhardt knew that populations still living in parts of the world near Flores—on the Malay Peninsula, in the Philippines—were short-statured. He checked his impressions against a book he had read decades before, The Origin of Races, by the anthropologist Carleton Coon, published in 1962. There Eckhardt found a footnote describing two small skeletons excavated in separate caves on Flores in the 1950s by the amateur archaeologist Verhoeven. Deciding that he needed to see those previous finds, Eckhardt tracked down the skeletons at Naturalis, the Dutch national museum of natural history in Leiden. In January 2005, Eckhardt flew to the Netherlands to examine the skeletons. "The two measured 1.5 and 1.6 meters in length—quite small but somewhat larger than the height Morwood's group was proposing for LB1," Eckhardt says. He realized something else: The Verhoeven skeletons differed not only from Morwood's Liang Bua specimen but also from each other. He says, "To me, those differences clearly suggested that Flores, far from being isolated, had been reached repeatedly by people from other regional populations."

By that time, Radien Soejono of the National Archaeological Research Center in Jakarta, listed as one of the coauthors of the Morwood Nature paper, had asked the Indonesian paleoanthropologist Teuku Jacob to restudy LB1. Jacob is with Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta; his entire career has centered on the analysis of ancient human remains. Says Eckhardt, "Radien and Teuku are considered to be the two grand old men of Indonesian archaeology. Radien works mainly with stones, Teuku with bones."

A number of scientists had begun questioning the new-species designation through letters and comments in a range of scientific journals. The group that included Eckhardt and Henneberg was at the forefront of the critics, while other specialists had lined up behind Morwood and his team. What the press started calling "the hobbit wars" had begun to heat up.

Following preliminary analysis of LB1, Jacob also concluded that the skeleton was not normal and did not represent a new species. Says Eckhardt, "Morwood's team reacted in an odd manner for scientists, who are supposed to believe in the value of independent study of evidence and replication of results." Instead, through the popular scientific press, "They made numerous charges, including that Jacob was holding on to LB1 and would restrict access to the bones in the future."

Continues Eckhardt: "Just the opposite was the case. Teuku had repeatedly invited me to examine the bones myself. Then, early in February 2005, I got an e-mail from Teuku saying he was under intense pressure to return the remains. If I wanted to see them firsthand, it had better be now." Eckhardt rearranged his Penn State classes and flew to Yogjakarta in mid-February, where he joined a group that included Jacob; Henneberg; Etty Indriati, a University of Chicago-educated anthropologist specializing in dentition, and Jacob's colleague at Gadjah Mada University; and Alan Thorne, a paleontologist with the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Look at the bones

"There we were," recalls Eckhardt, "sitting around a four-by-four table covered with a batch of plastic trays holding the remains of several small, long-dead Indonesians. We were picking up the bones, examining them, putting them back down. Every once in a while, looks would be exchanged across the table, and then one of us would articulate something we had all probably noticed. For instance, Maciej held up one of the femurs and said, 'The Nature paper says this is a right femur. But it is a left femur.'"

Indriati handed the LB1 skull to Eckhardt. "She said, 'Look at the back of the maxilla.' She whisked off some bits of dirt. Where the third molar was supposed to be congenitally absent, instead we have a socket with a piece of tooth in it." Discussions were intense and wide-ranging as the scientists drew upon their collective knowledge of mammalian evolution, human variation, and regional conditions in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

The international team came up with four key areas of evidence disproving the assertion that LB1 represented a new species: geographical factors; a pronounced asymmetry of the skull and face of LB1; dental traits; and abnormalities in bones other than the cranium. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published their findings on September 5, 2006.

Morwood and his colleagues had theorized that Homo erectus individuals traveled to Flores around 840,000 years ago and subsequently evolved in isolation to become Homo floresiensis. That claim assumed no additional influx of humans to the island until just before or just after the "hobbits" had died out around 15,000 years ago, perhaps following a volcanic eruption that also led to the extinction of the stegodons. Jacob's team pointed out that other studies showed that the dwarf elephants had been able to reach the island on at least two separate occasions. Fluctuating cycles of glaciation at the earth's poles would have repeatedly enlarged the land mass of Flores and adjacent islands, leaving water gaps of only a few kilometers. (That conclusion was based on research by K. Hsu of the National Institute of Earth Sciences in Beijing, a specialist in Pleistocene geology and a coauthor of the PNAS paper.)

Says Eckhardt, "There could have been numerous arrivals of humans during glacial stages with low sea levels, before final higher sea levels around ten thousand years ago widened the water gap separating Flores from neighboring islands. But by then, watercraft made crossings easy."

According to Eckhardt and his colleagues, the 14,200-square-kilometer island would not have offered food resources sufficient "for sustaining in isolation an adequate effective population" of hominids that would have provided enough genetic diversity to allow for survival and adaptation over hundreds of thousands of years. Rather, sporadic immigration from other Homo sapiens groups was far more likely.

After the Jacobs team had noticed that the LB1 skull was highly asymmetrical, they brought in David Frayer, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas. Using a set of photographs of the skull taken by a professional photographer, Frayer worked up computerized composite images of the hobbit's face. The combining of two left and two right side images of the face allowed for a comparison that made the asymmetry in the actual specimen strikingly obvious. The researchers also compared seven data points of left and right side measurements on the skull to quantify the asymmetry.

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Most recently updated April 23, 2007.