Friday, April 01, 2005

Homo hobbitus update Breaking the Hobbit

Yet another skirmish has erupted over the "hobbit," as researchers quarrel over who broke the bones of Homo floresiensis—a diminutive new species of human found on the Indonesian island of Flores last year.

Late last month the 18,000-year-old bones were returned to their official home, the Center for Archaeology in Jakarta, after being borrowed by Indonesia’s most prominent paleoanthropologist Teuku Jacob of Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta (Science, 4 March, p. 1386). Archaeologist Michael Morwood of the University of New England (UNE) in Armidale, Australia, leader of the team that discovered the bones, says the left side of the pelvis--which he calls one of the hominid’s most distinctive features--was "smashed," perhaps during transport.


The pelvi in question:



Hat tip to GregD at the new BioScans blog. Visit it often.

Only after visiting here, of course.