Anthropologists, The hobbit

Sydney - The arguments go on and on over a pile of bones found in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores five years ago. Some anthropologists are insistent that the skeleton of a metre-tall woman who hunted pygmy elephants and giant rats 18,000 years ago was that of a modern human with a deformed brain rather than a remnant of a separate species of human that died out. Dwarfism, they say, came about because they lived on a small island and their brains, and then their bodies, shrank to accord with the limited demands of their environment. Others find this theory implausible. Mike Morwood, the University of Wollongong anthropology professor who co-led the Flores team with the late Professor Soejono of the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology, argues that recent research bolsters the case that Homo floresensis, the primitive human dubbed the hobbit, was indeed a branch off human evolution that ended up going nowhere. "They are the wrong species in the wrong place at the wrong time," Morwood said. The research, published in the journal Nature and the work of Professor William Jungers of New York's Stony Brook University Medical Centre, focuses on the hobbit's foot. It's flat, relatively long, good for walking but not for running ñ and akin to those of ancient humans who lived in Africa more than 3 million years ago. Morwood, Jungers and many other anthropology luminaries, argue that the foot clinches it: the hobbit could at a pinch be a victim of dwarfism but its primitive foot showed the overwhelmingly likely explanation is that it's a separate species of primitive human that died out."

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