A First Look at the Bones of a ‘Hobbit’

A First Look at the Bones of a Hobbit

Original Article
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/science/21hobb.html?_r=2&ref=science

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: April 20, 2009

A hobbit will be making its public debut on Tuesday at Stony Brook University on Long Island. A cast of the skull and bones of the hominid Homo floresiensis, its diminutive size inspiring the hobbit nickname, will be displayed for the first time at a public symposium on human evolution, titled Hobbits in the Haystack.

Researchers at the university made the cast from 3-D images of a skeleton of one of these little people, who lived as recently as 18,000 years ago in caves on the Indonesian island of Flores. The original skeleton remains in an Indonesian laboratory.

The discovery, announced in 2004, set off heated debate among scientists. The Australian and Indonesian scientists who found bones of at least eight specimens pronounced them evidence of a separate human species. The individuals were small, not much more than three feet tall, and apparently had brains the size of chimpanzees. Other experts have contended that the hobbits are Homo sapiens who evolved small stature in isolation and hypothesized that genetic or pathologicaldisorders accounted for their abnormally small brains.

William Jungers, a paleoanthropologist at Stony Brook, said casts of the hobbit skull had been displayed at a few scientific meetings, but this was the first time both skull and skeleton would be displayed anywhere, inside or outside of Indonesia.