1. loom
  2. The Hobbit War: An Indonesian View

The Hobbit War: An Indonesian View

By loom on January 18, 2005.

The Guardian has a long but disjointed report about the dispute over Homo floresiensis. Articles like these rarely give a very good picture of scientific disputes, since all parties involved only get a couple catchy quotes apiece. I've been particularly puzzled by Teuku Jacob, the elderly Indonesian paleoanthropologist who sparked the controversy by taking possession of the bones and locking them away from the Indonesian and Australian researchers who found them. So I was pleased when my brother, a linguistic anthropologist who does research in Indonesia, passed on this link to a translation of a long essay by Jacob. My brother promises me that the translation is accurate. There's a fair bit of science here, although Jacob isn't averse to calling his Australian rivals "latter-day conquistadors."

Tags
evolution
Hobbits (Homo floresiensis)

More like this

Return to Hobbit Limbo
So lets recap: Its been almost eight months now since scientists announced the discovery of Homo floresiensis, the diminutive people that some claim belong to a new branch of hominid evolution and skeptics claim were just small humans. We seem to have entered a lull in the flow of new scientific…
Return of the Prodigal Bones
The Sydney Morning Herald reports today that the bones of Homo floresiensis, aka the Hobbits, have at last been returned to the team that originally discovered them. The team, made up of Indonesian and Australian scientists, discovered the bones on the Indonesian island of Flores. Last October…
Hobbits Alive?
The feud over Homo floresiensis, the little people of Indonesia, centers on whether they were an extinct diminutive species that evolved from some ancient hominid, such as Homo erectus, or whether they were just pygmy humans, perhaps suffering from some disease. The leading skeptic,…
Hobbit Limbo?
Last month saw the bombshell report that a tiny species of hominid lived on an Indonesian island 18,000 years ago. Since then there has been a dribbling of follow-up news. Some American paleoanthropologists have expressed skepticism, pointing out that while bones from several small individuals have…

So, you just *happen* to have a brother who is a linguistic anthropologist who does research in Indonesia! Talk about lucky breaks...

More interesting comments on this Guardian article and H. floresiensis in general at John Hawks blog