Modern Men at Odds Over Ancient Bones

Posted on Thu, Jun. 30, 2005
Modern Men at Odds Over Ancient Bones
By RICHARD C. PADDOCK
Los Angeles Times
KAMPUNG TERAS, Indonesia —

The bones in the limestone cave hadbeen buried more than 12,000 years when the archeologists found
them. The villagers say they belonged to sinners who drowned inthe biblical Great Flood.“The people in the cave were condemned by God years ago,” saidStanislaus Barus, 60, his lips stained red from chewing betelnut. “They had lots of sins, according to the Old Testament. Itrained for 40 days and 40 nights, and the condemned people tookrefuge in the cave.”The Indonesian and Australian archeologists who began unearthingthe remains in Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Florestwo years ago have come to a more scientific, if no less sensational, conclusion: They say the bones belong to a tiny,previously unknown species of human.The little people stood 3-foot-3 and had a brain the size of agrapefruit, the archeologists say. Making sophisticated stonetools, they hunted pygmy elephants, giant rats and Komodo dragons. They used fire to cook and almost certainly had aspoken language. The archeologists named them “Homo floresiensis,” or Flores Man.Based on the discovery of stone tools elsewhere on Flores,scientists believe the species’ ancestors landed on the islandeast of Bali more than 800,000 years ago and survived there longafter modern humans arrived in the region. Most likely theybuilt rafts to reach Flores, which would make them the earliestknown sailors. A volcanic eruption might have caused theirextinction around 10,000 B.C.In the search for human origins, some experts call this one ofthe most important finds of the last century. The discoverychallenges the conventional view of human evolution,particularly the belief that having a big brain is an essentialpart of being human. According to the discovery team, theselittle people carried out complex tasks with brains smaller thana chimpanzee’s.Not everyone has welcomed the discovery.In Indonesia, the October announcement of Flores Man in therespected British journal Nature ignited controversy within thescientific community and sparked jealousy among experts who werenot part of the excavation. The discovery was front-page newsaround the world.Teuku Jacob, Indonesia’s pre-eminent paleoanthropologist,accused the Australians of stealing the limelight fromIndonesian archeologists by holding their own news conference,and he challenged the conclusion that the bones represented aseparate species.“They are all modern man,” declared Jacob, a professor ofphysical anthropology at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta onthe island of Java.In his quest to disprove the findings, Jacob persuaded anIndonesian member of the team to lend him the priceless bones.For months he refused to give them back, then returned some ofthem broken, including a smashed pelvis. Members of theexcavation team have called his behavior unethical.Now controversy over the bones has derailed further excavationat Liang Bua. The quarrel has prompted the influentialIndonesian Institute of Sciences to prohibit digging in thecave, which had been planned for this year and might haveproduced new evidence in the scientific debate.“We should stop excavation there for a while, to avoid thedispute getting worse,” said professor Umar Jenie, chairman ofthe institute, which has authority over foreign research in thecountry. “If we don’t have a cooling-down period, I worry thatrelationships between Indonesian and Australian scientists willdeteriorate.”The tranquil village of Kampung Teras in the mountains ofwestern Flores seems an unlikely center of internationalcontroversy.During the last 50 years, Indonesian and Dutch archeologistsfound the remains of modern “Homo sapiens” in the top layers ofthe cave floor. But it was not until excavations in 2003 and2004 that the Indonesian-Australian team dug deeper and foundthe bones they identified as Flores Man.The most significant find was the skull and skeleton of a femalewho lived about 18,000 years ago: It revealed the species’ shortstature and tiny brain. The team also found bones belonging tosix other little people who lived between 95,000 and 12,000years ago, a span of more than 80,000 years.The bones of the pygmy humans were taken to Jakarta, theIndonesian capital, on Java. Not yet fossilized, they were toofragile for casting. Instead, researchers took them to ahospital, ran a CT scan, and from that made a model of theskull. The age of the bones was determined in Australia usingrocks found with the specimens.“On Flores, evolution has resulted in the most extrememorphological changes ever seen in hominids, including thesmallest stature and brain size for any known hominid species,”said professor Michael Morwood of Australia’s University of NewEngland, a co-leader of the excavation team.Scientists say the pygmies and modern humans overlapped in theregion for at least 40,000 years, but no evidence of contactbetween them has been found. The pygmy bones were uncoveredbeneath a layer of volcanic ash that is about 12,000 years old.All traces of Homo sapiens in the cave were found above the ashlayer.“There are still many problems to solve,” said Thomas Sutikna,an Indonesian archeologist on the discovery team. “How did theysurvive in the same period with modern humans? Maybe they hadcontact with modern humans. We don’t have information aboutthat.”The phenomenon of large animal species “dwarfing” in isolatedisland habitats is well known to scientists, although it had notbeen seen in humans. In this process, scarce food supplies givethe evolutionary edge to smaller creatures, resulting in thelarger species’ shrinkage over time. Stegodon, an elephant thatalso reached Flores more than 800,000 years ago, graduallyshrank to the size of a water buffalo.Even as larger species can dwarf in an island environment, theopposite can happen to smaller species. In the absence ofpredators on Flores, the rats evolved to become gigantic. Localssay the rats still exist and are sometimes caught and barbecued.While evolving its short stature and other unique traits, Homofloresiensis retained primitive characteristics in its jaw andpelvis that set it apart from other species of human, Morwoodsays. Initial analysis of the skull suggests that the brainmight have adapted to become more efficient as it shrank.The two October articles in Nature announcing the Floresdiscovery underwent a rigorous peer review process beforepublication. The main article was signed by two Australians,including Morwood, and five Indonesians, including Sutikna.Soon after, Jacob assailed the team’s conclusions, arguing thatthe Flores pygmies were modern humans and that the skull of thefemale was small because the woman had suffered frommicrocephaly, a condition in which the head is abnormally small.Jacob, 75, whose extensive collection of human fossils includesthe celebrated skulls of Solo Man and Mojokerto Child, arguesthat evolution cannot “go backward” and produce a human with asmaller brain. A human with such a tiny brain, he contends,could not have hunted cooperatively, used fire or had a spokenlanguage.“It is less than the brain of the chimpanzee, so it could not bemaking tools,” said Jacob, a former rector of Gadjah MadaUniversity who once served in parliament. “You can’t base a newspecies on one abnormal specimen. This is nothing more than amicrocephalic pygmy human.”To counter the team’s conclusion that Flores Man was a separatespecies, Jacob began combing villages on Flores for short peoplein the hope of proving that they were descendants of the cavedwellers.So far he has found and photographed 76 adults averaging about 4foot 7. None are as height-challenged as the pygmy skeleton.Rokus Awe Due, another co-author of the Nature article, arguesthat Jacob’s search for short people is misguided. The pygmies’bone structure is so different from modern humans’ that Jacob’scurrent-day examples cannot be the pygmies’ descendants, theIndonesian scientist says. Flores Man is not characterizedmerely by short stature, but by features such as a slopingforehead and recessed chin.“It’s ridiculous,” he said. “Why do they measure the people’sheight? Height is not the point. Jacob should measure the brainvolume of those people because the volume is what matters.”After the dispute erupted, the Indonesian Institute of Sciencesdiscovered that the Australian archeologists had never obtaineda permit from the institute to dig in the cave.That was required, said Jenie, the institute’s chairman, eventhough the excavation was conducted in partnership with therespected Indonesian Research Center for Archeology.Jacob says the lack of a permit is a sign of the Australians’lack of respect for Indonesia. “What they have done is actuallyillegal,” he said.Morwood said he believed that the center had obtained all theproper permits.Using his clout in the scientific community, Jacob arranged inNovember for an Indonesian member of the excavation team to shipthe bones of the Flores woman and five other individuals to himin Yogyakarta, 275 miles southeast of Jakarta, even though hedid not have authorization from the excavation team as a whole.For months, Jacob declined to return the bones, allowingresearchers who had no connection to the discovery to examinethem. Jacob, who has been accused of hoarding human fossils forhis collection, invited a German researcher to take a samplefrom a rib and ship it to a German laboratory in the hope ofextracting DNA.Critics say that allowing an unaffiliated scientist to takematerial from the find and send it overseas is an appallingbreach of scientific etiquette.Jacob and his researchers also made a mold of the skull, leavinga residue of rubber and scratches on the bone. As a result ofthe casting, Morwood said, much of the finer anatomical detailat the base of the skull was lost.In addition, a lower jawbone was broken and glued back togetherat a narrower angle. A tooth fell out, and pieces of bone werebroken off. Jacob, who returned all but the leg bones inFebruary, says the breakage occurred during the trip toYogyakarta.Rokus, the Nature article co-author, sees a more sinisterintent. He charges that Jacob was trying to manipulate theevidence, in particular reshaping the jawbone to fit his viewthat it belonged to Homo sapiens.Jacob doesn’t deny reconstructing some of the bones.“We tried to improve some of the things,” he acknowledged. “Wedidn’t damage any bones. Actually, we improved some.”http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/world/12019761.htm