Anthropologists war over find

In so doing, they unleashed tribal warfare among anthropologists. In polite, scholarly tones that masked ruthlessness worthy of soccer hooligans, many of them attacked the notion the hobbit could be a separate human species.

After all, it would mean that H. sapiens, who has been around for 150,000- 200,000 years, would have shared the planet with other hominids much more recently than anyone had thought.

It would also mean the hobbits were still knocking around after key events traditionally considered as proof that H. sapiens was master of the planet — the extinction of the Neanderthals, the arrival of modern humans in Australia and the first agriculture, a landmark event that transformed humans from hunter-gatherers into settlers.

To such critics, the one-off find proved nothing — the skeleton could be that of a dwarf, the result of a genetic flaw in a tribe of H. erectus or a disease called microcephaly, characterized by an abnormally small brain and head.

Now, though, Liang Bua has yielded more specimens, which adds a mighty weight to H. floresiensis’ credentials. In all, bits and pieces from at least nine individuals have been found, and dating of the remains suggest some were alive as recently as 12,000 years ago.

All seem to have been the same size as the original hobbit. The new bones also show these people, for all their short size, had relatively long arms and, unlike H. sapiens, had no chin.

The finds thus prove that the first hobbit “is not just an aberrant or pathological individual but is representative of a longterm population that was present during the interval [of] 95- 74,000 to 12,000 years ago,” the Australianteam say.

But that’s not all. Extracted from Liang Bua’s floor were the remains of a dwarf elephant, a stegodon, whose bones, marked by flints, showed the hobbits were good at butchering animals.

There were also scarred bones and clusters of reddened, flamecracked rocks, proof the community could manipulate fire.

In a review of the study, Daniel Lieberman, a Harvard University expert, said the new fossils backed the contention the hobbits were a previously undiscovered branch of the human family tree. Still unclear, though, is where these tiny hominids came from.

One theory is they evolved from H. erectus by island dwarfing, a phenomenon that is well known in the animal kingdom. Under this, a large species that arrives on an island where there is little food becomes progressively smaller in population numbers and in physical size in order to survive.

This jibes with the discovery the hobbits were apparently good hunters and had mastered the means of keeping warm — in other words, they had used human skills to buffer themselves against the pressures of natural selection.

“The finds from Liang Bua are not only astonishing, but also exciting because of the questions they raise,” Mr. Lieberman said.

The study, lead-authored by Mike Morwood of the University of New England at Armidale, New South Wales, is published tomorrow in Nature, the British science journal.

In a news item on its Web site, Nature said yesterday Indonesia had refused to renew the researchers’ access to the cave. The country’s anthropological establishment, which has close ties to the government, bitterly opposes the theory the hobbits were a separate species.

“My guess is that we will not work at Liang Bua again, this year or any other year,” Mr. Morwood said.