8

In 2003, a small skeleton was discovered by a team of Indonesian and Australian archaeologists on the island of Flores in Indonesia. The find surprised the world when Peter Brown, Michael Morwood, and their co-workers described the skeleton as a new hominin species, Homo floresiensis. The skeleton was tiny—barely the size of Lucy’s—and it had a tiny brain, only around 420 cubic centimeters. It had other features that resembled Australopithecus species, or even apes, but a few aspects of its skull, jaw, and teeth seemed like a shrunken Homo erectus. It seemed to be some kind of very primitive hominin, yet the skeleton came from archaeological deposits within a large cave, known as Liang Bua, that were then thought to be only 18,000 years old. Modern humans had been in the area long before that. We know that they settled Australia sometime before 40,000 years ago. Could this have been a tiny island population—survivors from the dawn of hominins—who had met our own species?

The press called them the “hobbits”—and they were a sensation. They dominated the headlines. And when there are sensational headlines in paleoanthropology, I had come to learn the hard way, there is usually a big fight.

The discovery immediately generated controversy. The discovery team proposed that Homo floresiensis was a dwarf population of hominins. The island of Flores itself had always been isolated from the Asian mainland and had its own strange retinue of fossil creatures, including pygmy elephant relatives called stegodons and gigantic lizards, even larger than today’s Komodo dragons. The cave had more fragments of skeletons of small hominin individuals and evidence of stone tools, even fire. The team claimed that the tools made by these small-brained hominins had been surprisingly “advanced.” Maybe, they suggested, brain size wasn’t as important to human evolution as we had thought.

The skull of the Flores skeleton

These claims were too much for some scientists to believe, and they went on the attack. Some argued that because modern humans were clearly in the area long before, the Flores skeleton must, in fact, be a form of modern human—probably an individual with some kind of developmental abnormality that affected its body and brain size. Others argued that such long isolation of a hominin population was improbable, especially if they had boats or rafts to reach the island in the first place. Still others doubted that tiny-brained hominins could have mastered stone tools, hunting, and fire.

As this debate heated up, a bitter struggle unfolded for control over the fossil remains. Outside scientists, including some well-established paleo​anthropo​logists, clamored to study the skeleton and raced to get themselves and their students involved in research on the new find. Others argued that the results of such surprising scientific research should be subject to independent examination. A senior Indonesian scientist, Teuku Jacob, asserted authority over the hominin remains and brought them to his laboratory in Yogyakarta for study, where several other scientists examined them. One member of the original discovery team described this move as a “kidnapping” and, when the bones were returned, decried the damage done to them during their absence.

I could see how the rift over access to fossil specimens was tearing the field apart. Scientists in the powerful and rich countries of the United States, Europe, and Australia were competing with each other for exclusive access to fossil discoveries in poorer countries. They were, in my opinion, using their financial resources and reputations to keep the work for themselves—and dividing the scientific community in the process. It was a problem I recognized well from my experience of trying to open access to the South African fossils. Only a couple of years before the Flores discovery, the 2002 meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists had been the scene of a public dispute about scientific access to fossils. As later reported in Science magazine, some scientists came forward with a proposal to establish a database in which scans of fossil specimens would be available freely to scientists. Many paleo​anthropo​logists objected to the idea, arguing that no scans could ever substitute for the original fossils, and that access to the originals should be limited to the discoverers for as long as necessary to fully publish every aspect of their anatomy, a time that might stretch to decades. I spoke in favor of a greater degree of access and collaboration, and later wrote up my views for the association newsletter. What was obvious to everyone was that more was at stake than scientific findings. Researchers wanted to carve out “rights” to exclusivity over fossil discoveries, and they would fight hard to make sure that potential competitors were kept out. In this environment, the idea of open collaboration was a pipe dream.

And then, by accident, I became ensnared in the Flores debate myself.

It began when my wife, Jackie, decided that we needed a family vacation.

Over the years, she had learned what to expect from me on a vacation: I would find some way to drag her and our two kids fossil hunting and then end up giving lectures to hotel owners and other guests. This time, she decided to take matters into her own hands, choosing a destination where a fossil site was definitely not in the cards.

Palau is a remarkable island chain perched on the western Pacific Rim. Part of the Federated States of Micronesia, it is made up of hundreds of small and large atolls with crystal clear waters. And these atolls formed recently, so no chance of fossils! We spent the days exploring the islands and beaches, diving and snorkeling. On our second-to-last day, Jackie decided to treat me. She had found an ad in a pamphlet for a kayaking tour that included going into a cave that had “old bones.” She was told, on inquiry, that the “old bones” were almost certainly from World War II—and she knew I was a war history buff—so she booked it. The next morning, we spent several hours kayaking among the islands with the children, being shown about by a local guide. A few hours into the tour, we arrived at a small island and were taken into a limestone cave to be shown the “old bones.” Indeed, they were old bones, and they were human—I could tell that immediately. In the dim light of the guide’s flashlight, I crouched down next to the remains—there was a calvaria, or skullcap, some bone fragments of arms or legs, and broken ribs. They were clearly human, but what struck me immediately was how small they were.

With the Flores debate fresh in my mind, the small skeletal remains posed an interesting problem. The Palauans were modern humans who had reached a remote island some 3,000 years ago. If an ancient hominin like Homo erectus could evolve into a small, unusual population on an island, maybe some similar evolutionary processes could affect modern human populations on islands, too. This idea, called “island dwarfing,” was already believed to be true of other mammals on islands, but some anthropologists had suggested that culture helped humans deal with the limited resources that might force adaptations in other animal populations. Here, I thought, might be a test case, and it might in the long run shed light on Homo floresiensis.

A few weeks later, I found myself in front of a small group of National Geographic staff, showing them pictures and explaining the scientific interest of island dwarfing at this particular time in history. I had already contacted the Palauan authorities for permits to collect some of the remains. We discussed a budget for taking a small group of scientists to Palau, but to make it work, we had to tag on a film crew to support the expedition. So within just a few months of our family vacation in Palau, I was putting together a team of scientists and booking flights for a June 2006 expedition. Jackie simply shook her head in disbelief.

The Palau expedition began with a personal tragedy. In the Philippines, overnighting on the way to Palau from Johannesburg, I received news that my father had been hospitalized. From halfway across the world I had to make one of the most difficult decisions of my life. He had broken his neck in an accident, and his condition was declining. He had been put on a ventilator and would be a quadriplegic for the rest of his life. My father and I were close, and we had talked about just such a situation. He had made it clear that if anything like this should happen, he would want me to continue with the expedition. He had also made his wishes clear about requiring a ventilator for life support. After speaking to my father and then the doctors, I sat alone in my hotel in the Philippines and cried. It is still hard to think about that moment. As my father was transferred to hospice, I continued to the remote island in the western Pacific. A few days later, 9,000 miles away, my father died.

I threw myself into the work at hand. On arrival, we met with tribal elders, presented our goals, and received their blessings. Then, working with the government’s archaeological survey, we began work in two caves, the one I had seen and a second we were shown. We learned that these bone-filled caves were actually burial chambers of a sort. Some of the first settlers of Palau, seafaring Polynesians who reached the island some 3,000 years ago, had used certain large caves on the island to place their dead. Over many years, thousands of human remains built up, leaving cave floors literally made of bone fragments. When storms or, occasionally, tsunamis washed into the caves, they scattered and mixed the skeletons together. Some of the original mineral content of the bones was replaced by lime leaching from the bedrock, leaving a thin white coating on many of the bones, including some spectacularly preserved skulls.

The expedition went off as planned, recovering remains from very small-bodied individuals. My longtime friend and colleague Steve Churchill joined me from Duke University on the expedition. Together with researchers and students from Wits, and our Palauan colleagues, we set up a makeshift lab to examine the remains. We started noticing details that seemed unusual. We found, for example, that the teeth of these ancient Palauans had abnormalities—not surprising for a small population on an island. Similar anomalies had been found on the Flores skeleton, such as premolar teeth out of line. Many of these Palauan skulls had a very slight chin, not a prominent one sticking forward from their jaw. Again, this seemed similar—but not identical—to the Flores skeleton. We began to wonder if, in fact, some of the traits that had been used to describe Homo floresiensis were actually just a result of inbreeding and small body size, similar to what we were finding in the bones from Palau. Such features didn’t challenge the idea that the Flores population was really a distinct species—we had no opinion about that. But they might show evidence about the process of evolution, and they might suggest that the Flores species should be redefined.

As we prepared our research for publication, we decided to try a relatively new journal, PLOS ONE, one of the pioneers in the new wave of open access to scholarly publications. My co-authors and I were, of course, in favor of this trend. Traditional scientific journals had operated by subscription to libraries, but with the advent of the Internet, they had moved toward not only huge subscription charges to libraries but also paywalls that charged for access by individuals. Huge amounts of money were changing hands, but the results of research were not accessible to the public. During the review and eventual publication of this paper in 2008, I first met John Hawks, a young paleoanthropologist and collaborator on this book you are reading.

Meanwhile, though, trouble awaited. As we worked on Palau, the documentary crew followed our every move. Documentary productions maintain their own editorial control—scientists may cooperate with them, but they film, write, and edit the stories. Sometimes that leads to conflict, and it is not uncommon to hear scientists complain about the way that a production has treated their work. In our case, the documentary producers decided that the Flores angle would guide their story. From my point of view, that was a small aspect of the work—it had merely interested me in the broader evolutionary questions. From theirs, it was juicy, complete with a large cast of scientists ready for an argument. As they interviewed experts, word spread that our team was taking a side in the great Flores debate.

We had stumbled onto a battlefield with guns blazing all around us. The prestigious journal Nature, which had published most of the original research on Homo floresiensis, put a reporter on the story, sending him all the way to Palau. Along the way, he found plenty of critics willing to attack us, almost always for notions that our scientific paper had not proposed.

It would be an uphill fight, getting colleagues actually to read what we had written. They were all too ready to assume that what they read in the media, or saw in a documentary film, must be the accurate scientific story. I learned an important lesson. Scientific debates may, in the long run, be decided by careful scientific work, but in the short run, many scientists pay more attention to the media and the rumor mill. Scientists are smart people, but too often they assume that people who disagree with them must be crackpots or lunatics. It can be the hardest thing in science to look back carefully at your own assumptions and evidence to find why people might disagree.

The scientific debate over the hobbits slowly subsided. Since that time, more information about the Flores fossils has been published, not only by the original discovery team but also by a broader team of paleo​anthropo​logists who became involved in the work. Early archaeological remains, some dating to more than a million years ago, have been found in other parts of the island, and a piece of a tiny jawbone from approximately 700,000 years ago from one of these early sites was first described in 2016. Another tiny brain has not turned up, but research has shown that many features of the skeleton were, in fact, very different from modern humans, and nearly all of them primitive. Probably most important, further archaeological work showed that the initial time line had been wrong. The hominin remains all predated modern humans’ arrival. Not everyone is convinced, and there are still many open questions, but in this case, as in all others, scientific progress ultimately depends on reexamining old assumptions, collecting new data, and being willing to put treasured ideas to the test.

The Palau episode hurt as it unfolded, but it would serve me well a few years later, when I had new research on other important finds. I learned to anticipate the problems that media can bring to scientific research, and I found ways to collaborate more constructively with documentary filmmakers. I learned the value of reaching out from the very beginning to a broad range of scientists not involved in the research, to prevent misunderstandings that might cause problems later. I vowed that with my next discovery, if and when I made one, I would take every precaution to prevent such misunderstandings from ever happening again.

I could not know, in early 2008, that just such a discovery was only a few months away.