by Lydia Pyne
Dubois occupied a rather curious niche in the early days of paleoanthropology: he operated as a well-qualified amateur, meaning he didn’t have an academic or an institutional post. However, his anatomy training and medical background—to say nothing of his extensive reading about the late nineteenth-century missing link fossil discoveries like Europe’s Neanderthals—offered enough expertise for Dubois to know what he was looking for and to know when he had found it. Without institutional support or independent wealth, Dubois took a post as a medical doctor in the Dutch East Indies, knowing that the post was a means of getting to Java, a place he was convinced would yield ancient human ancestors. He began surveys in 1887, employing local islanders to search for fossils, concentrating his efforts on Trinil in East Java and Sangiran in Central Java. In 1891, a small but significant set of fossils was recovered from sediments that filled the banks of the Solo River. This assemblage—a tooth, a skullcap, and a thighbone—became the first non-Neanderthal species to enter the history of paleoanthropology.
Dubois welcomed the excitement and enthusiasm that surrounded his Pithecanthropus (“apelike man”) discovery in 1891–1892, and he argued that the fossil remains were proof of a missing link between ape ancestors and modern-day humans. The Java Man fossils became an immediate scientific sensation and one that generated sheaves of articles and scientific papers. However, by the early twentieth century, the fossils also stirred up a great deal of controversy since many researchers were dubious about the existence of “transitional species”—“missing links”—and if these fossil species did exist, scientists were reticent to allocate these species outside of Europe. The bright lights that surrounded Java Man began to fade and the curtain inched its way down.
The lights faded so much, in fact, that the scientific fame that Dubois had enjoyed at the beginning of the twentieth century proved fickle when new fossils (like Peking Man and Piltdown) entered the paleo community and scientists suggested different hypotheses for evolutionary patterns, particularly questioning how useful notions like “transitional species” really were. In response to this criticism—which he took as personal attacks—Dubois took his Pithecanthropus fossils and figuratively went home, restricting scientists’ access to his Southeast Asian specimens. Convinced that the scientific community was out to persecute and mock him, Dubois denied researchers access to the bones for any subsequent studies. If researchers couldn’t study the bones, his logic went, then they couldn’t draw conclusions that might contradict his own.
Regardless, Dubois’s discovery firmly situated Southeast Asia as the place to go to find missing links; Pithecanthropus de-emphasized Africa and even Europe to some extent. The story of Dubois, his Java Man, and the early days of paleoanthropology serve as a historical prototype for the Flores discovery more than one hundred years later.
—
Attempts to explain Flo’s anatomy offer a particularly interesting parallel with paleoresearch from the nineteenth century, beyond her historical associations with Java Man. In fact, the ways that scientists have attempted to explain why Flo looks the way she does harken back to the early days of Neanderthal research. Following the 1856 discovery of a fossil specimen in Neander Valley, natural historians fell into two schools of thought as they tried to make sense of the Neanderthal skull—they had to decide whether the fossil represented a variant of humans or some other species entirely. Some said yes, the variation and cranial morphology were clearly different from that of Homo sapiens. Others argued that the differences in cranial capacity were easily explained by pathological variation and ascribed the differences as belonging to a malformed or diseased Cossack soldier. One explanation offered a new species; the other, a schema that explained morphology through pathology.
The hobbit seemed to replay this ideological divide. In other words, the same confusion, the same controversy, the same explanations that had already been introduced to explain an earlier paleoanthropological discovery offer a subtle reminder that types of discoveries and types of explanations maintain strong ties to their historical roots, and the explanations around the Homo floresiensis bones almost exactly mirrored the early explanations for differences in Neanderthals. The bones either belonged to a new species or represented the remains of a diseased and deformed individual. Most of the scientific community remains confident that Flo does indeed represent her own species.
The first question that confronted paleoresearchers was about Flo’s size: Why was she so small? The authors of the original publications of Homo floresiensis argued that Flo represented an entirely new species of hominin, one that could have had a Homo erectus–like common ancestor, and that the extremely diminutive skeletal structure that Flo exhibited was simply the result of “island dwarfing” reflected in other lineages of island mammals (say, elephants and hippos), which evidence the reduction of a species’ size over generations. Paleoanthropologist Dr. Dean Falk argued in 2005 that Flo’s brain did not show evidence of microcephaly (an individual pathology), but that its shape meant it was not simply a “dwarfed descendent of Homo erectus”—rather, it indicated that it shared a yet-to-be-discovered ancestor. In other words, this undiscovered ancestor would serve as an evolutionary go-between between Flo and older species of Homo. The findings were challenged in a 2006 commentary in Science when the Field Museum’s Dr. Robert Martin suggested that a reduction in body size from a Homo erectus–like ancestor would not result in “island dwarfing.” Instead, Martin and others argued that for Flo to look the way she does, she would have had to be affected by several severe pathologies like microcephaly. (Microcephaly describes a suite of neurological abnormalities that result in small brains.) Most scientific consensus now, however, agrees that the process of island dwarfism best explains Flo’s diminutive stature both in body structure and in brain size.
Studies of Flo’s wrists and ankles show that her skeleton oscillates between primitive and derived characteristics; in some ways she is very similar to Homo sapiens, while in other ways she is very different. Although Flo’s brain is small, evidence from studies of her wrist morphology demonstrate that she and others in her species were able to make and use stone tools. (Flo’s brain size is measured at 400–426 cubic centimeters in volume, depending on the study cited, compared with approximately 1,300–1,350 cubic centimeters for modern Homo sapiens.) The stone tools—the artifacts that had sparked the early research for the Homo floresiensis team—indicated that Flo’s species could hunt small elephants and large rodents. The presence of bones from hunted animals in ashes suggested that Homo floresiensis had a keen mastery of fire.10
Taken together, these characteristics provide an interesting evolutionary narrative. Geochronologist Dr. Bert Roberts of the University of Wollongong wryly noted that the increased complexity of the human evolution story immediately impacted everyday inquiries in paleoanthropology. “We had such a nice simple story, where we had modern humans and Neanderthals, and we bumped them off, that was the end of Neanderthals. We ventured across southeast Asia and it was basically empty because Homo erectus had died out there already, and we sort of just wandered into Australia and there we go. It was a clean and almost crisp little story. It made nice sense. Everyone was happy with that. And then suddenly the hobbit pops its head up.”11
In 2006, an editorial in Nature bemoaned that excavations at Liang Bua had been suspended after tempers flared over the Flores remains. “The latter-day hobbit story was spiced up considerably by the characters of the scientists who discovered it—some of whom publicly and not always politely disagreed with one another about the discovery’s significance. Not to mention the lively rebuttals from many academic challengers … who contend that to brand the Flores creature as a distinctive species is to create something as fictional as anything invented by Tolkien. Strong words have been exchanged. Skullduggery has been alleged. Accusations fly. This is ideal fodder for journalists.”12
—
In order to better understand a fossil’s evolutionary history
, researchers need to be able to examine fossils—consequently, paleoanthropology is a science that depends on access. Access to collections, access to measurements, access to methods, and, of course, access to hominin fossils themselves. The question of what “access” means and how that translates into “good science”—a trade-off of collaboration and control—has been asked and answered many times throughout paleoanthropology’s history.
In 2004, Teuku Jacob, chief paleontologist at the University of Gadjah Mada, a major power in Indonesian paleoanthropology and a proponent of the microcephalic argument, physically hauled off the specimens and had Liang Bua closed to researchers. Nominally, the bones were moved from Jakarta, the capital, to Yogyakarta, where Jacob’s laboratory was located, in order to make casts. When the fossils were returned to Jakarta—months later than agreed upon—damage to the pelvis and jaw was clearly visible. An incisor from the jaw was missing, for example, and the jaw was broken in several places, thus making the reconstruction of the jaw very different than it had been before. Morwood and Brown claimed that the damage had occurred during the casting process; Teuku Jacob alleged that the damage had occurred before he and his laboratory took possession of the bones. It was only with Jacob’s death that excavations at Liang Bua have been renewed. But for the Flores specimen, the question of access—and control to that access and interpretations of the fossil based on access to it—has become simply one more of many controversial aspects of the fossil’s story.
Questions of fossil curation and who could—or ought to—examine the bones had huge implications for the everyday work of paleoanthropological science. How should discoveries like this be curated? Who ought to have access to fossils? And what kind of authority ought an expert’s opinion convey? A good part of the controversy about the specimen can be attributed to the treatment of the bones and the actual access—or not—that surrounded the specimens.
Before Flores, as Brown put it, the “broad pattern of human palaeontology” had started “to look predictable.” After Flores, as Morwood admitted, “challenges” arose to “existing notions of what it is to be human the most.”13 Additionally, there was discord between several research teams and several researchers about what the remains constituted: Were the remains a new species? Or did the remains represent a modern human from the late Pleistocene who simply had problematic pathology? “It is the most extreme hominin ever discovered,” anthropologists Marta Mirazon Lahr and Robert Foley argued. “An archaic hominin at that date changes our understanding of late human evolutionary geography, biology and culture. Likewise, a pygmy and small-brained member of the genus Homo questions our understanding of morphological variability and allometry—the relation between the size of an organism and the size of any of its parts.”14
Many researchers have found themselves practically miring under the auspices of their own research agendas. In particular, Drs. Maciej Henneberg, Robert B. Eckhardt, and John Schofield published their book The Hobbit Trap: How New Species Are Invented specifically to argue that Flo isn’t a new species, but simply a pathological variation in a modern human. Most in fact have come to accept Homo floresiensis as a legitimate species and not some pathological aberration, but that doesn’t mean the debate has gone away. At the ten-year anniversary of the species’ discovery, retrospectives, think pieces, and a renewed curiosity about Flo’s significance only intensified the debate. Staunch opponents of the “hobbit species”—Henneberg and Eckhardt, together with colleagues Drs. Sakdapong Chavanaves and Kenneth Hsü—argued that LB1 was an individual with Down syndrome, claiming that this diagnosis would explain Flores’s skeletal morphology. But their insistence on diagnosing Flo’s pathology has yet to resonate with the larger scientific community. Immediately after their publication, insults were bandied about and umbrage was taken. In short, Twitter had a field day.15
—
To complement Homo floresiensis’s scientific name, researchers cast about for a nickname as a way to introduce the public and nonspecialists to their discovery. The discovery was officially published in 2004, the same year that The Return of the King, the third installment of The Lord of the Rings, won an Oscar for Best Picture, and the fossil rode swiftly on the heels the hobbit movie craze. Although efforts have been made to shift the female specimen’s nickname and identify it as “Flo” or “The Little Lady of Flores,” for better or worse, the “hobbit” nickname has stuck. And little wonder why.
Dr. Roberts described the process of nickname hunting: “We knew we had to come up with a name for publicity purposes. We couldn’t call it Homo floresiensis, so Mike said, ‘I like hobbit.’ I said, ‘Okay as long as it’s not going to cause any problems with Tolkien’s estate,’ or whatever they’re called. They can get pretty stroppy with people using their trademarked words. Mike referred to LB1 as hobbit, not ‘the’ hobbit, as if its name was Mary. For a while, Mike was trying to persuade Peter Brown to call it Homo hobbitus. I think he just thought Mike was a complete charlatan for even suggesting it.” (In A New Human: The Startling Discovery and Strange Story of the “Hobbits” of Flores, Indonesia, Morwood does indeed refer to the specimen without any article, just as “Hobbit.”) Peter Brown added, “Mike and I didn’t agree about nicknames because I thought it trivialized it, and I thought it would result in every loon on the planet telephoning me as soon as it was published. And that was true—endless bizarre telephone calls from people who had seen some small hairy person in their backyard.”16
But there’s a cultural power that comes from Flo’s life and tenure as a “hobbit.” As corny as it feels, referring to Flo as a “hobbit” reminds us that science doesn’t act in a cultural vacuum. Mapping Flo’s story onto something as familiar as a character out of a blockbuster story gives audiences a familiar “guide” to the fossil species. Pairing the fossil so closely with a well-known literary character has allowed the fossil to slip easily into the public’s consciousness. The fossil has also risen to be part of Indonesia’s national identity, implicitly offering the country a long-reaching historical narrative. But it’s the controversy surrounding Homo floresiensis that has done more to define the fossil as a celebrity than any nickname. Apart from personalities and competing institutions, the Flores fossil had the opportunity to act as a nation-building symbol, similar to how Lucy served Ethiopia decades prior. It was “very important for Indonesian society,” affirmed Professor Raden Pandji Soejono, the lead archaeologist at the dig.17 Flores did for Indonesia, a recent democracy, what Hadar did for Ethiopia. Flo is a cultural artifact—a symbol—of nationalism, playing a role similar to Lucy.
Acting as more than just a literary trope, however, Flo has managed to resonate deeply through her cultural ties in Indonesia through stories about the ebu gogo, argues anthropologist Dr. Gregory Forth. According to the indigenous Nage of Flores, the ebu gogo are humanlike creatures that live deep in the Indonesian forests. Forth has pointed out that calling the fossils “hobbits” is thus more than a simple literary allusion. “In particular, it has been found appropriate—evidently in order to communicate effectively with a wider public—to portray Homo floresiensis as a ‘hobbit’ (a choice obviously influenced by the recent Hollywood film versions of Tolkien’s novels),” Forth argued in 2005 when the fossil was first gaining its scientific and public footing. Forth also pointed out that Homo floresiensis was a curious mix of anthropology—culture met biology square in the middle of Flores where legends like ebu gogo met scientific categories like Homo floresiensis. Not only does the name—nickname, even—show us particular cultural tropes through literary allusions, but the evidence used to talk about “how to know” about the species reflects our cultural backgrounds and assumptions as well. How we talk about the species and how we name it conveys how we ground that scientific discovery within our own cultures.
“Curiouser still,” Forth continued, “the designation was not a creation of the popular press, but of the scientific discoverers themselves. Bound up with this identification, which has inevita
bly resulted in a trivialization of the anthropological discovery, has been a transformation of Flores into an approximation of Conan Doyle’s ‘lost world,’ once the abode of pygmy elephants and still the home of giant lizards and giant rats (references respectively to Varanus komodoensis, or the ‘Komodo dragon,’ and the endemic Flores giant rat, Papagomys armandvillei), and perhaps even of dwarf hominids.”18 It is particularly easy to talk about evolution in literary tropes because these tropes offer narrative explanations to evolutionary phenomena. (One of the reasons that science fiction embraced the Neanderthal.) And as literature writes big narratives and big conflicts, the hobbit story and its controversies grow larger than life, visualizing phenomena outside of ourselves.
Homo floresiensis skull cast, juxtaposed with cave. (Science Source)
—
The hobbit species hasn’t amassed the same kind of material culture or ephemera that we’ve come to ascribe to and expect from other famous hominin fossils. There are (as far as I know) no T-shirts, magnets, posters, or kitschy trinkets that surround Flo, the way there are for Lucy, Sediba, and even Neanderthals like the Old Man. But reconstructions of Flo, especially those by John Gurche, do live rather vibrant museum lives. Originally commissioned as a reconstruction for a National Geographic TV show, Gurche’s Flores hominin now lives in the Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian. As part of the Hall’s exhibit, next to a reconstruction of Lucy and a Neanderthal, Gurche created a bronze sculpture, catching Flo in a moment of panic, her dreadlock-esque hair flying around her face, her nostrils flared, and her arms outstretched—a moment of evolutionary pietà, fueled by the viewer’s awareness that Flo doesn’t, or can’t, survive whatever she is shielding herself from. Her terror has been described as “biblical” and “classical.”