Comments on: Fighting Over Hobbit https://gregladen.com/blog/2013/01/09/fighting-over-hobbit/ Fri, 11 Jan 2013 22:04:55 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.6 By: zackoz https://gregladen.com/blog/2013/01/09/fighting-over-hobbit/#comment-485443 Fri, 11 Jan 2013 22:04:55 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=15448#comment-485443 An inside account of the Flores discovery is given in a book by Mike Morwood and Penny van Oosterzee – The Discovery of the Hobbit”, Random House Australia 2007. I found it quite fascinating.

What would settle at least one part of the debate would be isolation of the hobbit’s DNA; Morwood said at a seminar in Canberra a few years ago that efforts were being made about this, but I’ve heard nothing since. It’s unfortunately possible that there’s no DNA left to find, given the tropical location of the find.

]]> By: jane https://gregladen.com/blog/2013/01/09/fighting-over-hobbit/#comment-485442 Thu, 10 Jan 2013 20:15:18 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/?p=15448#comment-485442 I always assume that any argument containing that many sly little ad hominems is wrong. We are dealing with multiple specimens here, right? If you found two specimens of a fossil canid, say, that were that much different from other known fossil canids, you would not hesitate to name it as a new species, would you? Would anyone go off shrieking and wailing that you shouldn’t recognize them until you somehow ultimately disproved the possibility that they were all extreme mutants of some known canid species that somehow survived to adulthood despite severe defects and without any normal individuals apparently around to care for them? I wonder what these two have to say about the Denisovans or about the weird archaic-featured Australian skeletons. The more twigs there were on the human branch of the tree of life, the more genocides our ancestors had to commit to become the only twig. That in itself is adequate motivation for some people to undercount.

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