Hobbit folk 'were just sick humans'
Trumpeted as a new species of human being, the 'hobbit' folk of Indonesia are really just sick members of Homo sapiens, it has been alleged. The claim - by Teuku Jacob, professor of paleoanthropology at Indonesia's Gadjah Mada university - threatens to trigger an academic row over the discovery of an extinct race of little hominid people, Homo floresiensis, on the island of Flores. Jacob said the tiny floresiensis skull is really that of a relatively recently deceased human who suffered from microcephaly, a congenital condition in which a person is born with a very small brain…
But these claims were rejected by British paleontologist Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum in London. 'The paper by Brown and his team was refereed by two independent teams made up of world experts before it was published in Nature. It is very hard to believe they could have got it as wrong as is being claimed.'