HENRY

Today’s Nature covers the controversy about the recent paper Small-bodied humans from Palau, Micronesia by Berger et al. Last month, Berger and colleagues claimed that they’d found a collection of small bodied humans dating back between 940 and 2890 years (cal bp) in a burial cave in Palau:

Preliminary sampling of two burial caves in Palau, Micronesia has produced the remains of small-bodied recent H. sapiens, possibly representing a case of insular dwarfing. Individuals in this sample exhibit, in addition to small body size, reduction of the absolute size of the face, distinct supraorbital tori (in some individuals), a weakly developed mental eminence, relatively large dental dimensions, and dental dysplasias and agenesis.

Some of these features may be considered primitive for the genus Homo (or trending towards the primitive condition), thus the human fossils from Palau may provide important insights into the relationship between small body size and the expression of morphological features generally considered to be taxonomically diagnostic in our genus.

Given the scarcity of skeletal samples of small-bodied modern humans, and their importance for resolving taxonomic and phylogenetic issues in genus Homo paleontology, we provide here a brief description of the more salient specimens and a preliminary analysis of the material relative to small-bodied modern humans and to the holotype specimen of one small-bodied member of our genus, H. floresiensis (LB1).

(I’m not sure what “trending towards the primitive condition” means, so I’ll ignore that).

The Nature paper by Rex Dalton (Bones, Islands and Videotape) discusses a few of the technical - and rather vicious - criticisms of the Berger paper:

“The more I read their paper, the more I am convinced it is complete nonsense and cannot be accepted as serious science,” says Michael Pietrusewsky

and:

Berger, charges Fitzpatrick, “hasn’t made adequate comparisons to other skeletal material from Palau. And I don’t think he understands variance in human populations”.

That is - those bones aren’t small people and this ain’t island dwarfing. Dalton suggests that a large part of the problem is how this research is funded by the National Geographic Society. Berger features in a TV show Fossil Hunter, with the slogan “entertainment first, science second”. Now, I’m not sure where I stand on the issue of entertainment-based funding and science, and certainly I think Nat.Geo. does some really good work. However, the paper does raise the issue of how science and entertainment tend to get in each other’s way:

the Palau story illustrates how science can get caught up in the entertainment process. Like many palaeoanthropologists, Berger has long worked with film crews to document discoveries. But sometimes the demands to catch a significant finding on tape can clash with the slow, rigorous nature of the scientific process. The question anthropologists are asking now is: did entertainment needs in Palau overwhelm the evidence from field research

Posted on April 17th, 2008 by Simon Greenhill