Report Reignites Feud Over ‘Little People’ as Separate Species

[Ediacara]

Report Reignites Feud Over ‘Little People’ as Separate Species

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By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: August 21, 2006

After the 18,000-year-old bones of diminutive people were found on the Indonesian island of Flores, the discoverers announced two years ago that these were remains of a previously unknown species of the ancestral human family. They gave it the name Homo floresiensis.

Doubts were raised almost immediately. But only now have opposing scientists from Indonesia, Australia and the United States weighed in with a comprehensive analysis based on their own first-hand examination of the bones and a single mostly complete skull.

The evidence, they reported today, strongly supports their doubts. The discoverers, however, hastened to defend their initial new-species interpretation.

The critics concluded in an article in the current issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the “little people of Flores,” as they are often called, were not a newfound extinct species.

More at the New York Times

[dipsydoodle]

1. Another species is

Homeo bush but they are just small minded bastards. :)

[xchrom]

2. another bit in the same article...

''Dr. Brown said an independent study led by Debbie Argue, an anthropologist at the Australian National University in Canberra, discounted microcephaly as an explanation. He said the report, accepted for publication in The Journal of Human Evolution, “completely supports my arguments for a new species.”