SEAArch - The Southeast Asian Archaeology Newsblog

Numerous fossil finds in the Patiayam have shown that the mountainous region in Java is rich with faunal remains dating back to a million years BP. The potential richness of these finds have been compared to the other famous prehistoric site Sangiran. However, there has been little able to be done with these finds due to a lack of resources and funding.

Patiayam: Site of great fossil finds
The Jakarta Post, 15 February 2008
Link is not static, and the story remains on the Jakarta Post website for seven days.
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A newly-defined disease is speculated a possible explanation of the hobbit: the disease causes decreased stature and growth, but also allows for normal intelligence to develop.

“Hobbits” May Have Been Genetic Mutants
National Geographic News, 03 January 2008
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Earlier this year, a study by Dean Falk hoped to put to rest the homo floresiensis controversy by comparing casts of the homo floresiensis brain with that of other microcephalic humans. The results of the study showed that there were marked differences between the LB1 brain and the brain of the microcephalic human, inferring in turn that the hobbit was really something else.

While the verdict on the Hobbit is still up in the air, we take a segue and look at the method used for this study and at Ralph Holloway, the scientist who pioneered the method of making endocasts.
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20 September 2007 (Newsweek) - Newsweek magazine features an interview with Matthew Tocheri, one of the investigators behind the Hobbit wrist study.

‘Tip of the Iceberg’
A new study of a skeleton of a member of a race of three-foot-tall ‘hobbits’ who lived 12,000 years ago in Indonesia shows that they were a species of human—and that the evolutionary path to Homo sapiens has been tortuous indeed.
by Jessica Bennett

It was an astonishing discovery: the skeletal remains of a new human species that lived for eons on a remote island while man colonized the rest of the planet. Back when it was first discovered in 2003, on the tiny Indonesian island of Flores, the three-foot-tall adult female skeleton was dubbed “the hobbit,” because she—and the 11 other skeletal remains that were found like her—bore more of a resemblance to the Tolkien fantasy characters than to modern humans. The hobbit’s discovery presented evidence that as recently as 12,000 years ago another species of human may have roamed the earth and, more startling, that our evolutionary history was a lot more complex than previously thought. Many scientists were more skeptical—the bones, they said, most likely belonged to a diminutive human with physical defects: a freak.

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21 September 2007 (Science Magazine) - And finally, the abstract of the homo floresiensis wrist study from Science Magazine. Subscription required for full access.

The Primitive Wrist of Homo floresiensis and Its Implications for Hominin Evolution
Matthew W. Tocheri, Caley M. Orr, Susan G. Larson, Thomas Sutikna, Jatmiko, E. Wahyu Saptomo, Rokus Awe Due, Tony Djubiantono, Michael J. Morwood, William L. Jungers

Whether the Late Pleistocene hominin fossils from Flores, Indonesia, represent a new species, Homo floresiensis, or pathological modern humans has been debated. Analysis of three wrist bones from the holotype specimen (LB1) shows that it retains wrist morphology that is primitive for the African ape-human clade. In contrast, Neandertals and modern humans share derived wrist morphology that forms during embryogenesis, which diminishes the probability that pathology could result in the normal primitive state. This evidence indicates that LB1 is not a modern human with an undiagnosed pathology or growth defect; rather, it represents a species descended from a hominin ancestor that branched off before the origin of the clade that includes modern humans, Neandertals, and their last common ancestor.