The bizarre dental question

This story of the Hobbit tooth should have come out earlier, but I seem to have missed it out. This was what’s been causing the recent Hobbit tooth furore over the past couple of days (see here and here).

Tempest in a Hobbit Tooth
Science, 24 April 2008

If Henneberg is right, the hobbit cannot be 18,000 years old, because only modern cultures do this kind of dental work. He wanted to see the bones again to test his idea, but his group has been denied access to the specimen by the Indonesians now in charge of it, because the discovery team is still analyzing it. “Access to the [original] specimens could have settled the tooth question … in minutes,” Henneberg says. So he made his claim not in a meeting or paper but in a book published last week and in hallway chat at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting in Columbus, Ohio, earlier this month.