A Bone to Pick in Indonesia

The bones in the limestone cave had been buried more than 12,000 years when the archeologists found them. The villagers say they belonged to sinners who drowned in the biblical Great Flood.

“The people in the cave were condemned by God years ago,” said Stanislaus Barus, 60, his lips stained red from chewing betel nut. “They had lots of sins, according to the Old Testament. It rained for 40 days and 40 nights, and the condemned people took refuge in the cave.”

The Indonesian and Australian archeologists who began unearthing the remains in Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores two years ago have come to a more scientific, if no less sensational, conclusion: They say the bones belong to a tiny, previously unknown species of human.

The little people stood 3 foot 3 and had a brain the size of a grapefruit, the archeologists say. Making sophisticated stone tools, they hunted pygmy elephants, giant rats and Komodo dragons. They used fire to cook and almost certainly had a spoken language. The archeologists named them Homo floresiensis, or Flores Man.

Based on the discovery of stone tools elsewhere on Flores, scientists believe the species’ ancestors landed on the island east of Bali more than 800,000 years ago and survived there long after modern humans arrived in the region. Most likely they built rafts to reach Flores, which would make them the earliest known sailors. A volcanic eruption may have caused their extinction around 10,000 BC.

In the search for human origins, some experts call this one of the most important finds of the last century. The discovery challenges the conventional view of human evolution, particularly the belief that having a big brain is an essential part of being human. According to the discovery team, these little people carried out complex tasks with brains smaller than a chimpanzee’s.

Not everyone has welcomed the discovery.

In Indonesia, the October announcement of Flores Man in the respected British journal Nature ignited controversy within the scientific community and sparked jealousy among experts who were not part of the excavation. The discovery was front-page news around the world.

Teuku Jacob, Indonesia’s preeminent paleoanthropologist, accused the Australians of stealing the limelight from Indonesian archeologists by holding their own news conference, and he challenged the conclusion that the bones represented a separate species.

“They are all modern man,” declared Jacob, a professor of physical anthropology at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta on the island of Java.

In his quest to disprove the findings, Jacob persuaded an Indonesian member of the team to lend him the priceless bones. For months he refused to give them back, then returned some of them broken, including a smashed pelvis. Members of the excavation team have called his behavior unethical.

Now controversy over the bones has derailed further excavation at Liang Bua. The quarrel has prompted the influential Indonesian Institute of Sciences to prohibit digging in the cave, which had been planned for this year and might have produced new evidence in the scientific debate.

“We should stop excavation there for a while, to avoid the dispute getting worse,” said professor Umar Jenie, chairman of the institute, which has authority over foreign research in the country. “If we don’t have a cooling-down period, I worry that relationships between Indonesian and Australian scientists will deteriorate.”

The tranquil village of Kampung Teras in the mountains of western Flores seems an unlikely center of international controversy.

The village has no electricity, running water or sanitation system. The 400 inhabitants, all of them Christian and most of them rice farmers, live in small wooden shacks with dirt floors. They cook their meals over open fires and wash in the river that runs through the village. No one owns a car. When they leave the village, they travel in a converted truck, usually so crowded that passengers ride on the roof.

During the recent excavation, more than 30 villagers got jobs digging with small shovels and hauling dirt from the cave. They earned less than $3 a day.

Large vines droop near the cave’s entrance, which has grown wider over the millenniums as the hillside above has eroded. Inside, broken stalactites hang from the ceiling, which in some places is more than 60 feet high.

Over the last 50 years, Indonesian and Dutch archeologists found the remains of modern Homo sapiens in the top layers of the cave floor. But it was not until excavations in 2003 and 2004 that the Indonesian-Australian team dug deeper and found the bones they identified as Flores Man.

The most significant find was the skull and skeleton of a female who lived about 18,000 years ago: It revealed the species’ short stature and tiny brain. The team also found bones belonging to six other little people who lived between 95,000 and 12,000 years ago, a span of more than 80,000 years.

The bones of the pygmy humans were taken to Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, on Java. Not yet fossilized, they were too fragile for casting. Instead, researchers took them to a hospital, ran a CT scan, and from that made a model of the skull. The age of the bones was determined in Australia using rocks found with the specimens.

“On Flores, evolution has resulted in the most extreme morphological changes ever seen in hominids, including the smallest stature and brain size for any known hominid species,” said professor Michael Morwood of Australia’s University of New England, a co-leader of the excavation team.

Scientists say the pygmies and modern humans overlapped in the region for at least 40,000 years, but no evidence of contact between them has been found. The pygmy bones were uncovered beneath a layer of volcanic ash that is about 12,000 years old. All traces of Homo sapiens in the cave were found above the ash layer.

“There are still many problems to solve,” said Thomas Sutikna, an Indonesian archeologist on the discovery team. “How did they survive in the same period with modern humans? Maybe they had contact with modern humans. We don’t have information about that.”

The phenomenon of large animal species “dwarfing” in isolated island habitats is well known to scientists, although it had not been seen in humans. In this process, scarce food supplies give the evolutionary edge to smaller creatures, resulting in the larger species’ shrinkage over time. Stegodon, an elephant that also reached Flores more than 800,000 years ago, gradually shrank to the size of a water buffalo.

Even as larger species can dwarf in an island environment, the opposite can happen to smaller species. In the absence of predators on Flores, the rats evolved to become gigantic. Locals say the rats still exist and are sometimes caught and barbecued.

While evolving its short stature and other unique traits, Homo floresiensis retained primitive characteristics in its jaw and pelvis that set it apart from other species of human, Morwood says. Initial analysis of the skull suggests that the brain may have adapted to become more efficient as it shrank.

Excavations elsewhere on Flores have unearthed stone tools dating back more than 800,000 years, indicating that the pygmies’ ancestors reached the island before that. Morwood says the extent of evolutionary differences suggests that the species lived in isolation much longer, perhaps even 2 million years. If true, that would rewrite the theory of early human migration around the globe.

Because of the deep ocean channels west of Flores, reaching the island even during the low sea levels of the ice ages would probably have required a water voyage, which some scholars have thought beyond the ability of such early humans.

The Flores discovery suggests that other species of humans might have evolved elsewhere in the Indonesian archipelago, much as Charles Darwin found that tortoises and birds evolved differently on the various islands of the Galapagos.

Indonesia has been rich in human archeological finds, including fossils known as Java Man, Solo Man and Mojokerto Child, all hominids on the island of Java that lived between 50,000 and 1.8 million years ago.

Some archeologists believe it won’t be long before someone unearths new human species on neighboring islands -- perhaps Timor Man, Lombok Man or Sulawesi Man.

The two October articles in Nature announcing the Flores discovery underwent a rigorous peer review process before publication. The main article was signed by two Australians, including Morwood, and five Indonesians, including Sutikna.

Soon after, Jacob assailed the team’s conclusions, arguing that the Flores pygmies were modern humans and that the skull of the female was small because the woman had suffered from microcephaly, a condition in which the head is abnormally small.

Jacob, 75, whose extensive collection of human fossils includes the celebrated skulls of Solo Man and Mojokerto Child, argues that evolution cannot “go backward” and produce a human with a smaller brain. A human with such a tiny brain, he contends, could not have hunted cooperatively, used fire or had a spoken language.

“It is less than the brain of the chimpanzee, so it could not be making tools,” said Jacob, a former rector of Gadjah Mada University who once served in parliament.

“You can’t base a new species on one abnormal specimen. This is nothing more than a microcephalic pygmy human.”

To counter the team’s conclusion that Flores Man was a separate species, Jacob began combing villages on Flores for short people in the hope of proving that they were descendants of the cave dwellers.

So far he has found and photographed 76 adults averaging about 4 foot 7. None are as height-challenged as the pygmy skeleton.

One of Jacob’s discoveries is Johannes Daak, who has become famous for being short. Standing 4 foot 1 and claiming to be 100 years old, Johannes is convinced that he is descended from the pygmies. (He sees no inconsistency with his other belief that the cave dwellers died in Noah’s flood, leaving no offspring.)

Johannes makes a few dollars by charging visitors who want to take his photo. And who can blame him? He and his family live in a two-room shack whose only furniture is a wooden sleeping platform.

Rokus Awe Due, another co-author of the Nature article, argues that Jacob’s search for short people is misguided. The pygmies’ bone structure is so different from modern humans’ that Jacob’s current-day examples cannot be the pygmies’ descendants, the Indonesian scientist says. Flores Man is not characterized merely by short stature, but by features such as a sloping forehead and recessed chin.

“It’s ridiculous,” he said. “Why do they measure the people’s height? Height is not the point. Jacob should measure the brain volume of those people, because the volume is what matters.”

After the dispute erupted, the Indonesian Institute of Sciences discovered that the Australian archeologists had never obtained a permit from the institute to dig in the cave.

That was required, said Jenie, the institute’s chairman, even though the excavation was conducted in partnership with the respected Indonesian Research Center for Archeology.

Jacob says the lack of a permit is a sign of the Australians’ lack of respect for Indonesia. “What they have done is actually illegal,” he said.

Morwood said he believed that the center had obtained all the proper permits.

Using his clout in the scientific community, Jacob arranged in November for an Indonesian member of the excavation team to ship the bones of the Flores woman and five other individuals to him in Yogyakarta, 275 miles southeast of Jakarta, even though he did not have authorization from the excavation team as a whole.

For months, Jacob declined to return the bones, allowing researchers who had no connection to the discovery to examine them. Jacob, who has been accused of hoarding human fossils for his collection, invited a German researcher to take a sample from a rib and ship it to a German laboratory in the hope of extracting DNA.

Critics say that allowing an unaffiliated scientist to take material from the find and send it overseas is an appalling breach of scientific etiquette.

Jacob and his researchers also made a mold of the skull, leaving a residue of rubber and scratches on the bone. As a result of the casting, Morwood said, much of the finer anatomical detail at the base of the skull was lost.

In addition, a lower jawbone was broken and glued back together at a narrower angle. A tooth fell out, and pieces of bone were broken off. Jacob, who returned all but the leg bones in February, says the breakage occurred during the trip to Yogyakarta.

Rokus, the Nature article co-author, sees a more sinister intent. He charges that Jacob was trying to manipulate the evidence, in particular reshaping the jawbone to fit his view that it belonged to Homo sapiens.

Jacob doesn’t deny reconstructing some of the bones.

“We tried to improve some of the things,” he acknowledged. “We didn’t damage any bones. Actually, we improved some.”