Not A Hobbit After All?

[HMS_Beagle]

I wouldn't be too quick to jump on this Down's syndrome bandwagon. Seems the authors of these new papers, Maciej Henneberg and Robert Eckhardt, have been singing this song with minimal evidence and ignoring contradictory scientific data for some time. In 2011 they self-published a book called The Hobbit Trap in which they argued that H. floresiensis was really a deformed modern human. One of their arguments there was the most remarkable claim that the type specimen LB1 actually contained modern dental work.

And the colorful history of the hobbit finds doesn’t end there. Maciej Henneberg, Robert Eckhardt, and John Schofield self-published a book called The Hobbit Trap, in which they called into question the status of the hobbit as a new species. One of their objections was that the teeth showed signs of modern dental work, a claim Peter Brown (one of the hobbit’s discoverers) understandably called “complete lunacy.”

The 2013 take on the hobbits of Flores

There's a reason science doesn't look too favorably on their work. Eckhardt in particular seems like a total loony tunes. In the last few days he's been pimping his paper on science boards all over the web like he did here, attacking anyone who says anything negative like he did on this site:

British Natural History Museum: News in brief

It may turn out that Homo floresiensis is not be a new species but it won't be because of these woo merchants.

[Jesse]

I wouldn't be too quick to jump on this Down's syndrome bandwagon. Seems the authors of these new papers, Maciej Henneberg and Robert Eckhardt, have been singing this song with minimal evidence and ignoring contradictory scientific data for some time. In 2011 they self-published a book called The Hobbit Trap in which they argued that H. floresiensis was really a deformed modern human. One of their arguments there was the most remarkable claim that the type specimen LB1 actually contained modern dental work.



There's a reason science doesn't look too favorably on their work. Eckhardt in particular seems like a total loony tunes. In the last few days he's been pimping his paper on science boards all over the web like he did here, attacking anyone who says anything negative like he did on this site:

British Natural History Museum: News in brief

It may turn out that Homo floresiensis is not be a new species but it won't be because of these woo merchants.

Thanks for the new information HMS_Beagle. I didn't know this was something that was already being pushed. I still have my hopes that this is a new species. I have to look into their qualifications a bit closer. Though I do wonder why LB1 is the only abnormality out of them all.

[rogue06]

I wouldn't be too quick to jump on this Down's syndrome bandwagon. Seems the authors of these new papers, Maciej Henneberg and Robert Eckhardt, have been singing this song with minimal evidence and ignoring contradictory scientific data for some time. In 2011 they self-published a book called The Hobbit Trap in which they argued that H. floresiensis was really a deformed modern human. One of their arguments there was the most remarkable claim that the type specimen LB1 actually contained modern dental work.



There's a reason science doesn't look too favorably on their work. Eckhardt in particular seems like a total loony tunes. In the last few days he's been pimping his paper on science boards all over the web like he did here, attacking anyone who says anything negative like he did on this site:

British Natural History Museum: News in brief

It may turn out that Homo floresiensis is not be a new species but it won't be because of these woo merchants.

Eckhardt along with John Schofield and Maciej Henneberg made the claim about modern dental work a few years ago in a self-published book called "The Hobbit Trap" although I've heard it said that this was primarily Henneberg's idea. Subsequent detailed analysis of the teeth by Jungers and Kaifu (2011) disputed these claims saying that

ABSTRACT: The claim that the lower left first mandibular molar of LB1, the type specimen of Homo floresiensis, displays endodontic work, and a filling is assessed by digital radiography and micro-CT scanning. The M1 tooth crown is heavily worn and exhibits extensive dentine exposure that is stained white, but there is no trace of endodontic treatment or a dental filling in this Indonesian fossil dated to 17.1-19.0 kya. Dental calculus (commonly observed in foragers) is present on the teeth of LB1, but there are no observable caries. The pattern of dental attrition in the mandibles of both LB1/2 and LB6/1 (moderate to extensive flat wear across the entire arch) is consistent with that seen in Plio-Pleistocene Homo fossils and in modern hunter-gatherers, and is not typical of most agriculturalists. We conclude that the dental-work and farming hypotheses are falsified and therefore irrelevant to the debate over the taxonomy and phylogeny of H. floresiensis. Am J Phys Anthropol 145:282–289, 2011.

Or more simply (from the conclusion):

Our findings corroborate and extend the primary conclusions reached earlier by Brown (2008) and Brown and Maeda (2009). Photographs, a digital radiograph, and micro CTs scans of the left molars of LB1 all reveal no evidence of a dental filling in the left M₁.Occlusal wear and white mineral staining of the exposed dentine were confused by Henneberg and Schofield (2008) for a dental filling, but all teeth of LB1 with exposed dentine exhibit comparable degrees of chalkiness. The pulp cavity and the root canals of the tooth were never breached in life and exhibit no evidence of endodontic treatment.

Paper in downloadable PDF file here

[HMS_Beagle]

This is interesting.

It has now come to light that the authors of this latest "H. floresiensis was really just a modern human with Downs" used a loophole in PNAS bylaws that allowed their woo paper to be published without proper peer review.

Scientists have also attacked the editors of PNAS – the journal of the US National Academy of Sciences – for permitting the authors of the Down's syndrome paper to avoid independent peer review because one is an academy member and so is allowed to select his own referees when submitting the paper.

"The article is a contributed submission from an academy member, Kenneth Hsu, an 89-year-old hydrologist who has absolutely no expertise in the subject and who selected referees that were also without expertise in fossil hominin skeletons," said one of the key scientists involved in the discovery of Homo floresiensis, Professor Peter Brown, of the University of New England in Australia. "This is an outrageous abuse of the peer review process."

source

Virtually every paleontologist associated with H. floresiensis research has denounced the "Downs" claim as the worst kind of pseudoscientific junk.