Bones of contention

[Rosemary]

Bones of contention by Djuna Ivereigh
Cosmos, October 2007

"It's just another day for us," Thomas Sutikna tells me, boarding a beat-up minibus bound for Middle Earth. He and his team from the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology spendtheir days hunting 'hobbits' – a race of extinct, metre-high humans whose remains they discovered in Liang Bua Cave on the remote Indonesian island of Flores. The only thing different about this day is that Sutikna and crew will have 40-odd experts peering over their shoulders and into their digs, debating if and how their work should rewrite what it means to be human.
The debate became personal at the end of 2004, when emeritus professor Teuku Jacob from Indonesia's Gadjah Mada University 'borrowed' the Liang Bua bones from Jakarta's Centre for Archaeology and debunked Homo floresiensis in the media.
Australian anthropologist Mike Morwood, of the University of Wollongong in New South Wales and a partner on the Liang Bua find, cried foul on an institutional agreement regarding management of the bones. The brouhaha descended to "a level of shouting and name-calling that you do not often hear in Indonesia," Morwood would later report. Most distressing, however, was that the bones were returned to the centre scarred, broken and clumsily repaired. A member of Jacob's lab confessed that the damage was the result of botched efforts to cast the crumbly remains.
I thought this was supposed to be an important scientific and archaeological find. Surely there should be more responsibility for these ancient bones?

Bones of contention | COSMOS magazine

[BladeOfFire]

I agree. There should have been more care with the bones when they were 'borrowed'. It was a great find, and the bones were damaged that could and shall screw up the data.

[Esioul]

Argh, I can't actually rmember if these are false or not. When my housemate gets home I will ask her and get back to you (she is more of a prehistorian than I).

[Wybren]

Er They reported a bit of that wrong as Mike Moorwood is one of my lecturers at the University of New England at Armidale, as is Peter Brown. Though Peter Brown is not one of my favourite professors, he is brilliant and I have little trouble accepting his hypothesis.

But yes more care should have been taken with these bones and I can imagine how they would have felt to see them in such a state.

There is a good book called Bones of Contention by Roger Lewin if anyone is interested in reading some other controversies