The Sydney Morning Herald reports today that the bones of Homo floresiensis, aka the Hobbits, have at last been returned to the team that originally discovered them.
The team, made up of Indonesian and Australian scientists, discovered the bones on the Indonesian island of Flores. Last October they declared that they had found a new species of diminutive, small-brained hominid that existed just 12,000 years ago. Then, in November, the bones wound up in the hands (or, rather, the locked safe) of the Indonesian paleoanthropologist Teuku Jacob. Jacob claims that a member of the Hobbit team asked him to look at the bones. Members of the team see things a bit differently: they accuse him of poaching. In response, Jacob has called them a bunch of would-be conquistadors. (I have some more background in my previous Hobbit posts.) Jacob promised to return the fossils by the end of 2004, but ...
