There’s just no getting ahead when you’re a hobbit. Anthropologists are arguing yet again over whether a tiny 18,000-year-old Indonesian skull represents a separate species of little human cousins, or an ordinary Homo sapiens with an abnormally small head.
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New data compare the fossil to a large group of modern humans with microcephaly, a genetic condition that makes the head smaller than usual. Measurements of the hobbit skull suggest its proportions fall within the range of microcephalic Homo sapiens, researchers report August 8 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Previously published papers that seemed to show that it can’t be a microcephalic are open to doubt,” says coauthor Ralph Holloway, an anthropologist at Columbia University in New York.