NC State Researcher Leads Team Debunking Palau 'Hobbit' Claims

Main Category: Biology / Biochemistry
Article Date: 27 Aug 2008 - 0:00 PST

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An archaeological team led by North Carolina State University's Dr. Scott Fitzpatrick says in a new study, published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, August 27, that extensive analysis of human remains from the Pacific island nation of Palau shows that the earliest settlers of the island chain, and their descendants, fall well within the normal body size for modern humans - rebuffing earlier claims from other researchers that Palau had been home to a dwarf-sized population of so-called "hobbits."

Fitzpatrick, an assistant professor of anthropology at NC State, says the study reflects both new and previously collected data from a Palau burial site he has worked at since 2000 called Chelechol ra Orrak - and "indicates that early Palauans were of normal size and that their physical characteristics are well within the variation seen in modern human populations." Palau was settled by humans between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago.

Fitzpatrick and his co-authors, Dr. Greg Nelson of the University of Oregon and Dr. Geoffrey Clark of Australian National University, specialize in island archaeology and physical anthropology and have done extensive work in Palau and other islands in the Pacific.

Fitzpatrick also says that this study does not address scientific findings of small-bodied humans on the island of Flores in Indonesia known as Homo floresiensis, affectionately known as hobbits. Fitzpatrick notes that Flores was colonized much earlier than Palau - hundreds of thousands of years ago. Fitzpatrick says "if a group of small-bodied humans was to evolve in an island environment, it would likely require the population to be isolated for tens of thousands of years - which was not the case in Palau."

Small Scattered Fragments Do Not a Dwarf Make: Biological and Archaeological Data Indicate that Prehistoric Inhabitants of Palau Were Normal Sized.
Fitzpatrick SM, Nelson GC, Clark G (2008)
PLoS ONE 3(8): e3015. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003015
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