Two biological anthropologists try lifting the veil obscuring one of paleoanthropology's intriguing mysteries in this light-hearted debate: who was the hobbit? Found on an obscure island, the tiny, small-brained, big-footed, ‘Homo florensiencsis,’ or ‘the hobbit,’ is unlike any other discovery. Where did this being come from, and who are its ancestors? This program is jointly sponsored by the Leakey Foundation and the California Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Robert Martin is A. Watson Armour III Curator of Biological Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago. He has devoted his career to exploring the evolutionary tree of primates, as summarized in his 1990 textbook Primate Origins. Dr. Martin is particularly interested in reproductive biology and the brain, because these systems have been of special importance in primate evolution. His research is based on broad comparisons across primates, covering reproduction, anatomy, behaviour, palaeontology and molecular evolution.
is currently Curator in the Department of Anthropology of the American
Museum of Natural History in New York City. Born in England and raised
in East Africa, he has carried out fieldwork in countries as diverse as
Madagascar, Vietnam, Surinam, Yemen, and Mauritius.
Trained in archaeology
and anthropology at Cambridge, and in geology and vertebrate paleontology
at Yale, Tattersall has concentrated his research over the past quarter-century
in two main areas, in both of which he is an acknowledged leader: the
analysis of the human fossil record, and the study of the ecology and
systematics of the lemurs of Madagascar.
Tattersall is also a prominent
interpreter of human paleontology to the public, with several recent trade
books to his credit, among them Extinct Humans (with Jeffrey Schwartz;
Westview Press, 2000), Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness
(Harcourt Brace, 1998), and The Last Neanderthal: The Rise, Success
and Mysterious Extinction of Our Closest Human Relatives (Westview
Press, Revised Edition, 1999), as well as several articles in Scientific
American and the co-editorship of the definitive Encyclopedia of
Human Evolution and Prehistory.
He lectures widely, and, as curator,
has also been responsible for several major exhibits at the American Museum
of Natural History, including Ancestors: Four Million Years of Humanity
(1984); Dark Caves, Bright Visions: Life in Ice Age Europe (1986);
Madagascar: Island of the Ancestors (1989); and the highly acclaimed
Hall of Human Biology and Evolution (1993).
Ian Tattersall, paleoanthropologist and curator at the American Museum of Natural History, describes the discovery of the LB1 bones (nicknamed the "hobbit"), and the mystery surrounding the nearly complete skeleton.