ng others from examining them. In the case of Homo floresiensis, it seems he was miffed that he was not involved in the original project, even though the idea of digging in Flores was not to find new species, but rather to look for evidence of exactly how and when humanity first arrived in Australia. Hence the involvement of Australian researchers. However, since Florence’s existence was announced in a paper in Nature, he has been trying to get in on the act.
First, he wrote a piece for Nature’s rival Science, suggesting that the skeleton was merely a diminished—possibly diseased—version of Homo sapiens, rather than a genuinely new species. That was despite the fact that many of its features are completely different from those of modern humans. Then he removed the original specimen that was the subject of the Nature paper. Now, he has taken most of the rest of the material—dramatically stuffing the bones into a leather case with the assistance of Radien Soejono, a researcher at the Centre for Archaeology who was one of the authors of the paper in Nature, but apparently without the permission of the centre’s director, Tony Djubiantono.
Meanwhile here’s a model of what Homo Floresiensis may have looked like.
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