‘”
And he has concerns about the referees of the Nature article. “The reviewers seemed unevenly selected, very one-sided.”
It is an argument Roberts [Professor Richard “Bert” Roberts of the University of Wollongong, Australia, a co-author of the original Nature paper] categorically rejects. The referees were leading anthropologists. “They [Nature] had six referees on each paper, the most I have ever known. They made damn sure they had a cushion behind their arse. The papers had to be submitted three times. It took six months, so was hardly rushed out. It was fair and rigorous.
“Our team had everyone involved – geomorphologists, geochronologists, archaeologists, paleoanthropolgists … We left no bone unturned. Good grief, it was a soccer team of authors!”
And he raises the stakes by suggesting that Jacob and other critics have an “intellectual interest” in denying that the skeleton was a new species. “All … are supporters of the multiregionalism evolutionary model … This discovery would destroy their theory. It suits their purposes very nicely [to oppose Homo floresiensis].”
The background to the row is a long and bitter debate between those anthropologists who say the modern human evolved in Africa and that all modern Homo sapiens developed there, and those such as Jacob who say that Homo erectus migrated from Africa through the north and spread [and developed] throughout the rest of the world. The argument is far from being resolved on either side.
Presumably a new species would fit better into the out-of-Africa theory: just one more hominid species left by the evolutionary wayside as the latest model Homo, hot from the Great Rift Valley, spreads triumphantly across the globe. It’s not obvious to me though why this should be particularly damaging to the multiregionalism theory, and besides, my understanding is that the battle’s all over bar the shouting anyway, as genetic studies tend to confirm the out-of-Africa theory. It all seems more like a case of professional jealousy. We’ll see.
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