It's mid-February, do you know where your hominid is? Since late October, when a joint Australian-Indonesian team published in the journal Nature the discovery of a new species of human on the Indonesian island of Flores, the fate of what the team dubbed Homo floresiensis has been up in the air--from the point of view of both its evolutionary meaning and its custody. The new hominid, also sometimes called the Hobbit, is apparently one of at least seven tiny individuals found on the island. But late last year, Indonesian paleoanthropologist Teuku Jacob, with the help of a senior researcher at the Center for Archaeology in Jakarta, took possession of the hominid's skull and a number of other bones. Jacob is one of a small number of scientists who argue that the 18,000 year old Hobbit is not a separate human species, but simply a deformed, microcephalic modern human.

The problem now is that while the controversy can only be resolved by further study of the hominid remains, Jacob has failed to keep a promise to return the bones to the Center in Jakarta by January 1, after he had time to study them.

A debate over the evolutionary meaning of the find was published in the most recent issue of the journal Before Farming. The majority of human evolution researchers side with the contentions of the original discoverers that Homo floresiensis is indeed a new species. But not everyone agrees with the team's leading hypothesis, which is that the species evolved from a population of Homo erectus ancestors that somehow got stranded on the island of Flores; others hypotheses include the possibility that the hominid evolved from an even earlier hominid species, possibly even an australpithecine, that made it to the island during a very early homind migration.