The ongoing saga over Homo floresiensis, aka “the Hobbit,” has taken yet another unexpected turn. As my colleague Elizabeth Culotta reports in today’s issue of Science, a one-gram sliver of the hominid’s rib is now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, being readied for DNA analysis. The sample was carried to Leipzig by French anthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin, who is head of the institute’s department of human evolution.

This new development has two important aspects, one political and one scientific. The politics: As mentioned in an earlier post on this site, over the past few months the remains of several tiny hominids, including one complete skull, have been in the possession of Teuku Jacob, Indonesia’s senior paleoanthropologist. This has greatly angered many members of the Australian-Indonesian team that originally discovered the hominid bones on the island of Flores, since Jacob was not a member of this original team. The Australian researchers, led by Mike Morwood of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, have argued that Jacob’s possession of the bones violates a memorandum of understanding between the university and the Center for Archaeology in Jakarta, which is the official repository of the bones (I refer to them as bones because these 18,000 year old specimens are not fossilized; as a result, they are very fragile, adding to the worries about their fate.)

Stuck in the middle of this dispute is Tony Djubiantono, director of the Center in Jakarta, who acquiesced after the fact when Jacob took the bones with the help of another Center researcher, and whom Hublin now says has given “formal authorization” for him to take the sample to Leipzig. Confused? I don’t blame you! Nevertheless, Elizabeth quotes Morwood as saying that the transporting of the sample to Leipzig was “unethical” and “illegal” on the grounds that Jacob had no right to allow samples to be take from a hominid that is not his to begin with.

Now for the science: Jacob, along with Australian researchers Alan Thorne and Maciej Henneberg (who are not members of the original team, and in fact are scientific rivals with one of the team’s members, Peter Brown) have argued that the hominid is not a new species at all but simply a deformed, microcephalic modern human, albeit one that lived thousands of years ago. As I and others have written, this interpretation is rejected by the majority of paleoanthropologists who have read the original Nature paper in which the discovery was announced last October. Of course, being in the majority does not make one right, and thus only further study can resolve the issue. But the DNA analysis may or may not help. The good news is that Hublin has handed the sample to Leipzig colleague Svante Pääbo, widely acknowledged as the world’s top ancient DNA expert. If anyone can get DNA out of the 18,000 year old rib, it would be Svante. But the bad news, Svante says, is that there is less than 50% chance of getting DNA out of this particular sample.

The kicker is that even if Svante does get DNA out, it will only help if it shows no trace of modern genetic sequences, thus proving that this is a different species and not a deformed modern human. If there is modern DNA, however, it could not be ruled out that this was not contamination from modern genetic sequences in the laboratory, a frequent occurrence with this kind of study. Either way, the debates are likely to continue!

Final note: My colleague Carl Zimmer, in a post on 24 February on www.corante.com, cites the Sydney Morning Herald as reporting that the Hobbit bones have now been returned by Jacob to the original discovery team. If true, and I will confirm it in a later post, it might allow us to get past the politics and focus on the extremely important scientific questions. Understanding the evolutionary origins and history of this alleged new species of human could dramatically change our view of human evolution, or at least modify it in important ways. Check in regularly with these news pages for the latest!