hobbit

You know about the Hobbit. Not The Hobbit (TM) but the hominid from Flores, Indonesia. Mike Morwood was a key investigator in that research (though he did lots of other research as well). He was born ... ... in Auckland, New Zealand, studied archaeology at the University of Auckland and gained his PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra. From a position in the Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Islander Advancement – the public service body with responsibility at that time for Aboriginal cultural heritage – he joined the University of New England (UNE), in Armidale, New…
The Hobbit is a book by JRR Tolkien, a just released blockbuster movie, and a hominid from Indonesia. Here, we are speaking about the hominid from Indonesia. A while back I wrote a review of a book by Dean Falk, for American Scientist. You can find that review here, and you can find a different review of the same book here on my blog. Falk's book is about endocasts and brains her area of specialty and she goes into the study of two specific hominids in particular, Taung, and LB1. Taung (pronunced "Tah oong," roughly) is the type specimen of Australopithecus africanus, the first described…
The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution is by a scientist Dean Falk, who has contributed significantly to the study of evolution of the human brain, and who has been directly involved in some of the more interesting controversies in human evolution. Back when I was a graduate student I was assigned by my advisor a set of literature to absorb and comment on. The mix of published and soon to be published papers included a series of papers written by Ralph Holloway and Dean Falk. These represented a fight over the interpretation of early…
Recently, I mentioned two new books on human evolution, and I told you I had a print review of them coming up. Well, it's here, in American Scientist! Yes, I know, that's an internet thing, but it is the internet version of the print thing. Please have a look, and leave a nice comment! Or a mean comment, whatever.