At least try to have an ounce of real evidence beyond someone’s ethnicity if you are going to make wild accusations like this. If he was a Creationist he would’ve arranged for Duane Gish or William Dembski to analyze the bones, not Alan Thorne and Maciej Henneberg*.

*http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2005/02/24/return_of_the_prodigal_bones/

OK that put aside this is all about protecting Islam and yes, Teuku Jacob is a crypto-creationist in line with the usual balancing between fundamentalism and an Islam that pretends being modern (By the way, Australia has already a law making it impossible to critisize Islam!).

Take a look at Out of Africa as Pygmies and back as global “Mongoloids”. Maybe the Hobbit represents the first OOA-delivey of a more wrinkled brain that later replaced all the other?

However, while the bones were in his custody, he permitted two other Australian scientists to study them in detail—Dr Alan Thorne of the Australian National University, and Professor Maciej Henneberg, of the Department of Anatomical Sciences at the University of Adelaide. The discoverers have protested loudly at the alleged impropriety of this pair studying ‘stolen remains’.

Following their three-day examination of the most complete specimen, Professor Henneberg said it confirmed his previous opinion, gained from studying the reports, that this was a modern human who had a brain-shrinking disorder called microcephaly. He is reported as saying that there is now ‘absolutely no doubt that this person had a growth disorder.’

http://smh.com.au/news/Science/Hobbit-just-a-little-man-with-small-brain/2005/02/18/1108709439138.html

Whether the tiny people of Flores were indeed microcephalic modern types, or whether they represent a pygmy version of so-called Homo erectus, the point is really the same. Namely, that there is no reason not to classify them all—the Flores inhabitants as well as H. erectus—as Homo sapiens—part of the range of variation found within a single species (see also Skull wars: new ‘Homo erectus’ skull in Ethiopia).

In fact, evolutionist Alan Thorne is one of those who, along with the University of Michigan’s Milford Wolpoff, has been saying for years to his paleoanthropological colleagues that, even though they believe that H. erectus evolved into modern humans, it is wrong to assign a separate species name to it. Thorne and Henneberg are natural allies in this; Henneberg has recently published his findings that if you bunch all the ‘apemen’ in together, they exhibit the range of variation one would normally find within a single species!

Henneberg M., de Miguel C., Hominins are a single lineage: brain and body size variability does not reflect postulated taxonomic diversity of hominins, Homo. 55(1–2):21–37, 2004.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15553266

It isn’t a question of evolution going forward or backward, because evolution has no direction except towards better adaptation to the current environment.

People sometimes think evolution means everything is evolving with some concrete goal in mind–that organisms change only to become smarter, faster, stronger, or what have you. This is obviously what Teuku Jacob thinks, and he fits perfectly Ambrose Bierce’s definition of positive: mistaken at the top of one’s voice.

A being with a smaller, less complex brain requires a smaller amount of resources to support it than one with a larger, more complex brain. In an environment where resources are limited, a being that needs less will be more likely to survive. Thus, what Jacob calls “backward” is, in such an environment, actually going “forward” toward better adaptation to the environment.

Natural selection provides for survival of the species, not for how “advanced” a species can get before it goes extinct.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2005/03/03/the_hobbits_brain/

http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/print/1998

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa004&articleID=00082F87-7D35-117E-BD3583414B7F0000&pageNumber=2&catID=4

Heh. Dinosaurism.

This is misleading. The question isn’t about “the missing link” but if the bones are human or hominid. There is only 1 skull but there are other bones from 6 separate specimens. The skull isn’t the only part of the skeleton with pertinent information. The brain cast is nearly identical to the erectus brain cast, and the non-skull bones are distinctly erectine:

” . . . It has a suite of clearly archaic traits which are replicated in a variety of early hominids and these archaic traits are not found in any abnormal humans which have ever been recorded. We now have the remains of 5 or 6 other individuals from the site, so it’s not just one. There’s a population of these things now and they all share the same features.”

A pathology explanation appears highly in doubt.

Further the issue goes beyond this scientific debate to the issues of hording and damaging rare and priceless specimens, and abusing governmental authority to effectively cut-off further exploration.