Anthropology.net

It has been almost two years since Lee Berger and I shared a few words on Anthropology.net about his small people of Palau. Since then, a TKO paper, published in the summer of 2008, basically thwarting Berger’s claims. Thankfully, we haven’t heard much of his sensationalist research since…

But his documentary is still floating around. It recently aired on Australia’s public broadcaster channel ABC. ABC journalist and presenter Jonathan Holmes wasn’t too pleased his network aired this less than admirable documentary. On his show, Media Watch, he explains why. Check out the entertaining excerpt or watch the scathing clip here.

For all you aspiring paleoanthropologists and scientists out there, take this tragic case into heart and don’t make the same mistakes. You’ll leave only behind a legacy of fail.

Lee Berger’s got a big problem. Rex Dalton was on his case earlier this year about Berger’s political and cultural approach to his Palaun study. And now Scott Fitzpatrick, one of the most vocal critics of Berger’s dwarves from Palau, has a new paper out in the open access journal PLoS One, where he sinks his teeth into the science behind Berger’s Palaun dwarves. His reputation as a thorough, thoughtful and careful scientist is challenged. Other authors in this paper include Greg Nelson as well as Geoffrey Clark, who specializes in island archaeology and physical anthropology — especially that of Palau.

The paper, “Small Scattered Fragments Do Not a Dwarf Make: Biological and Archaeological Data Indicate that Prehistoric Inhabitants of Palau Were Normal Sized,” argues that Berger et al. studied a fragmentary, small sample size, that other remains found from other sites in Palau fall within normal human variation, and lastly the sizes reported by Berger et al. are very similar to samples of regular humans from Chelechol ra Orrak… the latter claim was mentioned in the Elizabeth Culotta news piece, by John Hawks and Berger himself in our comment thread.

I’m not at all surprised by the points raised in this current paper. I’ve read the paper and will be reviewing it in this post. For any burgeoning physical anthropologists and paleoanthropologists out there, this is an important paper to read. The take home message of ‘don’t rush to publish and know the previous literature and samples by heart when you tread on someone else’s turf.’

In the introduction, Fitzpatrick et al.’s burst out guns a’ blazing. It is pretty much an academic slam of Berger et al.’s work. Of particular interest is Fitzpatrick et al.’s discussion about the problems with approaching comparative anatomy with a bias… Because it really gets at the heart of Berger’s issue. The authors write,

“Researchers familiar with Oceanic prehistory should work from a null hypothesis that human skeletal material found in Palau represent modern humans of normal stature and body mass… Unfortunately, it appears that Berger et al. did not do this and instead operated from a null hypothesis, based off their initial impression from a few fragments that exhibited small or primitive dimensions (one of which-apparent brow ridges—turned out to be carbonate precipitate that eventually flaked off), that their sample represented a population of small-bodied humans.”

There’s no denying that Lee Berger approached the remains with preconceived notions that he was looking at the remains of Homo floresiensis before completely assessing them. Hell, he sought out an emergency grant to study the caves thinking that he was introduced to a cash crop of Hobbits. But, that aside, there flaws can bee seen in the hard science.

Berger et al. estimated stature off of two femoral heads. John Hawks mentioned that… saying,

“Berger and colleagues have no femora sufficiently preserved to estimate length, but their two femoral heads have diameters of 38.8 and 36.1 mm.”

Hawks is right, it is hard to estimate length of a femur and ultimately height when you don’t have the whole bone. And that’s exactly what Fitzpatrick et al. address. They compare the mean values of femoral heads from Chelechol ra Orrak, a site just a few kilometers from Berger’s site. They report that while Berger et al.’s sample is smaller than the average modern human, they are only slightly less than the average diameters from Orrak. When removing the larger individual from the Orrak sample, the mean falls to ~37.16mm — meaning the maximum diameter for two individuals from Orrak is below that reported by Berger et al.

Map of Chelechol ra Orrak (blue C), Ulong (red U), Ucheliungs (green U) and Omedokel (yellow O) Cave Sites in Palau

The samples from Orrak were found in 2000 by Fitzpatrick. Orrak is just as old as Berger’s sites, around 3, 000 years before the present. The site yielded 25 individuals spanning from prenates to neonates to adolescents and adults of both sexes. There are several complete skeletons present, but only one has been excavated and the rest are a made up of a hodgepodge of elements. Here’s the catch: when looking at other measurements of the bones from Orrak, we see that they are of people of average size and stature. The Orrak females averaged about 5-foot, 1-inch in heigh, within the average accepted values of height.

Okay, what about the frontal bone? Remember the reporting of the ‘moderate bossing’ of the frontal? Well both sites reported by Berger, the Ucheliungs and Omedokel caves, are limestone rockshelters. When mixed with water, limestone as you may know deposits a hard matrix which may have caused the lumpy, primitive brow ridges on an otherwise modern human’s frontal bone. But since the frontal bone wasn’t available to Fitzpatrick et al., they take their analysis to other, quantitative measurements such the breadth of the bone.

Frontal breadth measurements taken from 14 male specimens of early Palaun populations have a range of 90 – 96 mm are most certainly small. A specimen from Orrak has a frontal measurement of 90.5mm. But the other measurements, such as the cranial length, breadth, and basion-bregma height indicate that this individual had long cranium with a normal brain size — he or she just a small face. The point to take home, as with the femoral head one, is that one measurement alone need not make a dwarf.

Berger et al. said the teeth they studied appeared megadont and therefore primitive. Megadont just means large toothed. While the teeth are undoubtedly large, they are not very primtive. Fitzpatrick et al. list four different publication which say that the ‘megadont’ measurements fall within the range of early Palaun populations of modern humans. Early Palaun populations were hunter gatherers, who did not experience a reduction in tooth morphology that came with the onset of agriculture. I’d venture to say that almost every physical anthropologist knows this. And for Berger et al. to not consider this and not review the previous literature, is just damn sloppy.

Fitzpatrick and team use the measurements from femora, crania, and teeth from Orrak to show that people from 3,000 years before the present in Palau were just simply gracile. The logical consideration is that people from same period found in the Ucheliungs and Omedokel sites are the same, not dwarves. But what about the discussion Berger et al. gave to their small-bodied ‘pygmies’ transitioning into larger-sized people around 1,000 years ago? Fitzpatrick and team go the extra mile and integrate archaeological and linguistic evidence and conclude that there aren’t any signs of external influence on Palaun language and material culture that could account for the change in larger body size.

I chuckled a bit inside when I read the conclusion in Fitzpatrick et al.’s paper. They write that they used a “sledgehammer to crack a nut,” with the wealth of evidence they showed. But you shouldn’t pity Berger. He didn’t take the time to understand the area in which he was working. That was evident with the upset he caused within Palau and the story Rex Dalton was able to extract. Greg Nelson provided the press with this scolding quote:

“Any time you work anywhere, you have to understand this history. You just can’t walk in and cowboy it, pull some stuff out and draw conclusions in the absence of understanding the bigger picture.”

Fitzpatrick, S.M., Nelson, G.C., Clark, G., DeSalle, R. (2008). Small Scattered Fragments Do Not a Dwarf Make: Biological and Archaeological Data Indicate that Prehistoric Inhabitants of Palau Were Normal Sized. PLoS ONE, 3(8), e3015. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003015

Rex Dalton is back on the Palau issue that got so much attention last month. He’s investigated the facts in much more detail than he did previously and does not necessarily have kind words for the research behind the Palaun fossils. He has written up his news feature in the latest issue of Nature. The piece is titled, “Archaeology: Bones, isles and videotape.” I want to disclose that while I did take the bait and switch after reading the original PLoS One article, I became very doubtful after I read Dalton’s first expose on the matter. I expressed the facts on this site, and as you may know, a very interesting debate ensued in the comments.

Now, I don’t mean to rehash the same arguments but I do want to spend some time looking into this issue a bit more. Why? Because mistakes like this, mistakes on how Berger conducted research and messed up local politics in Palau, on how the National Geographic Society meddled with the scientific and publication process, are critical to evaluate and learn from in order to prevent these things from happening again.

This is a serious problem, especially when one of the forefront voices of anthropology here on the web reduces these issues as, “irrelevant to the scientific evaluation of the manuscript.” I’m sure he is just as concerned as we all are in doing good science, but as I’ve said before the scientific evaluation also relies on how the research was done. It is very possible that he’s saying such because he wants to protect his reputation with the National Geographic Society, an institution that funds lots of paleoanthropological research. But, we should always put aside these considerations when doing good science is compromised. So, if you can’t tell, with this post I wanna emphasize that we be considered with doing good, ethical science first and foremost and then worry about the fortune and glory, the funding and publicity. In order to do so, I’ll review this recent case as an example of how not to do good, ethical science.

The first issue I wanna address, and perhaps the one that raises many concerns is how Berger et al. concluded what they did. I’ve taken a look at the data sets, and come to realize that the possibility the ‘Palaun dwarfs’ were nothing more than normal-sized island dwellers but juveniles, is very high. Why? Well, Berger et al. say that the 61 skeletal elements from the caves suggest the people were on extreme low end of the range, but I really only read three or so bones were used per measurement of body size. Seems like a very selective sample size to document small peoples… From these three or so measurements, are we to assume that the thousands of other bones in the cave are also small bodied people? No!

To add to that discrepancy, Scott Fitzpatrick criticized that many of the body size estimates were based off of long bones that did not have the shaft fragments, making it really hard to estimate height. Fitzpatrick did research on bones dating from a similar time period and in a nearby cave, about 4 kilometers away. He found femora, with the shaft and the head of the bone, and his analysis shows that those people were of normal height. Michael Pietrusewsky shares this concern and is quoted in Dalton’s piece saying,

“The more I read their paper, the more I am convinced it is complete nonsense and cannot be accepted as serious science.”

Ouch. That’s not only a direct jab at Berger et al. but also a shank to John Hawks, who was editor of the paper and screened it for scientific validity. Moving onto National Geographic’s impact in the science behind this paper, let me also quote John Hawks’ incisive commentary in his FAQ related to this publication,

“In this case, National Geographic funded the work and apparently produced a documentary about it. Their production wasn’t disclosed to the journal, and I view it as irrelevant to the scientific evaluation of the manuscript…

…I would tend instead to ask these questions: Does the Nature Publishing Group (NPG), in publishing Rex Dalton’s piece, have a vested interest in the credibility of their own journals, in comparison to open access outlets like PLoS?…”

John Hawks completely turned the table on Nature and Dalton, skimming over the fact that the National Geographic Society, the organization that produced the documentary in secrecy, leaving the publishing journal out of the picture, had more of a vested interest in making a buck out of investing in Berger’s project than NPG discrediting PLoS.

You maybe wondering, “How he can say something like this?” Through the multitude of media outlets the National Geographic controls, such as their magazine, television shows, and popular website — you can’t even begin to say Nature is on economic par with them. And while people seem to only use National Geographic Magazine as toilet reading material, to line doctor and dentist office waiting tables, and to house as memorabilia, the fact that the National Geographic Society is a popularizer of science is obvious. The National Geographic Society reports on science and reaches millions of peoples, which turns into millions of dollars in potential revenue generated from ads.

Nature is used by a much more specialized demographic, and is a credible more prestigious source of peer reviewed high impact science, where most of its content comes from first hand sources. While Nature does sell ads, I would venture to say that the National Geographic Society has more of a vested interest in spreading their documentary over TV than the target audience Nature‘s piece reached. Based upon the shear size of the National Geographic Society conglomerate compared to NPG, it is just absurd to even consider that the Society didn’t have anything but bling bling in sight when they accepted Berger’s grant request, hell a representative from the NGS even admitted that.

To further discrete Berger’s dedication to the hard science, Dalton scrounged up this awesome tidbit:

“In other areas of his research, Berger has worked on a planned television series featuring him called Fossil Hunter, which uses the slogan “entertainment first, science second”.”

With that sorta information, I’m not surprised to read further on that one of the bone-yielding caves was off-limits to visitors. Berger just marched right into the caves without fully figuring out if he could. Other researchers, more in tune with cultural issues, such as Timothy Rieth, discovered the Omedekol cave over ten years before Berger. He,

“viewed the mouth of the other cave… but didn’t venture inside even though bone piles could be seen. “I don’t just go inside burial caves on vacation because it’s fun…”"

When Berger forced a emergency grant to study the caves, after he trespassed over it, it instigated a political power struggle between the Koror government and the state Council of Chiefs. And that’s why Dalton previously got a disapproving quote from a Palaun chieftan, to which Chris Sloan — from the NGS, commented on this site saying that “a disgruntled tribal leader who had been left out is not a surprise.” Gosh, how arrogant!

Aside from the massive holes in Berger et al.’s analysis, and the horrible reviews it got by one of the reviewers, we should also fold in the fact that National Geographic outclassed the publishing journal by releasing the documentary before the embargo was lifted. We should also consider how Berger did not respect this tribal burial ground, and how his and the Society’s urgency in excavating and producing a documentary in hopes it was another hobbit cash crop, not only compromised a very thorough investigation, but also the socio-political framework of Palau.

I accidentally forgot to leave out some very critical drama surrounding the Palau findings that I just reported on. Next Monday, March 17th 2008, the National Geographic Channel will be running a documentary titled, “Mystery Skulls of Palau.” The National Geographic Channel is funded by the National Geographic Society, the very group that Lee Berger sought out to fund the excavation of the Palau fossils after he discovered them.

Rex Dalton, of Nature News, has looked into this issue a bit more. Dalton, if you don’t know, has been reporting for Nature News on paleontology, anthropology and the like for almost ten years. He’s also specialized in figuring out scientific misconduct. In his report on the Palau findings, “Pacific ‘dwarf’ bones cause controversy,” Dalton’s covers most of the basics that is running in the press but he’s also got some juicy bits about how Berger’s irked some government officials in Palau.

“The new claim was first disclosed in a commercial movie produced by the National Geographic Society, which partially funded Berger’s work. Although the movie is not scheduled for broadcast in the United States until 17 March, it was shown in Asia on 1 March, before the journal publication, drawing criticism.

In Palau, some officials and traditional leaders are concerned that sacred burial sites were exploited for movie-making rather than scientific purposes. Adalbert Eledui, the state resource manager who oversees the region, describes the movie as “unscientific” and says he should have had notice before it was broadcast to protect the sites from an expected influx of visitors. Now, he says, resource managers may need to build cages to restrict access to the caves….

…Most of the island’s chiefs had never visited the caves before last week, because Palauans typically avoid burial sites. Palau’s paramount chief Yutaka Gibbons told Nature that he had heard about the bones from people talking in a restaurant about the movie. “This shows disrespect to our people, country and laws,” he says. “Before they did anything, they should have sat with us.” Berger says he believed that traditional leaders had been briefed on his work in the caves.”

Seems like this is unfolding into a perfect example of how to not conduct paleoanthropological research in another country. I just don’t get it how anthropologists, people trained in the study of humans, can often disregard notifying officials and representatives of the government about what is ultimately their fossils. It seems common courtesy to inform Palauans with a simple memo,

“Hey, we found some interesting bones in your backyard. You may wanna know about it. Can we work together with you on this?”

I can only speculate that the story behind the Palau findings went something like this… Berger was kayaking around these Micronesian islands and stumbled upon these findings. He saw an opportunity, and he sought out a big institution with big money to fund his work. The National Geographic Society of course, didn’t hesitate to fund Berger. They would love to make some sensational headlines, especially if these 25 or so individuals were hobbits like Flores. The Society mobilized to make a documentary out of this and all along the people of Palau were left out of the loop.

This isn’t the first time that the National Geographic Society has been entangled in a mess like this. I can think of the drama surrounding the hasty excavation of Selam as one of the more prominent examples of when external interests pushed aside doing good science. Also, the questionable dating of Omo I and II, funded also by the Society is ill-received by many. In this situation, as outlined by the quotes from chieftains and Palauan government officials, critical information wasn’t passed down to the people who these bones belong too.

Tim White shared a comment about this problem in Dalton’s writeup,

“This looks like a classic example of what can go wrong when science and the review process are driven by popular media.”

To which Berger defended,

“he didn’t know the movie was scheduled to premiere before the journal report came out.”

Bollocks. I don’t buy it. It is no secret that Berger was bed fellows with the National Geographic Society in getting these bones out of the ground, so why didn’t he nor the Society tell Palauans about this? It seems awfully hegemonic and disrespectful to not give the people of Palau a bit of a heads up! Don’t you think?

PLoS One completely surprised me today by releasing this paper, “Small-Bodied Humans from Palau, Micronesia.” The research comes from South African and American researchers, and the paper was edited by John Hawks, who apparently can really keep a secret it seems. I had no idea about this study and find it a really remarkable find since fossils of another small bodied human, Homo floresiensis, were found about 1,000 miles south of these new findings.

If I read this correctly, a minimum of 25 individuals have been found. Lots more will be found according the authors, which is always welcoming to me. The Palau fossils are of small people, similar in size to the Flores hominins. Preliminary analysis of more than a dozen individuals, including a male weighing about 43 kg and a female weighing about 29 kg, document that these were tiny. Analyzing some of the cranial and dental features like the distinct presence of a maxillary canine fossa, a clearly delimited mandibular mental trigone, moderate bossing of the frontal and parietal squama, a lateral prominence on the temporal mastoid process, reduced temporal juxtamastoid eminences and an en maison cranial vault profile with the greatest interparietal breadth high on the vault indicates that these individuals were simply small H. sapiens adapted for life on a small island.

So how were these bones found? Lead author, Lee Berger, writes to National Geographic News that he was kayaking around rocky islands about 370 miles east of the Philippines, when he found the bones in a pair of caves in 2006. Crazy story! I wish I would find something like that while vacationing. He reports that the,

“the [Ucheliungs and Omedokel] caves were littered with bones that had been dislodged by waves and piled like driftwood. Others had remained buried deep in the sandy floor, and more, including several skulls, were cemented to the cave walls.”

Radiocarbon dating was applied to pinpoint an age for the bones. The antiquity of the bones is between 1,410 and 2,890 years ago, which is remarkably much more recent than 18,000 year old antiquity of the Flores hominins. Along with the small size, the Palau fossils have similar features to H. floresiensis, such as their pronounced supraorbital tori, non-projecting chins, relative megadontia, expansion of the occlusal surface of the premolars, rotation of teeth within the maxilla and mandible, and dental agenesis.

But again, Berger and colleagues do not infer from these features any direct relationship between the peoples of Palau and Flores; however, they conservatively write that these similarities may be a common adaptation in humans of reduced stature. In their own words,

“Based on the evidence from Palau, we hypothesize that reduction in the size of the face and chin, large dental size and other features noted here may in some cases be correlates of extreme body size reduction in H. sapiens. These features when seen in Flores may be best explained as correlates of small body size in an island adaptation, regardless of taxonomic affinity. Under any circumstances the Palauan sample supports at least the possibility that the Flores hominins are simply an island adapted population of H. sapiens, perhaps with some individuals expressing congenital abnormalities.”

Again the paper is published in PLoS One, which is an open access journal. That means you can download the original report and read it for yourself for free. I really recommend you do, this seems like one of the more significant paleoanthropological finds for 2008. Here’s the citation:

Berger, L.R., Churchill, S.E., De Klerk, B., Quinn, R.L., Hawks, J. (2008). Small-Bodied Humans from Palau, Micronesia. PLoS ONE, 3(3), e1780. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001780