No pygmy people in Palau | Part 1
Micronesian Thursday (lol) Feature
This Micronesian, ahem, Thursday Feature is a little bit different this week for a couple of reasons. For one, it’s not out on Monday lol my bad. And also, none of the folks in this story are Micronesian. This is, instead, what I thought was an interesting story about Palauan fossils, purported pygmy people, and a National Geographic show.
“On a remote island in the Pacific lie the remains of a people that are unlike anything discovered before,” said the National Geographic narrator, Alisdair Simpson. He, with his British accent, orients viewers to what’s on the screen: a montage of a map of Palau, the famous silhouette of the Rock Islands, and a man in a dark cave.
In an episode titled “Lost Tribe of Palau,” National Geographic followed paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, who was the lead author of a report that put Palau at the center of archaeological controversy.
Berger’s paper was titled “Small-Bodied Humans from Palau, Micronesia.” From his examination of ancient human remains in a limestone cave in one of the Rock Islands, Berger’s paper stated, the remains “may represent a marked case of human insular dwarfism.”
“We feel that the most parsimonious, and most reasonable, interpretation of the human fossil assemblage from Palau is that they derive from a small-bodied population of H. sapiens1 (representing either rapid insular dwarfism or a small-bodied colonizing population),” the Berger paper states.
In the first four minutes of NatGeo’s documentary about the Palauan fossils, the narrator adds a heavy helping of intrigue and said, “The possibilities are extraordinary. Could this be a strange new species of human? Or the results of some kind of mutation?”
But other experts had much more sobering takes on the Palau fossils.
In a 2008 New York Times article, Dr. William Jungers, a paleoanthropologist, was quoted saying Berger’s paper “is really much ado about nothing.”
Archeologist Dr. Scott Fitzpatrick spent the last 25 years and counting working in Palau, reviewing the archaeological stories that had settled into the earth over thousands of years. Fitzpatrick was the lead author of two studies disputing Berger’s paper. Not long after Berger’s paper was published, Dr. Fitzpatrick, Greg Nelson, and Geoffrey Clark authored a study, titled “Small scattered fragments do not a dwarf make.” 2
Dr. Fitzpatrick graciously sat down with me to talk about his work,3 give some much-needed context to the Berger findings, and set the record straight.
Dr. Fitzpatrick said that a few years before Berger published this paper on the human remains in Palau, there was a discovery in caves in the Island of Flores in Indonesia.
“Basically, they found skeletal remains of several individuals that, I think they've revised the data, but they're pretty old,” Fitzpatrick told me. “Very small, like three feet tall, modern humans, essentially. Not modern Homo sapiens. But humans that look like modern humans but small.”
They’re called Homo Floresiensis.
“Affectionately called ‘hobbits,’” Fitzpatrick added.
Discussions were had over the Flores, Indonesia hobbits, doubts were cast. Then a couple of years later in 2006, Berger was on vacation in Palau and saw human bones in a cave.
Part two, coming next week. You can kind of see where this is story is going. Knowing what I know after speaking with Dr. Fitzpatrick, and reading other articles about the Palau fossils, I can’t help but cringe a bit when I watch the NatGeo show about Berger’s adventures in Palau.4 Someone uploaded the show on YouTube. Here’s part 1.5
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Homo sapiens
Who knew science could be sassy? Lol
I sent a message to Dr. Berger through his website months ago, hoping to talk about the Palau fossils but no word yet. I sent another message through his website again today. Also, to any Palauan archaeologists, what’s your take?
There’s so much to unpack about the NatGeo show.
Should we have a Zoom watch party?