Two papers stirred up the palaeoanthropology world by suggesting that Homofloresiensis - a putative human relative discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 - was instead an example of Homo sapiens with Down's syndrome. The theory, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences., was greeted with much scepticism. As part of a string of tweets, anthropologist Holly Dunsworth at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston said: "Conclusion [is] based seemingly on zilch." Co-author Robert Eckhardt, a geneticist at Pennsylvania State University, defended the diagnosis in a comment posted on a blog of the Natural History Museum in London, saying that his group and others have spent the past decade "trying to turn the 'Hobbit, circus into science".
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