Australian-Geographic-Magazine-September-Octobe..

94 Australian Geographic

Facing history.

Dr Susan Hayes,

at right, with

Penny Williamson.

A researcher at

the University of

Wollongong, Susan

was originally a

forensic scientist.

Her focus is now

archaeological, and

she specialises in

approximating the

faces of ancient

human species.

Our results do show a more

modern facial appearance

than some Hobbit faces

produced by palaeo-artists.

M

Y ROLE IN the H. fl oresiensis story began when I joined

the Centre for Archaeological Science (CAS) at the

University of Wollongong in 2012. Professor Richard

Roberts, CAS director and Australian Laureate Fellow, intro-

duced me to Professor Mike Morwood, and I started work with

Mike and Thomas Sutikna, an archaeologist from Indonesia, on

the facial approximation of LB1. Thomas and Mike had worked

together for many years, and Thomas (together with Wahyu

Saptomo, Rokus Due Awe, Jatmiko and Sri Wasisto from Arke-

nas) was instrumental in the discovery of H. fl oresiensis.

Working with Hobbit was certainly challenging, but Mike

and Thomas were great collaborators, and I knew they were the

two people with the most experience regarding this strange little

hominin. Our experiment aimed to discover what would happen

if we applied what we knew about forensically approximating

the faces of modern humans to an archaic, extinct hominin.

I had never worked with such an archaic human fossil before,

so, although there is always extensive background research before

starting to approximate a face, this project also included a steep

learning curve about the relevant palaeoanthropology (the

research that has been undertaken with H. fl oresiensis has been

extensive since 2004). To make the approximation, we used

CT scans of the skull, 3D imaging and computer modelling.

We found that Hobbit herself (she’s the only individual of

H. fl oresiensis for which we have a skull) looked more like us than

many people might have expected. And, although by today’s

standards of human evolution she’s not exactly what you’d call

pretty, she is certainly distinctive. Hobbit doesn’t have those

hyper-feminine, modern-human features such as big eyes, nor

is there much of a forehead, and she doesn’t have a chin at all.

But our results show that she looks a lot less like a chimpanzee

than some of the illustrations created by many palaeo-artists.

At the Australian Archaeological Association conference in

late 2012, the response to our results was, for me, astounding.

Mike and Thomas were well used to all the attention, but I was

not. Within hours I was receiving emails from all over the world,

and our Hobbit face was all over the internet.

My worry was that we had not yet submitted our research

for publication, and, in the sciences, international peer-review

is essential. Mike’s response to the paper we submitted in early

2013 was that it was too focused on the technical process and not

easily understood by the wider community. As ever, he was right.

Sadly, Mike died in July 2013 with projects yet to do (see box

opposite). This was shortly after our research appeared in the

international Journal of Archaeological Science, so he never knew how

we were received by the media – which was that we thought

Hobbit had a very modern face. To be fair, our results do show

a more modern facial appearance than some Hobbit faces pro-

duced by palaeo-artists. This is probably because our approach UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG

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