Strange things are afoot in the saga of cousin Florence, the diminutive homi-nid announced to the world with much brouhaha in October. Homo floresiensis, to give the name that science has attached to her skeletal remains and those of six other individuals of the same species found in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, excited scientific interest not merely by being a new species of human, but by being one that flourished at the same time as Homo sapiens. The most recent of the seven fossils appears to date from a mere 13, 000 years ago, well after Homo sapiens had passed through Indonesia on its way to Australia. But that, and other facts concerning the discovery, may now be hard to confirm because most of the remains have been borrowed by Teuku Jacob, a researcher at Gadjah Mada University in Jogjakarta, who was not involved in the original excavation.
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