What if hobbit has a filling?

University of Adelaide professor of biological anthropology and comparative anatomy Maciej Henneberg says in his new book, The Hobbit Trap, that a lower left molar had a filling, a claim that threatens to blow out of the water conjecture by the fossil's describers that the Hobbit is 18,000 years old.

Professor Brown said Professor Henneberg's claim was "complete lunacy"."There is no factual support," Professor Brown said. "The molar tooth has no evidence of dental work of any sort and this can be demonstrated by examination of the tooth ... with photographic evidence, X-rays, CT scans."

Charles Hildebolt, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, has also been working on the Flores material and has obtained his own CT scans. "We think that it is highly unlikely that any type of filling material is in the mandibular left first molar," he said in an e-mail. "The defect in the mandibular left first molar does not have the appearance of a cavity preparation made by a dentist in that the defect is shallow, is nonretentive and is not extended in an apical direction interproximally. There is no indication of tooth decay in any of LB1's teeth."He adds, "if for some reason, a temporary filling were placed in LB1's mandibular left first molar, we should be able to see some indication of it in the CT images, but we cannot--all that we can see is a defect that resembles other defects on LB1's teeth where the enamel has worn away and the dentine is exposed."

Brown's discussion includes high resolution photos of the specimen, the 3-D CT reconstruction featured in the Scientific American web story, and CT slices taken through the middle of the left and right teeth. I didn't think the 3-D CT slice was quite right to establish that the tooth was normally worn without question, since it cut through the buccal cusps which are unaltered in any event, but it does show a pulp cavity of normal dimensions for that area.The slice taken through the centers of the left teeth, although a bit fuzzy (again, characteristic of the CT resolution), is much less equivocal: it shows a normal pulp cavity of equivalent dimensions to the right side and no evidence of alteration or drilling.That's enough to convince me.

DNA analysis might help, but prospects are gloomy. The site is hot and wet, perfect for destroying genetic material. There's been at least one effort to find DNA in hobbit bone, carried out in the lab of ancient DNA specialist Svante Pbo of the Max Planck Institute (Leipzig, Germany). It failed.