This Micronesian Monday Feature picks up where we left off last Thursday. Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger has spotted human bones in a cave in one of Palau’s Rock Islands while on vacation.

Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger tells the National Geographic crew, “It really is one of the last places on Earth, you’d expect to make a major paleontological find.”

He’s in Palau. Berger and a team of folks explored a cave and extracted various human remains, including part of a human skull that appeared to have a pronounced brow ridge, Berger the National Geographic narrator explained. The narrator added that the brow ridge is “very different from the average modern human.” 

The brow ridge mystery intensifies when another paleontologist finds a matching piece of the skull. It fits but it looks real weird. ¹

The truth of the brow ridge is revealed only after NatGeo has layered on all kinds of speculation, stoking the fires of the viewers’ imagination. Twenty minutes after the thick brow ridge has been introduced to viewers, after the narrator has talked about the possibility of the bones being stolen, that the bones might come from “a bizarre looking people,” and that the bones might be an indicator of a whole new species, NatGeo discloses the truth.

The appearance of a thick brow ridge was actually a brow ridge covered with calcrete, some type of hardened substance. The camera crew captures the team chipping away at the skull, separating calcrete from bone. 

A thicker, prominent brow ridge might have indicated a skull of some archaic human species but the skull turned out to look more like a modern human. ²

Other than that not-so-prominent-browed-skull, there were also a bunch of other things Berger & Co dug up. 

Dr. Scott Fitzpatrick, an archaeologist who has done research in Palau for the past 20-plus years, said the Berger team found a lot of fragments.

“They’re in pieces and they don’t have complete pieces of big, long bones,” Fitzpatrick said. 

They ran tests on the fragments and found them to be about 3,000 years old. 

“They make the argument that because their measurements of fragments of bones show that they were extremely small that this might be another case of endemic dwarfism like The Hobbit,” Fitzpatrick said.

Fitzpatrick read the paper and he was highly skeptical. About six months later, Fitzpatrick and co-authors Greg Nelson and Geoffrey Clark wrote their own paper disputing Berger’s report. 

“We kind of go through, ‘Here's what we know about island colonization,’” Fitzpatrick said. “It's virtually impossible to think that there's a little group of people that live on a little island in Palau amongst hundreds of islands that are isolated.

“We know that people in Palau were just moving around all over the place. There wasn’t one small group that suddenly became small.” 

Fitzpatrick said he and his co-authors felt very compelled to clarify things.

Berger’s paper was one thing but the National Geographic episode “Lost Tribe of Palau” also portrayed Palauans based on the bone fragments as almost like early hominids in Africa. 

“I…felt very it was very important to try and set the record straight,” Fitzpatrick said. In his work, Fitzpatrick was working at the only site in Palau that had complete skeletons that were around the same age as the fragments Berger extracted. 

“We show that they’re just normal size,” Fitzpatrick said. “There’s not anything like what they said they were. Unfortunately, those kinds of papers, when they get a lot of press, scholars who see that will end up citing it, without digging a little bit deeper into other potential rejoinders or contrary publications like ours.” 

Part 3 coming next week. ³

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