This year has been a vintage one for biologists interested in human evolution. In a cave on an Indonesian island, the remains of a new species of human were found, a species that lived only 18,000 years ago and hence overlapped with modern Homo sapiens.

This, the most important discovery of 2004, was also one of the most controversial. The discovery of the skeleton -- dubbed Florence after its scientific name, Homo floresiensis -- was first reported in the British-based journal Nature. Earlier this month it was named runner-up in the "breakthroughs of the year" awarded by rival journal Science, based in the United States.

Florence made the front pages of newspapers worldwide. Later in the year Science published a paper by an Indonesian paleoanthropologist, Teuku Jacob, of Gadjah Mada University. Jacob, who was not one of the scientists who wrote the Nature paper, claimed that Florence was not a new species, but his motives are suspect. It appears he was angry not to have been involved in one of the most important scientific discoveries ever made in his country. The team that uncovered the skeleton reject his claims that Florence is simply a modern human with a small head, but remarkably, Jacob has made off with the original bones, so no independent checks can be made. He says he'll return the bones in January. However, we can be quite sure that Florence and the six other skeletons found on the island do belong to the new species.