“Don’t worry about oil running out; it won’t for very many years,” the Oxford Ph.D. told the bankers in a message that he will repeat to businessmen, academics and investment analysts at a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, next week. “The issue is the long downward slope that opens on the other side of peak production. Oil and gas dominate our lives, and their decline will change the world in radical and unpredictable ways,” he says.

Campbell reckons global peak production of conventional oil — the kind associated with gushing oil wells — is approaching fast, perhaps even next year. His calculations are based on historical and present production data, published reserves and discoveries of companies and governments, estimates of reserves lodged with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, speeches by oil chiefs and a deep knowledge of how the industry works.

“About 944 billion barrels of oil has so far been extracted, some 764 billion remains extractable in known fields, or reserves, and a further 142 billion of reserves are classed as “yet-to-find,” meaning what oil is expected to be discovered. If this is so, then the overall oil peak arrives next year,” he says.

If he is correct, then global oil production can be expected to decline steadily at about 2 to 3 percent a year, and the cost of everything from travel, heating, agriculture, trade and anything made of plastic will rise. And the scramble to control oil resources will intensify. As one U.S. analyst said this week: “Just kiss your lifestyle goodbye.”

But the Campbell analysis is way off the much more optimistic official figures. The U.S. Geological Survey states that reserves in 2000 (its latest figures) of recoverable oil were about 3 trillion barrels and that peak production will not come for about 30 years. The International Energy Agency believes that oil will peak between 2013 and 2037, and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and Iran, four countries with much of the world’s known reserves, report little if any depletion of reserves. Meanwhile, the oil companies — which do not make public estimates of their own “peak oil” — say there is no shortage of oil and gas for the long term. “The world holds enough proved reserves for 40 years of supply and at least 60 years of gas supply at current consumption rates,” said BP this week.

Indeed, almost every year for 150 years, the oil industry has produced more than it did the year before, and predictions of oil running out or peaking have always been proved wrong. Today, the industry is producing about 83 million barrels a day, with big new fields in Azerbaijan, Angola, Algeria, the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere soon expected on-stream.

But the business of estimating oil reserves is contentious and political. According to Campbell, companies seldom report their true findings for commercial reasons, and governments — which own 90 percent of the reserves — often lie. Most official figures, he says, are grossly unreliable: “Estimating reserves is a scientific business. There is a range of uncertainty, but it is not impossible to get a good idea of what a field contains. Reporting [reserves], however, is a political act.”

According to Campbell and other oil industry sources, the two most widely used estimates of world oil reserves, drawn up by the Oil and Gas Journal and the BP Statistical Review, both rely on reserve estimates provided to them by governments and industry and do not question their accuracy. Companies, says Campbell, “underreport their new discoveries to comply with strict U.S. stock exchange rules, but then revise them upward over time,” partly to boost their share prices with “good news” results. “I do not think that I ever told the truth about the size of a prospect. That was not the game we were in,” he says. “As we were competing for funds with other subsidiaries around the world, we had to exaggerate.”

Most serious of all, he and other oil depletion analysts and petroleum geologists, most of whom have been in the industry for years, accuse the United States of using questionable statistical probability models to calculate global reserves and OPEC countries of drastically revising upward their reserves in the 1980s. “The estimates for the OPEC countries were systematically exaggerated in the late 1980s to win a greater slice of the allocation cake. Middle East official reserves jumped 43 percent in just three years despite no new major finds,” he says.

The study of “peak oil” — the point at which half the total oil known to have existed in a field or a country has been consumed, beyond which extraction goes into irreversible decline — used to be back-of-the envelope guesswork. It was not taken seriously by business or governments, mainly because oil has always been cheap and plentiful. In the wake of the Iraq war, the rapid economic rise of China, global warming and recent record oil prices, the debate has shifted from “if” there is a global peak to “when.”

The U.S. government knows that conventional oil is running out fast. According to a report on oil shales and unconventional oil supplies prepared by the U.S. Office of Petroleum Reserves last year, “world oil reserves are being depleted three times as fast as they are being discovered. Oil is being produced from past discoveries, but the reserves are not being fully replaced. Remaining oil reserves of individual oil companies must continue to shrink. The disparity between increasing production and declining discoveries can only have one outcome: a practical supply limit will be reached and future supply to meet conventional oil demand will not be available.”

It continues: “Although there is no agreement about the date that world oil production will peak, forecasts presented by USGS geologist Les Magoon, the Oil and Gas Journal, and others expect the peak will occur between 2003 and 2020. What is notable … is that none extend beyond the year 2020, suggesting that the world may be facing shortfalls much sooner than expected.”

According to Bill Powers, editor of the Canadian Energy Viewpoint investment journal, there is a growing belief among geologists who study world oil supply that production “is soon headed into an irreversible decline … The U.S. government does not want to admit the reality of the situation. Dr. Campbell’s thesis, and those of others like him, are becoming the mainstream.”

In the absence of reliable official figures, geologists and analysts are turning to the grandfather of oil depletion analysis, M. King Hubbert, a Shell geologist who in 1956 showed mathematically that exploitation of any oil field follows a predictable “bell curve” trend, which is slow to take off, rises steeply, flattens and then descends again steeply. The biggest and easiest exploited oil fields were always found early in the history of exploration, while smaller ones were developed as production from the big fields declined. He accurately predicted that U.S. domestic oil production would peak around 1970, 40 years after the period of peak discovery around 1930.

Many oil analysts now take the “Hubbert peak” model seriously, and the USGS, national and oil company figures with a large dose of salt. Similar patterns of peak discovery and production have been found throughout all the world’s main oil fields. The first North Sea discovery was in 1969, discoveries peaked in 1973 and the U.K. passed its production peak in 1999. The British portion of the basin is now in serious decline and the Norwegian sector has leveled off.

Other analysts are also questioning afresh the oil companies’ data. U.S. Wall Street energy group Herold last month compared the stated reserves of the world’s leading oil companies with their quoted discoveries and production levels. Herold predicts that the seven largest will all begin seeing production declines within four years. Deutsche Bank analysts report that global oil production will peak in 2014.

According to Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review, a monthly magazine published by the Energy Institute in London, conventional oil reserves are now declining about 4 to 6 percent a year worldwide. He says 18 large oil-producing countries, including Britain, and 32 smaller ones, have declining production; and he expects Denmark, Malaysia, Brunei, China, Mexico and India all to reach their peak in the next few years.

“We should be worried. Time is short and we are not even at the point where we admit we have a problem,” Skrebowski says. “Governments are always excessively optimistic. The problem is that the peak, which I think is 2008, is tomorrow in planning terms.” On the other hand, Equatorial Guinea, Sao Tome, Chad and Angola are all expected to grow strongly.

What everyone agrees with is that world oil demand is surging. The International Energy Agency, which collates national figures and predicts demand, says developing countries could push demand up 47 percent, to 121 million barrels a day, by 2030, and that oil companies and oil-producing nations must spend about $100 billion a year to develop new supplies to keep pace. According to the IEA, demand rose faster in 2004 than in any year since 1976. China’s oil consumption, which accounted for a third of extra global demand last year, grew 17 percent and is expected to double over 15 years to more than 10 million barrels a day — half the United States’ present demand. India’s consumption is expected to rise by nearly 30 percent in the next five years. If world demand continues to grow at 2 percent a year, then almost 160 million barrels a day will need to be extracted in 2035, twice as much as today.

That, say most geologists, is almost inconceivable. According to industry consultants IHS Energy, 90 percent of all known reserves are now in production, suggesting that few major discoveries remain to be made. Shell says its reserves fell last year because it only found enough oil to replace 15 to 25 percent of what the company produced. BP told the U.S. stock exchange that it replaced only 89 percent of its production in 2004.

Moreover, oil supply is increasingly limited to a few giant fields, with 10 percent of all production coming from just four fields and 80 percent from fields discovered before 1970. Even finding a field the size of Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, by far the world’s largest and said to have another 125 billion barrels, would meet world demand only for about 10 years.

“All the major discoveries were in the 1960s, since when they have been declining gradually over time, give or take the occasional spike and trough,” says Campbell. “The whole world has now been seismically searched and picked over. Geological knowledge has improved enormously in the past 30 years, and it is almost inconceivable now that major fields remain to be found.” He accepts that there may be a big field or two left in Russia, and more in Africa, but these would have little bearing on world supplies. Unconventional deposits like tar sands and shale may only slow the production decline.

“The first half of the oil age now closes,” says Campbell. “It lasted 150 years and saw the rapid expansion of industry, transport, trade, agriculture and financial capital, allowing the population to expand sixfold. The second half now dawns, and it will be marked by the decline of oil and all that depends on it, including financial capital.”

So did the Swiss bankers comprehend the seriousness of the situation when he talked to them? “There is no company on the stock exchange that doesn’t make a tacit assumption about the availability of energy,” says Campbell. “It is almost impossible for bankers to accept it. It is so out of their mindset.”

The “McLibel” two, beaming below a DIY banner reading “20 Years of Global Resistance to McWorld,” said they were “elated.” “It’s a great victory,” Steel said. “[This judgment] shows that the British libel laws are oppressive and unfair. I hope that the government will have to change them, and there will be greater freedom of speech for the public.”

But it was barely necessary for the European court to decide that the trial was “unfair.” Anyone who visited the austere Court 11 of the Royal Courts of Justice between June 28, 1994, and December 16, 1996, when the epic 313-day libel case was in progress could tell at a glance that the two defendants were at a horrendous disadvantage.

Morris and Steel, who earned about 3,500 pounds a year, had no legal training and were trying to defend themselves in one of the most complex branches of English law. Sometimes they were cutting, but not surprisingly they hesitated, paused and conferred at every point. What was expected to be a six- and then a 12-week trial became a painfully slow slog stretching into legal infinity. It was a triumph for Steel and Morris just to have got through the legal thickets of the 28 pretrial hearings and into the case proper, but they needed the help of the judge as well as the pro bono advice of Keir Starmer Q.C. and others who shared their civil liberties concern about the case.

McDonald’s, on the other hand, had the smoothest of luxury legal machines. The company not only employed Richard Rampton Q.C., a formidable 2,000-pounds-a-day libel specialist, a 1,000-pounds-a-day solicitor and the services of a full legal chambers but also had access to anything it wanted, and thought nothing of flying in witnesses and experts from all over the world.

Halfway through the longest trial in English civil case history the McLibel two’s joint assessment of English libel law was that it was an arcane relic, a legal lottery that favored only the very rich. They were appalled that when they took the British government to the European court of human rights in 1991 to try to get legal aid, they were refused, bizarrely because it was considered that they were defending themselves rather well on their own. They were infuriated, too, that they were denied a jury on the basis that ordinary people would not understand complex scientific arguments, even though they — as ordinary as they come — could clearly understand the issues well enough to defend themselves. And they found it hard to believe that the burden was always on them on prove with primary evidence what almost every other country would consider legitimate comment.

But the heart of their case was that McDonald’s, a company with a turnover of $40 billion a year, was unfairly using the British libel laws to sue two penniless people for libel over public interest issues that affect people’s everyday lives. It was a clear case, they said, of the corporate censorship of opposition and debate backed by the British establishment.

Morris, who shot from the hip during the trial, in contrast to Steel’s more incisive questioning, recalled Tuesday how they got through the legal nightmare. “We basically rolled up our sleeves and got on with it.” What he did not say was that they frequently felt cruelly punished for their original ignorance of the law. The case may have gone on so long in part because of their lack of legal aid, but it was also because they believed the court treated them shabbily at times. When Steel was suffering badly from stress, she was denied the shortest adjournment.

Tuesday the book was closed on a trial that would not be allowed to last so long today — and would probably never happen, if only because no big corporation would ever seek to pursue two such determined critics.

“It was a nightmare fighting that case, but it was a unique chance to expose the reality of McDonald’s,” Morris said. As ever, he took the bigger political picture. “Our overall object has always been to encourage people to stand up for themselves and to take control of their resources, not multinational companies or governments. This should encourage people to better defend themselves.”

The final proof that times have changed since 1985 was to be found in the restaurant outside which the McLibel two gave their press conference Tuesday. Of five customers chosen at random, two had not only heard of the McLibel trial but agreed that what Steel and Morris had achieved was both important and significant for society and had moved on the debate about food and corporate behavior. The conundrum, perhaps, was that they had still chosen to eat there.

It reports that two companies dominate sales of half the world’s bananas, three trade 85 percent of the world’s tea and one, Wal-Mart, now controls 40 percent of Mexico’s retail food sector. It also says that Monsanto controls 91 percent of the global genetically modified seed market.

Household names including Nestlé, Monsanto, Unilever, Tesco, Wal-Mart, Bayer and Cargill are all said to have expanded hugely in size, power and influence in the past decade directly because of the trade liberalization policies being advanced by the United States, Britain and other G-8 countries whose leaders are meeting this week in Davos, Switzerland.

“A wave of mergers and business alliances has concentrated market power in very few hands,” the report says. It accuses the companies of shutting local companies out of the market, driving down prices, setting international and domestic trade rules to suit themselves, imposing tough standards that poor farmers cannot meet and charging consumers more.

The report says that 85 percent of all the recent fines imposed on global cartels were paid by agrifood companies, with three of them forced to pay $500 million to settle price-fixing lawsuits. “It is a dangerous situation when so few companies control so many lives,” said John Samuel of ActionAid Wednesday.

The ActionAid report notes that many food behemoths are wealthier than the countries in which they do their business. Nestlé, it says, recorded profits greater than Ghana’s GDP in 2002, Unilever profits were a third larger than the national income of Mozambique, and Wal-Mart profits were bigger than the economies of both countries combined. The companies are also said to be taking advantage of the collapse in farm prices. Prices for coffee, cocoa, rice, palm oil and sugar have fallen by more than 50 percent in the past 20 years.

The report feeds into growing calls at Porto Alegre for the regulation of multinational food companies. A coalition of the largest international environmental, trade and human rights groups, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Amnesty, Via Campesina and Focus on the Global South, Wednesday said they would be working together to press for corporate accountability.

Retailers such as Tesco, Ahold, Carrefour and Metro are buying increasing volumes of fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy products in developing countries, but their exacting food safety and environmental standards are driving small farmers out of business, says ActionAid.

A spokeswoman for the Food and Drink Federation, which represents British food businesses, Wednesday recognized that the industry’s success “is closely linked to those at the beginning of the food supply chain.” But she added: “Britain, the world’s fourth largest food-importing country, invests heavily and provides an enormous market for developing-world farmers.”

This 13,000-year-old, 1-meter tall, 25-year-old hominin, with a brain one-third the size of modern man’s, was found just a few miles from Johannes’ village and was a scientific sensation last October when the team of Australians and Indonesians that unearthed it claimed in the journal Nature that it was an entirely new human species. Dubbing it Homo floresiensis and nicknaming it “hobbit,” they said it was a descendant of a long-extinct ancestor of modern man (Homo erectus), thought to have flourished between 1.8 million and possibly 300,000 years ago. Dubbed one of the breakthroughs of 2004 by the journal Science, it made worldwide news. Fossils show only about 10 human species and 50 subspecies, so finding a brand-new one is a huge story for anthropologists, and Homo floresiensis was greeted as the most breathtaking and important discovery in 150 years, changing our understanding of late human evolutionary geography, biology and culture. Not only was it the smallest adult hominin found but, the Australian team suggested, because it came so late in the human evolutionary scale, a group of Homo floresiensis could even be alive today in the forests of Flores.

But every major find has a backlash, and in this case a fierce, high-level challenge has come from academics in several countries. Leading them is professor Teuka Jacob, who heads the Laboratory of Bioanthropology and Paleoanthropology at Gadjah Mada. The only man outside the excavating team to have inspected the skeleton, Jacob says it is conceivable that Johannes’ family members are descendants of the little lady of Flores.

But even if his researchers find no direct link, he says he is certain from his own preliminary inspection that the bones now locked in a safe in his vault at the university do not belong to a new species within the genus Homo, or even a subspecies, but a pygmy version of Homo sapiens — not unlike Johannes. And he claims that behind the intense media attention last October were ill-equipped, hurried young academics whose work was not properly scrutinized. The world of anthropology is used to disputes, but the fierce nature of this one has split the field.

Lian Bua, the limestone cave where Homo floresiensis was found 5.9 meters below the floor in October 2003, translates as “cold cave.” It is at least 10 degrees Celsius cooler than the deep, hidden valley of paddy fields that it overlooks. It is also easy to see why early man used this cave for so long. It is ideal for hunter-gatherers. Light and dry, with 20-meter ceilings, easily defensible ledges and secret chambers, it’s a place a tribe could live under its stalactites.

“This is where they found the skeleton,” says Riccus Bandar, a farmer from the nearby village of Beotaras who helped with the dig and is now the cave’s unofficial custodian, guide and gateman. He points out the slightly disturbed ground a few feet from the cave’s left wall. “They also found pygmy elephants, Komodo dragons and tools. It is the most beautiful cave in the world.”

Lian Bua has a colorful recent history. At one point a schoolroom for villagers, it was first investigated in the 1950s by Theodoor Verhoevenis, a Dutch missionary and amateur archaeologist. Indonesian archaeologists excavated it again in the 1980s, but the work was suspended during the Asian financial crash. Since then it has become a favorite picnic spot for locals.

But it is legendary in Beoteras. “My grandmother told me when I was about 6 of how, long ago, six children from the village went hunting and one of their dogs went into the cave but did not come out,” says Bandar, who is in his 60s. “They went in and saw a little man there. He was very small, standing on a rock. They were frightened and ran back. The people were very afraid.”

The story is more or less echoed in other villages, many of whose people say they originate from the island of Kalimantan (formerly Borneo) — where pygmy-size people live. According to one account, the little people of Flores were also called the Reba Ruek and were very hairy. The Australian scientists say they were told of an Ebu Gogo who reportedly lived on Flores until just a few hundred years ago. But no one in the villages near Lian Bua has heard that name.

Some 1,500 kilometers to the west of Flores, on the far more developed island of Java, is Jacob’s laboratory. The only one of its kind in South Asia, its ground floor is a chaos of cabinets and shelving, holding 40 years of excavated material. It includes Jacob’s large collection of hominins — including his discoveries of Homo erectus, Homo erectus palaeojavanicus and Homo erectus soloensis.

But he is keeping the latest Flores find in a safe in his steel-doored vault. Like all other major finds made by the department of archaeology, the bones were sent to his laboratory. He did not — as the press has said — kidnap them. “They even gave me the money for the transport.” He insists he is not jealously guarding his patch, or upset that Australians found the skeleton. “At my age you look at things quite calmly. I have been working in this field for more than 40 years … Here [in this laboratory] we have one-third of the world’s Homo erectus finds.”

But professor Richard “Bert” Roberts of the University of Wollongong, Australia, a coauthor of the original Nature paper, accuses Jacob of “stifling study” by not releasing the bones. “Jacob has a habit of hanging on to fossils for a long time. He cannot be allowed to keep these, to stifle the study that he so advocates. I urge him to send the fossils back.”

Jacob is one of the world’s most experienced paleoanthropologists, as well as being a pathologist. After training in Holland and getting his Ph.D. in the United States, he worked for 40 years on many of Indonesia’s major sites, as well as in Kenya, Australia, Italy, China and South Africa. He has written more than 20 books and is one of Asia’s most decorated and well-known academics.

All his experience, he says, tells him that this is not a new species. “When I saw the Australians’ research, I refused to comment for the first two weeks. Then the head of the archaeological center [which cosponsored the dig] asked me to take the bones and then we got a really good look. “The skull looked to me like a primate’s. It was only when I picked it up that I knew it was Homo sapiens. We did the measurements. A few things might confuse people, like the shape of the skull from the back is pentagonal. Later I saw the pelvis and the thighbone. It’s just human. It’s not erectus.”

He believes that the small brain volume may be a sign of mental abnormalities, specifically microcephaly (small brain), which has been observed elsewhere in early humans. “I started to get confirmation about the size of the brain. Then I knew they had found [something] similar to a microcephelate. It [the disease] could be genetic or acquired during birth.”

He did not find the tiny skull remarkable. “It was what we call microcranic — very small. There was a very small brain and jaw. In this case there were no other abnormalities, only in the skull. The legs, arms and everything else were genetically normal. But this [microcephaly] can happen anywhere. It could be as common as one in 500.”

In rapid succession he picks up bits of the bones laid out on his desk. “Look at the teeth, they are clearly modern … so is the skull. The arm bones, the leg bones … all are small, but that is all. If you analyze the front of the face, you might think it is an ape. But look at the whole head and it looks much more human, especially from behind.”

He inspects the jaw. “The front teeth are very small. It has only one premolar. In [Homo] erectus, they get smaller and then larger. This has the same occlusal pattern as recent Javanese finds.”

He believes that the Australians got not only the species wrong but even the gender. “The margin of the eye hole is rounder than for a female,” he says. He picks up the thighbone. “Observe the muscular attachments. They are more pronounced than with females. Again, the pelvis is rounded [which suggests a man].”

The row is now splitting anthropologists. Although the Australian and Indonesian scientists stand their ground and are backed by many experts, a group that includes paleopathologist Maciej Henneberg of the University of Adelaide and anthropologist Alan Thorne of the Australian National University in Canberra is skeptical of their case. Henneberg argues that the skull of the Flores hominin is very similar to a 4,000-year-old microcephalic Minoan skull found on Crete in 1975.

Jacob says he is now getting support from around the world and hopes to publish a paper setting out his arguments in Science soon.

The Australians’ mistake, he says, was not to fully compare their findings with others made in Flores or elsewhere in the region. A find like this, he says, “must be seen from all aspects, in relation to the environment and neighboring areas. They did their study without comparative material. We are now studying every detail and comparing it with all the other remains from Flores caves and neighboring islands, like the small individuals found in east Java in the 1950s. “I have studied the remains from several caves in Flores in the 1960s. There are five similar caves in the area. Catholic priests found some small skeletons in the 1950s. Dutch anthropologists found some in the 1960s.”

The Australians say it is too much of a coincidence to have seven possible hominins all with small bones (only one skull has been found), but Jacob says small people are not uncommon in the region.

“There is plenty of other evidence of pygmy peoples in the region. There are pygmies still living in west Papua, the Andeman and Nicobar islands, and in the Philippines. But they are all Homo sapiens. They’re just a smaller size. These pygmies were once quite common, but only pockets remain. There was far more diversity of people before.”

He says the row has become personal. “I have been called everything. They say it’s jealousy, a turf war, but it’s not.” He claims the Australian team were “scientific terrorists” forcing ideas on people, that it was unethical for them to have made the announcement without the Indonesians being invited and that they were not experienced enough. “I don’t think the Australians have the expertise. They were very narrow. They have a tunnel vision and were not equipped in this area.”

He absolves the Indonesians on the team. “Professor R.P. Soejono [the head of the Indonesian archaeology center that jointly sponsored the dig] was in the list of authors, but he never even saw the drafts [of the Nature article]. The others were young Indonesians. In the present climate it’s hard to get a job. You usually follow the hand that feeds you. I would say [to the Australians] ‘do some more work. Think twice. Look at everything from different angles. Don’t start with the conclusion.’”

And he has concerns about the referees of the Nature article. “The reviewers seemed unevenly selected, very one-sided.” It is an argument Roberts categorically rejects. The referees were leading anthropologists. “They [Nature] had six referees on each paper, the most I have ever known. They made damn sure they had a cushion behind their arse. The papers had to be submitted three times. It took six months, so was hardly rushed out. It was fair and rigorous.

“Our team had everyone involved — geomorphologists, geochronologists, archaeologists, paleoanthropolgists … We left no bone unturned. Good grief, it was a soccer team of authors!”

And he raises the stakes by suggesting that Jacob and other critics have an “intellectual interest” in denying that the skeleton was a new species. “All … are supporters of the multiregionalism evolutionary model … This discovery would destroy their theory. It suits their purposes very nicely [to oppose Homo floresiensis].”

The background to the row is a long and bitter debate between those anthropologists who say the modern human evolved in Africa and that all modern Homo sapiens developed there, and those such as Jacob who say that Homo erectus migrated from Africa through the north and spread [and developed] throughout the rest of the world. The argument is far from being resolved on either side.

One of the original advocates of multiregionalism, professor Alan Thorne of the Australian National University at Canberra, was coauthor of a reaction to the Flores paper in the journal Before Farming, and has weighed in on Jacob’s side. He says: “If it was another species, as they are saying, then it’s very unlikely that all the details of racial characteristics [are] exactly the same as Homo sapiens living there today. They might have one or two features but not all of them. There is something seriously misleading here.”

Like Jacob, he thinks Homo floresiensis is a case of “secondary microcephaly.” “That means that we don’t know the genetic reason for [the disorder] but that secondary reasons may be responsible, like something being wrong in the gut. There are many examples in the literature. The disorder may be as common as Mongolism, say one in 2,000. Dwarfism, anyway, goes with microcephaly, especially in hunter-gatherer populations.”

And he supports Jacob’s broader points. “Paleoanthropology has lost its way and people are desperate for new species. People are more aggressive. If, as Jacob thinks, it’s a case of microcephaly, there are a lot of people in my field who cannot recognize a village idiot when they see one.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jacob loves a good row. “This is like ecstasy without the drug. It relieves you. The blood speeds up. It excites you. You think more. But it has stirred up a nest of hornets. It’s like opening a can of worms and you cannot put them back in again. The creationists are using it for the wrong reason [to deny evolution]. I am not a creationist at all.

“I don’t want to seem like a killjoy but we are looking for truth, not for fame. You have to look for the truth, but fame will come to you whether you look for it or not,” he says. “I think it’s quite possible that there are other species. But in the past 15,000 years there is only one. It’s not an entirely unimportant find because it is a pygmy skeleton found in a controlled excavation. But it’s certainly not the most important in the last 150 years.”

Lomborg, a Danish statistician whose bestseller “The Skeptical Environmentalist” created storms of protest when it was published two years ago by throwing doubt on climate change science, is hailed by free marketeers around the world but is reviled by many scientists. Yesterday he told a meeting of European right-wing think tanks how he had brought together what he called the “Real Madrid” team of “galactica” economists.

“A stellar cast came to Copenhagen [Denmark] to reach consensus about how to help the world’s poor,” he said. “We chose economists because they have long, valuable experience in prioritizing things, and they are unaligned and impartial. We said, ‘If we had an extra $50 billion, how should it be spent to do the most good in the world?’ We looked at the world’s problems and came up with 32 challenges.”

The economists then considered the potential costs and benefits of spending money on problems like hunger, climate change, communicable diseases, sanitation, water, money laundering and financial instability. Rejecting spending anything on education, slums, terrorism, arms proliferation, deforestation, lack of energy or corruption, they narrowed the list to 10 areas, which they then divided and ranked into a number of initiatives.

At the top of their wish list by a large margin was spending money on the control of HIV/AIDS. “We found that for $27 billion we could prevent 28 million cases of HIV by 2010,” said Lomborg. “It was the best investment that humanity could do. The benefits would be 40 times as high as the costs.”

The second best option was to spend the money on food and health, specifically by providing micronutrients for the diets of the 850 million chronically malnourished people, mainly in sub-Saharan African countries, who need iron and vitamin supplements. A $12 billion program could help them significantly, said Lomborg.

Controversially, the eight professors found that the third most cost-effective way to spend the money would be to promote free trade, something most of them had made their names doing. Three of the six Americans on the panel, Robert Fogel, Douglass North and Vernon Smith, are Nobel winners, and five others are odds-on to win similar honors.

Lomborg, who is head of the Danish Environmental Assessment Institute, conceded Wednesday that trade liberalization policies as promoted by the professors would hurt some people. “There are always winners and losers. We found that getting rid of subsidies and trade barriers had very low costs and high benefits. We reckoned that the benefits could be as much as $2.4 billion a year for rich and poor. “But there is no doubt that free trade is not only good, but the winners far outweigh the losers. I would say free trade is a huge boon to making a better world.”

There was consensus, too, that providing mosquito nets in malarial areas would benefit millions for relatively little money. The team of economists calculated that $13 billion spent would halve the cost of treating malaria and give a 500 percent return on investment.

Right at the bottom of the economists’ list of priorities for humankind was climate change, which Lomborg Wednesday said was a problem of the future. Initiatives like the Kyoto treaty, which is expected to be ratified next month and will force rich countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, were all but useless, he said.

“Let’s not spend the money on problems we cannot do much about. Let’s start with the ones where we can do the most good at the lowest cost now. It’s a bad economic proposition to spend money here. Global warming will harm people in 100 years, when there will be far fewer poor people. The best thing you can do is make people rich.” In an ideal world, he said, all these problems should be addressed. “But it is not ideal, so we must focus on how to do most good. This is only an economic ranking. There may be other issues like justice and equity. This is not a coup d’état. We’re not trying to take away the politicians’ rights to choose.”

The dream team was immediately attacked by a coalition of 18 leading British development and environmental groups, meeting 100 yards away. “This simplistic and rather banal ranking of these problems should not be taken too seriously,” said Stephen Tindale, the director of Greenpeace. “It is an example of intellectual illiteracy. All these problems are linked.”

“They have come up with bizarre conclusions,” said Andrew Simms, the policy director of the New Economics Foundation. “The simple point is that unless you act to prevent runaway climate change, all the other things which they prioritize — which are generally no-brainer good things — will be wrecked by global warming.”

Lomborg, however, was unfazed. “The biggest problem is that we all die, yet no one is considering how to solve that. These economists are talking about how much good you can do.”