Berger was lead author of a controversial report of the discovery in 2006 of what he and colleagues claimed were small-bodied humans in Palau, Micronesia. Scholars have disputed the argument that these individuals are pygmoid in stature, or that they were the result of insular dwarfism; in an article titled "Small Scattered Fragments Do Not a Dwarf Make", anthropologists Scott M. Fitzpatrick (NC State), Greg C. Nelson (University of Oregon), and Geoffrey Clark (Australian National University) conclude that "rehistoric Palauan populations were normal-sized and exhibit traits that fall within the normal variation for "Homo sapiens"," hence, concluding that their evidence did "not support the claims by Berger et al. (2008) that there were smaller-bodied populations living in Palau or that insular dwarfism took place" Berger and co-authors Churchill and De Klerk replied to the study, saying "the logical flaws and misrepresentations in Fitzpatrick and coworker's paper are too numerous to discuss in detail" and that their restudy report "amounts to a vacuous argument from authority... and "ad hominem" assault, and brings little new data to bear on the question of body size and skeletal morphology in early Palauans". John Hawks, the paleoanthropologist who edited the original Palau article for "PLoS ONE", has replied in part to some of the dissenting researchers' claims (in his personal web blog).