Hobbits Were Real??? 3 Ft Tall 18,000 YO Skeleton Found

kickycan wrote:

Has anyone advanced the theory yet that the people of that time just kept all their midgets in one place?

Yes, I believe that's where the concept of the popular children's toy "A Barrel of Monkeys", and of course Munchkins came from, and possibly Timbits, here in Canada, but history is still foggy on this.

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ok so now what do you really think about this?

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Seed wrote:

ok so now what do you really think about this?

I think it's a pretty amazing and important discovery. So was discovering that the ceaolocanth was still living. We really understand very little about our own history, so every discovery like this matters.

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ceaolocanth? what is that? didnt hear anything about that

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How about the theory that the midgets were seldom seen because they were the ruling class?

and how bout them Sox?

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It's a slightly old story, but still interesting: http://www.cnn.com/TECH/science/9809/23/living.fossil/

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oh wow thats amazing...

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Interesting speculation by BBC - do go to full story.

Eton or the zoo?

By Desmond Morris
Author and anthropologist

The discovery of a new species of human poses exciting questions about who we are. How would we treat this close relative if one were found alive today?
Every time an intrepid anthropologist discovers an old tooth or part of a jawbone that might possibly have come from one of our ancient ancestors, there is a flurry of excitement.

Before long a whole skull, then a whole body and finally a whole human society has been deduced from this tiny fragment.

We are so desperate to know where we came from that this game of inventing the past has been played over and over again.

The truth, if we are honest, is that there still remains a huge gap in our knowledge of what happened between the time of our remote ancestors and our more recent ones.

What occurred in that "great gap", several million years ago, is anybody's guess - and guesses there have been aplenty.

But the new discovery of a tiny, 3ft tall, flat-faced, bipedal "ape-man" on the Indonesian island of Flores is rather different.

Here, the skeletal remains are not only much more detailed, but they are found in caves along with delicate stone tools and evidence of fire-making and the hunting of large game.

What is more, these hunters existed as recently as 12,000 years ago and, who knows, living groups of them may still be lingering on in odd corners even today.

This is shattering news and will create fascinating problems for both political and religious leaders............

Full story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3964579.stm

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More:

Suppose for a moment that a living tribe of these beings is discovered, how should they be treated?

Are they merely advanced apes, or are they miniature humans?

If an explorer brought back one of their infants to study, would you put him down for Eton or the Zoo?

If he died, would he be buried in consecrated ground or a pet cemetery?

His very existence among us would make us question all over again, what it is to be human.

We are not used to this because our ancestors successfully killed off all our close relatives.

This has created a chasm between us and the other animals, a chasm so big that religion went as far as to say that we are not even related to them. Humans have souls and they do not.

Darwin put a stop to this nonsense with his theory of evolution, but amazingly the blindingly obvious truth he discovered is still resisted by large sections of the human population.

They stubbornly continue to insist that we are some kind of special creation.

The arrival of "Mini-Man" is going to give them nightmares.......

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I love the comments given after that article. I happen to be a Christian that believes in evolution. Glad to see I am not alone. I have no trouble squaring the two.

I feel like we have gone backwards in science over the last few years here in the states and it is happening at a time when there are so many discoveries to be made.

It appears the new finds are being made in areas of the world we have yet to fully explore. As the world becomes more open to trade and travel, I imagine (hope) more such finds will come to our attention. I find this fascinating.

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The official name of the species is Homo floresensis, it is descended from Homo erectus.

This is a link to the Nature articles discussing the discovery. Unfortunately the official articles announcing and describing the find is copyrighted and you must register and pay for it.

http://www.nature.com/news/specials/flores/index.html

There is a tradition (folklore) in Indonesia of a small human like being that live deep in the forest, uses fire and ware no cloths. It is called Orang pendek. I can fine no on line discussion of this folklore but the New York Times article announcing the find alludes to it

"Among today's Ngadha people of central Flores and the Manggarai of West Flores there are local stories of little people who lived in caves until the arrival of the Dutch traders in the 16th century".
New York Times link

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Would it not be wonderful if these beings had existed up until then - or even until now!

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From The Australian newspaper:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11245217%5E37556,00.html

IMRE SALUSINSZKY
Ecce homo! Midget cousin stretches relative generosity

November 01, 2004
New Species Revealed: Tiny Cousins of Humans
? headline, The New York Times, October 28
MONDAY: Big news! My tiny cousin Homo floresiensis, from the remote Indonesian island of Flores, is arriving tomorrow for a visit. I wonder, how can I make the little guy feel at home? I'll spend this afternoon moving everything he might need ? breakfast cereal, towels, the Sydney street directory ? down to where he can reach it. This is going to be cool!

Tuesday: Homo arrived this morning and he is soooooo cute! He had his stuff in a crude sack made from the hide of a dwarf stegodon (a kind of elephant) and carried the carcass of a giant rat over his shoulder ? just like in the drawing! (I told him we were fine for provisions and convinced him to leave it in the wheelie-bin.)

Homo stands about 1m tall, has primitive features, possesses a rudimentary symbolic language and uses tools. He also knows the secret of fire. Unfortunately, there are some other secrets ? such as flushing the toilet, thank you very much! ? that he doesn't know about yet. But we'll work on it. After all, an apartment in Sydney is not the same thing as a cave on a remote island 600km east of Bali.

I make a delicious evening meal of gado-gado, thinking he'll appreciate the gesture, but Homo only wants to eat butternut pumpkin ? raw and unpeeled. After dinner I try to get him interested in the family photo album, thinking he might want to see what our common ancestor, Homo erectus, looked like. But he keeps loping back into the TV room, where Big Brother is on. Oh well. I just have to remember: "Don't push things too fast. His brain is only the size of a chimpanzee's."

Wednesday: Things are spinning out of control, fast. When I get home from work, I find my beloved labrador, Lulu, lying in the hall with a smashed-in skull. There is a trail of blood ? to the guest-room. Losing control, I start banging on the door, screaming hysterically: "Come out of there, you filthy little evolutionary quirk!" I'm about to drag Homo outside, kick him down the stairs, and wash my hands of him for once and for all, until I realise ? this is a little guy who's spent his whole life hunting giant rats and pygmy elephants. I have to try to see things from his angle, and from his angle my darling Lulu could well have seemed like a giant rat. Or pygmy elephant.

Thursday: Just to get out of the apartment ? which is now covered in Homo floresiensis droppings, half-eaten pumpkins and the primitive tools my cousin has fashioned from my CD collection ? I take Homo to a book-launch in Balmain. I'm a bit concerned about how he'll get on with the literati, but I needn't have worried. He's immediately treated like a celebrity. After necking a carafe of cheap white wine, he starts demanding piggy-backs from Thomas Keneally and Bryce Courtenay. They are only too happy to oblige.

I happen to have a book proposal doing the rounds, but in all the excitement and hubbub nobody is interested. All they want to talk about is "your gorgeous little human-thingummy cousin". OK. In the taxi going home there is strained silence.

Friday: Incredibly, Homo's introduction to sophisticated society is the talk of the gossip and fashion pages. According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Collette Dinnigan is already working on a "new line of summer pelts". (Perhaps she'd like to drop over and put some of Homo's current line of pelts through the washer ? he smells like the holding pens at the Royal Show.)

When I get home from work my cousin is chattering into the phone in rudimentary symbolic language. I grab the receiver and scream into it, "Who is this? Judy? Delta? Who's there?" but whoever it is hangs up.

I force Homo to sit down next to me on the couch: "Listen, coz, this just isn't working out. I know you mean well, but with a brain no larger than a monkey's . . ." He looks as if he's about to start crying, and I'm almost about to relent when a car horn sounds in the street. Homo grabs his primitive sack of belongings and bolts down the stairs.

From the window, I can see he's being picked up by some of his new friends in their convertible. I'm not sure who they are, but some of their faces are familiar from the gossip pages. Monkey brains. They're welcome to him.

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There is no such thing
There is no such thing as Homo florensensis. The skeleton they found was a human that suffered from a disease called microcephaly. I think this sad episode is deeply insulting to disabled people. Imagine telling parents of a child suffering from microcephaly that if their child's remains were found by an anthropologist, they would think it was not human. That is cruel.

This is another one of these ridiculous cases where someone thinks they discover something, and they ignore the obvious most likely explanation, and instead jumps to the most outrageous explanation, which is then throughly disproven by more serious scientists. The original "discoverers" become so totally wedded to their initial claim, they can never admit they were wrong. They become mariginalized and then ignored by the scientific community. Meanwhile, the popular media goes hysterical over the ridiculous claim, and never mentions that it was disproven.

Other examples of this phenomena are the cold fusion fiasco, and that nonsense about that supposed life in the Martian meteorite. At least in those other two examples, they were not insulting disabled people by telling them that they don't count as human.

Jeffery Winkler

[email protected]

Edit [Moderator]: Website removed

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so, what about the other seven they found there?

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They didn't find any "other seven". They never found another one. The other tiny bits of bone that they claim belong to this supposed "species", don't have any evidence of microcephaly, or any other characteristcics of the supposed first one.

During the Piltdown Hoax, people claimed to find remains of other members of this nonexistant species, even though there was only one hoax. The fact is someone can take a piece of fossil, and imagine seeing whatever they want in it.

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okiedokie artichokie.....

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Still in debate......

BBC

Quote:

.....The creature stood just 1m (3ft) tall and possessed a brain size of around 400 cubic centimetres (24 cubic inches) - about the same as a chimp's brain. Dating of the sediments around the remains indicated the Hobbit lived only 18,000 years ago.....

....."There is a fundamental problem of the tiny brain size combined with the sophisticated stone tools," Dr Martin told the BBC News website.....

.....Dr Martin also invokes a biological rule of scaling to argue that LB1 could not have been a dwarfed version of the older human species Homo erectus, as has been suggested.....Dr Martin and his colleagues argue that the brain of LB1 is far too small to be a dwarf hominid, or human-like species.....

BUT

.....Professor Stringer pointed to the form of the shoulder blade and the thick, chinless jawbones as particularly indicative that researchers were dealing with a novel human species.

"Some of the material [at Liang Bua] is believed to go back to 70,000 years and the most recent material to 12,000 years. We're not talking about one individual at one point in time. This morphology is represented over a considerable period in time," he said......

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Quote:

Jonathan Leake and Tom Baird
THE remains of a fossilised stone age pygmy, hailed as a new species of human when it was found two years ago, probably belonged to a disabled but otherwise normal caveman, researchers have claimed.

The discovery of the 18,000-year-old "homo floresiensis" on the Indonesian island of Flores was thought to be a major development in tracing human evolution when it was announced in 2004.

However, a new analysis of the 3ft skeleton, nicknamed the "hobbit", along with other remains found at the site, has indicated they probably belonged to an early human suffering from microcephaly, a condition that causes an abnormally small head and other deformities.

full story at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2320787,00.html

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Hobbits Were Real??? 3 Ft Tall 18,000 YO Skeleton Found

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