Hobbits are real!!!

[toms]

well, nearly. Did anyone catch all the news about them finding those fossils of those 3 foot tall humans who died out only 12000 years ago. And they used tools, fire and hunted and made cave art.....

Just lends weight to my belief that tolkien's version of creation is just as valid as any other fictional account in a big book.

http://news.google.co.uk/nwshp?hl=en...3107287070.xml

[Druid Bremen]

Haha, that is great. Nice find toms. Next time, they just might find a large dark land, where remains of a civilisation, which housed an extremely large army of a few species, namely man and orcs, and a large spent volcano can be found. I think we all can guess where this is!

[toms]

there is a thread with more detail than i could be bothered to post in the swamp if anyone is interested...

[Kurgan]

Tolkien said it himself, his books are fiction, and not an allegory of anything.

But that doesn't stop people from seeing where he used "what he knew" when coming up with the fictional people, places and things in his stories.

Nice jab at religion there, we'll see you graduate from Troll College yet!


If you wanted to have a real discussion of what a "Myth" really is, though, let me know. ; )

[SkinWalker]

The whole find is very interesting. Those of you with access to the journal Nature can find a fascinating series of articles regarding this new species, but it demonstrates that "humans are subject to the same evolutionary forces that made other mammals shrink to dwarf size when in genetic isolation and under ecological pressure, such as on an island with limited resources."

Homo floresiensis (named after the island Flores) lived in an environment with large lizards (Komodo Dragons), giant rats and toroises, and hunted dwarf elephants. They flourished 38,000 years ago and were finally wiped out by a volcano's eruption at around 12,000 years ago, though its just as likely that the species died off at around 18,000 years ago since this is when the archaeological remains appear to stop.

18,000 years would also fit with the notion that environment and restricted gene flow greatly affected their population's ability to sustain itself, since dwarfing is characteristic among populations of small, inbred islands.

The ancestors to H. floresiensis first came to the island at around 900,000 years ago.

One of the more interesting points of this find is that it provides reinforcement of the notion that multiple hominid species existed on the planet at the same time. Human evolution is more characterized as a bush than a ladder. If H. foresiensis is, indeed, a separate species, it existed at a time in which humans did (H. sapiens is likely to be 150,000 years old plus), but whose progenitor was 900,000 years old (H. erectus).