Headline News: We Have Hobbit Ancestors....

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

What if they find a skeleton with nine fingers?

That's about as likely as finding evidence of an unwinged balrog!

[Thinlómien]

And another article, which I recieved from the mailing list of The Finnish Tolkien Society:

Bone of Hobbit-like species uncovered

Tuesday, October 11, 2005 Posted: 2012 GMT (0412 HKT)

-- Scientists say they have found more bones in an Indonesian cave that
offer additional evidence of a second human species -- short and hobbit-
like -- that roamed the Earth the same time as modern man.

But the vocal scientific minority that has challenged that conclusion
since the discovery of Homo floresiensis was announced last year remains
unconvinced.

The discovery of a jaw bone, to be reported in Thursday's issue of the
journal Nature, represents the ninth individual belonging to a group
believed to have lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. The bones are in a
wet cave on the island of Flores in the eastern limb of the Indonesian
archipelago, near Australia.

In 2004, scientists announced their original, sensational discovery of a
delicate skull and partial skeleton of a female, nicknamed "Hobbit" and
believed to be 18,000 years old. In addition, they found separate bones
and fragments of other individuals ranging in age from 12,000 to 95,000
years old.

The findings have ignited a controversy unlike any other in the often-
contentious study of human origins.

The tiny bones have enchanted many anthropologists who accept the
interpretation that these diminutive skeletons belonged to a remnant
population of prehistoric humans that were marooned on Flores with dwarf
elephants and other miniaturized animals, giving the discovery a kind of
fairy tale quality.

If true, the discovery grafts a strange and tangled evolutionary branch
near the very top of the human family tree.

The conventional view of human evolution is that several types of
primitive ape-like ancestors appeared and faded over a span of about 4.5
million years. Modern Homo sapiens developed about 100,000 years ago, and
quickly overtook other large-brained competitors like Homo erectus and
Neanderthals. Modern humans were thought to have roamed the Earth without
competition for at least the past 30,000 years.

Fully grown, Homo floresiensis would have stood about 3 feet tall, with a
brain about the size of a chimpanzee.

Its discoverers, led by Australian anthropologist Michael Morwood of the
University of New England, speculate it evolved from Homo erectus, which
had spread from Africa across Asia. They attribute its small size to its
isolation on an island.

However, the researchers acknowledge that the Hobbit shares a bizarre and
unexplained mixture of modern and primitive traits. For example, its long,
dangling arms were thought to have belonged only to much older prehuman
species that were confined to Africa.

A vocal scientific minority insists the Hobbit specimens do not represent
a new species at all. They believe the specimens are nothing more than the
bones of modern humans that suffered from microencephaly, a broadly
defined genetic disorder that results in small brain size and other
defects.

And, at least two groups of opponents have submitted their own studies to
other leading scientific journals refuting the Flores work.

"This paper doesn't clinch it. I feel strongly that people are glossing
over the problems with this interpretation," said Robert Martin, a
biological anthropologist and provost of the Field Museum of Natural
History in Chicago.

Those caught in the middle of the debate say it is a real test of what we
know about human evolution.

Daniel E. Lieberman of the Peabody Museum at Harvard said the specimens
are so unusual that they deserve a more detailed analysis in order to
adequately answer the critics' complaints.

"Many syndromes can cause microencephaly and dwarfism and they all need to
be considered," said Lieberman, who wrote a commentary in Nature. "The
findings are not only astonishing, but also exciting because of the
questions they raise."

In the latest Nature study, the same team of Australian and Indonesian
scientists working in Liang Bua cave on Flores report finding a variety of
additional bones buried at various depths.

Among them, bones from the right arm of the previously discovered 18,000-
year old female. They labeled her LB1.

And, they report finding the lower jaw bone that does not belong to any of
the previously discovered individuals. An analysis of firepit charcoal
found nearby in the excavation layer suggests the jawbone is 15,000 years
old. It suggests a weaker chin with smaller tooth dimensions than LB1, but
otherwise shares the same characteristics.

"They almost certainly belong to the same species," Lieberman concluded.

[Encaitare]

'Hobbit' Species Discovery Challenged

[The 1,000 Reader]

Originally Posted by Fordim Hedgethistle

That's about as likely as finding evidence of an unwinged balrog!

That's about as likely as finding evidence of a balrog.

[Bêthberry]

Controversy continues over the discovery of this new species, based largely it appears on the size of the brain and the particular nature of its structure.

Hobbit or not?

Interesting too how apparently these little people were wiped out by a volcanic eruption. Where are the Great Eagles when they are needed?

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

Interesting too how apparently these little people were wiped out by a volcanic eruption. Where are the Great Eagles when they are needed?

That's a Deus Ex Machina for you...

[Rikae]

Originally Posted by Child of the 7th Age

OK, I am going to raise an idea here that is probably preposturous. Yet I can't help wondering.... Many cultures have stories of little folk leading a secluded life alongside the big folk, but largely hidden from view. They are given many different names, but the idea is widespread.

Do we have some kind of a collective memory that taps into what happened in the distant past? Some kind of radar that could take a people that really existed and make them part of a folk memory? And is it possible that some people are better at this than others.....they are sensitive to these distant memories in a way that others are not? Could Tolkien be someone with a special gift: the gift of reconnecting with archetypes that once really existed in some form or fashion and make up part of our human past? Is this one of the things we sense when we read his works?

This sort of idea is right up my alley - it seems this sort of intuitive "memory" could exist as a part of the collective unconscious, which is not so far fetched considering the parallels between mythologies of distant cultures, for instance. It could provide an explanation for the way Tolkien "resonates" with so many readers, producing an almost religious passion for his world and stories; he not only used the existing mythology, but built on it with an intuitive grasp of the collective memories of humankind. Maybe far-fetched to some, but it makes sense to me. I have always believed the psyche transcends time and space; no, actually as Campbell said, I don't need to have faith...I have experience.
The question of whether these stories would be reduced somehow if there were evidence for some historical basis is interesting. I think in this case such evidence, and its implications, would be an incredibly exciting discovery in their own right, with such fascinating implications, that it wouldn't be the least bit of a let down. It would be something akin to Edgar Allan Poe's essay "Eureka", which describes the big bang theory; science confirming what an artist intuited speaks for the power of intuition and imagination as being, perhaps, above science - and that's an exciting thought to me.
There seems to be new evidence, now, that the hobbits do in fact represent another human species, and that they used tools and fire : http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...tv_hobbit.html
:

[alatar]

More information about those hobbit ancestors has been discovered. The findings explain Gollum's climbing dexterity without a doubt.

[Kitanna]

Here's another article about our Hobbit ancestors from the USA Today:

The setting was a hidden island filled with pint-size men who feasted on pygmy elephants and battled dragons. The story of paleontology's "Hobbits," the extinct human species called Homo floresiensis, packs plenty of drama.

But the 2003 discovery by an Australian-Indonesian of the undersize bones inside Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores has long also suffered from a modern-day human rivalry. Add in the scientific back-story — a five-year feud over the whether the original inhabitants of Flores were actually a separate human species — and you have enough material for a novel.

The latest chapter of this story comes in the next Journal of Human Evolution, which boasts four reports concerning the hobbits— five years after discovery was first disclosed in the journal Nature. "Here we report the discovery, from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia, of an adult hominin," wrote the authors of that 2004 paper in the formal language of scientists declaring a new species. ("Hominin" is what the cool kids among paleontologists say instead of "hominids" now, or what reporters call "human species." )

Incredibly these "hobbits" stood less than 40 inches tall and had brains about a third the size of modern humans, although they were buried with Stone Age tools, which indicates they had some smarts. "The combination of primitive and derived (modern-looking) features assigns this hominin to a new species, Homo floresiensis. The most likely explanation for its existence on Flores is long-term isolation, with subsequent endemic dwarfing," concluded the team led by Peter Brown of Australia's University of New England. The declaration made the bones of "Liang Bua 1," or LB1, described in the study the "holotype", basically the defining specimen of the new species, much like the fossil of " Lucy" defines the pre-human species Australopithecus afarensis, which lived 3 to 4 million years ago in Africa.

For something so sacrosanct, LB1's bones have enjoyed a rough few years, derided by critics such as Jochen Weber of Germany's Leopoldina Hospital as belonging to a microencephalic victim of a small-brained pathology, not a new species. Florida State University neuroscientist Dean Falk countered those claims in other studies, most recently in a 2007 Proceedings of the National Academies of Science paper that concluded, "Despite LB1's having brain shape features that sort it with normal humans rather than microencephalics, other shape features and its small brain size are consistent with its assignment to a separate species." The bones even departed from their home in Jakarta's Indonesian Centre for Archaeology without the permission of all of the discoverers, a move that left them damaged and pawns in the politics of paleontology in Indonesia prior to their return.

Another look at LB1's much-maligned noggin comes with the new Journal of Human Evolution papers in a study led by anatomical scientist Karen Baab of the Stony Brook (N.Y.) University Medical Center that examines the asymmetry of the skull. Critics of the new-species designation had pointed out the two halves of the skull are lopsided, suggestive of microencephaly. However, Baab's report concludes that "the cranium is fairly asymmetrical, but within the range of asymmetry exhibited by modern humans and all extant African ape species." Packed under 10 feet of wet mud, the skull likely became a bit distorted, a process called taphonomy by fossil researchers.

The whole microencephaly debate is nonsense, original team members such as Peter Brown have argued, as they have turned up bones, if not skulls, from about a dozen "hobbits" underneath Liang Bua Cave. The bones all display similar looks. A graveyard for stubby microencephalics in a cave on Flores strikes the discoverers as unlikely.

Two papers look at those "post-cranial" remains of LB1 and kin, in other words every thing but the skull. The hips, legs and feet of nine hobbits are examined in a paper led by William Jungers of Stony Brook University. And the arms, collar bones, wrists and fingers of six hobbits are described in another led by his colleague Susan Larson. Those bones "presents a unique mosaic of derived (human-like) and primitive morphologies, the combination of which is never found in either healthy or pathological modern humans." Larson's group reports. The leg bone finds indicate LB1 was most likely female. Overall, the bones most resemble those of Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, suggesting they arrived at the island of Flores a very long time ago.

The latest papers include a better description of that cave, which concludes that whatever hobbits were, they ate a lot of Stegodon pygmy elephants. "There are at least 47 individual Stegodon represented in all excavated sectors of Liang Bua," the researchers write, describing findings from 10 holes that held remains from 95,000 to 17,000 years ago, when a volcanic eruption appears to have bumped off both elephants and hobbits.

Komodo dragon and giant stork remains also litter the cave, though there is less suspicion the hobbits preyed on those species. More likely they scavenged their carcasses. One thing the cave lacked was seashells, suggesting that hobbits were not big on surf and turf. "Homo floresiensis probably descended from a very early Homo erectus, or from Homo habilis, both human species that are not known to have used marine resources. Homo floresiensis probably did not have the right behavior to exploit marine resources (perhaps fear of entering the water, just like for instance orangutans)," says study lead author Gert van den Bergh of Holland's Nationaal Natuurhistorisch Museum Naturalis, by e-mail.

Or perhaps modern humans lived on the coasts and hobbits were "restricted to the more inaccessible interior of Flores and did not venture into the coastal areas," he says. "You see, still many unanswered questions remain."

[LadyBrooke]

I just found a rather old article today http://www.primates.com/ebu-gogo/index.html that dealt with the myths that the islanders told about the Ebu Gogo. Apparently they saw more of Gollum then Frodo.

One of the village elders told us that the Ebu Gogo ate everything raw, including vegetables, fruits, meat and, if they got the chance, even human meat.

Besides being a little freaked out at the last part, I'm also reminded rather strongly of Gollum's dietary preferences. So what do you all think? And who volunteers to be put in a room by yourself with one?