Hobbits and House Elves (the fossil evidence)

[justcarol67]

Susan wrote:
> 
> Well of course they were not human, they were precursors of homo 
> sapiens, a different precursor to the Neanderthal Human.
> 
> That said, I think this is totally cool news. The article I read
said that there were stories about them as late as the 1600s A.D.
> 
> Who said little people weren't real? And they had dragons, too!

Carol:
The Homo Floriensis fossils date from 18,000 years ago and are
contemporary with the Cro-Magnon cave paintings in Europe, so these
people could not possibly have been precursors of modern humans. By
that time, the Neanderthal (who were in Europe when the Cro-Magnon
arrived and coexisted with them for several thousand years) were
already extinct. However, there would be only a very distant
connection between the tiny Floriensis people, who apparently evolved
from the Homo Erectus of Java, and the Paleolithic peoples of Europe
(Cro-Magon or Neanderthal), since the ancestors of Java Man left
Africa and reached east Asia about a million years before any form of
Homo Sapiens, including Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis, evolved.

BTW, the Neanderthal diverged from the ancestors of Homo Sapiens
Sapiens (us) about 750,000 years ago. They are not our ancestors, or
anyone else's (unless you believe, as some anthropologists do, that a
few Neanderthal genes must have trickled into the Cro-Magnon gene
pool--genetic research disputes that theory, but the genetic research
has itself been disputed).

The dragons in the article are of course Komodo dragons (giant lizards
that still exist today). Evidently there were also pygmy Stegodons (an
extinct relative of the elephant) and Labrador-retriever-sized rats on
the island at the time that Floriensis lived there. Save me! No wonder
the little people went extinct.

Carol, who started out skeptical about Homo Floriensis but, having
spent the day exploring the topic, now believes they did exist but is
still not convinced that a creature with a chimp-sized brain made
those sophisticated tools