Middle Earth Discovered on Indonesia?

[The 14th Colony]

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/nation/10031634.htm
Apparently, they had Hobbits there 18,000 years ago.

[Darth Marley]

Middle-Earth is Europe!

[Senmut]

Middle-Earth is Europe!


Ante-diluvian crustal shifts. Plate tectonics. Whatever. :D

[Rowan]

They have found 7 bodies so far

[Senmut]

This could get hobbit-forming.

[Rowan]

This could get hobbit-forming.:LOL:

[The 14th Colony]

My advice to them is, if they find a gold ring with lettering that reacts to fire, LEAVE IT BE AND LEAVE ASAP!!!!!!!!

[The 14th Colony]

This could get hobbit-forming.
LOL :LOL:

[jewels]

My advice to them is, if they find a gold ring with lettering that reacts to fire, LEAVE IT BE AND LEAVE ASAP!!!!!!!!
No, DUMP IT INTO THE NEAREST ACTIVE VOLCANO!

:LOL:

[thomas7g]

No..find a hobbit and HIM drop it in a volcano!!! :LOL:

Seriouly though...isn't it New ZEaland that ring fans flock to in droves to see old filming locations?


btw- aren't pygmies like around still?

[The 14th Colony]

How closs is Indonesia to New Zealand? I have to check a map. It would have been an incredible coincidence if the "Hobbit" bodies had been discovered in New Zealand.

[The 14th Colony]

No, DUMP IT INTO THE NEAREST ACTIVE VOLCANO!

:LOL:
Most definately, and be wary of Nazguls! :eek:

[Rowan]

To others, the species' baffling combination of slight dimensions and coarse features bears almost no meaningful comparison either to modern humans or to our larger, archaic cousins.







They suggest that Flores Man doesn't belong in the genus Homo at all, even if it was a recent contemporary. But they are unsure where to classify it. "I don't think anybody can pigeonhole this into the very simple-minded theories of what is human," anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh. "There is no biological reason to call it Homo. We have to rethink what it is."
Researchers suspect that Flores Man probably is an H. erectus descendant that was squeezed by the pressures of natural selection.





Scientists have named the extinct species Homo floresiensis, or Flores Man, and details appear in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.



The specimens' ages range from 95,000 to 12,000 years old, meaning they lived until the threshold of recorded human history and perhaps crossed paths with the ancestors of today's islanders.



Flores Man was hardly formidable. His grapefruit-sized brain was two-thirds smaller than ours, and closer to the brains of today's chimpanzees and transitional prehuman species in Africa than vanished 2 million years ago.



Yet Flores Man made stone tools, lit fires and organized group hunts for meat. Bones of fish, birds and rodents found near the skeleton were charred, suggesting they were cooked.



All this suggests Flores Man lived communally and communicated effectively, perhaps even verbally.

"It is arguably the most significant discovery concerning our own genus in my lifetime," said anthropologist Bernard Wood of George Washington University, who reviewed the research independently.







Now, scientists are more puzzled by the specimen's jumble of features that appear to be borrowed from different human ancestors.

This much is clear: Its worn teeth and fused skull show it was an adult. The shape of the pelvis is female. The skull is wide like H. erectus. But the sides are rounder and the crown traces an arc from ear to ear. The skull of H. erectus has straight sides and a pointed crown, they said.

The lower jaw contains large, blunt teeth and roots like Australopithecus, a prehuman ancestor in Africa more than 3 million years ago. The front teeth are smaller and more like modern human teeth.

The eye sockets are big and round, but unlike other members of the Homo genus, it has hardly any chin or browline.

The rest of the skeleton looks as if it walked upright, but the pelvis and the shinbone have primitive, even apelike features.

Bones from the species' feet and hands have not yet been found. Delicate artifacts found in the cave were described as "toy-sized" versions of stone tools made by H. erectus. They suggest that Flores Man retained intelligence and dexterity to flake small weapons with sharp edges, even if its body shrunk over time. "I've spent a sleepless night trying to figure out what to do with this thing," said Schwartz. "It's a mind-blower. It makes me think of nothing else in this world."




Eeeeeezzzz very interesting :D

[Senmut]

My advice to them is, if they find a gold ring with lettering that reacts to fire, LEAVE IT BE AND LEAVE ASAP!!!!!!!!


Will they be able to read it clearly, through all that Smaug?

Anyway, more on this: http://dsc.discovery.com/ads/ad_popup_fill2.html

[warhammerdriver]

http://dsc.discovery.com/ads/ad_popup_fill2.html

I think you gave us the wrong link.

[Micheleh]

Source: dailydispatch.co.za

SYDNEY - The discovery of a skeleton of a female barely one metre tall who hunted pygmy elephants and giant rats 18000 years ago could force a reassessment of the origins of humanity, scientists in Australia said yesterday.

The perfectly preserved skeleton, which is about the size of a modern three-year-old and has a skull the size of a grapefruit, was discovered in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, about 600km east of Bali.

The female creature, called the Flores Hobbit after the remote island on which her remains were found, has been identified as a completely new member of the human race.

The find, detailed in the latest edition of the journal Nature, is the work of a joint Australian-Indonesian team incorporating members from the University of New England and the Indonesian Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta.

"At first we thought it was a child," University of New England professor Mike Morwood said. But it was an adult female, about 30, and it was 18000 years old. The remains of six more little people have been unearthed in the Liang Bua limestone cave that also contains volcanic ash from an eruption that might have wiped out the ancient species.

"It's a new species of human that who actually lived alongside us, yet were half our size," Morwood said. "They were using fire to cook in hearths. They were making sophisticated stone tools associated with the hunting of big game. So despite their very small brains, this hominin population was doing sophisticated things."

The Australian team has now found several other specimens as well as delicate stone tools at the same site.

Nicknamed Hobbit, the miniature humans called Homo floresiensis existed alongside our own species, Homo sapiens, for tens of thousands of years and might have died out only 500 years ago.

The find was hailed as one of the most important human origin discoveries of the last 100 years.

Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, said: "This has really rewritten the text books. To have this creature present less than 20000 years ago is astonishing.

"In terms of the bigger questions of human evolution as a whole, and how complex it was and how much we still have to learn, I cannot underestimate its importance."

Scientists have not ruled out the possibility that her descendants, or other unknown human species are still hiding in the impenetrable forests and cave systems of Southeast Asia.

Cut-off from the mainland, evolution ran a different course on Flores. Besides the hobbits, elephants the size of ponies and rats as big as dogs roamed the island and were probably hunted by Homo floresiensis.

They themselves may have been hunted by giant lizards - even bigger versions of the huge Komodo dragons which still exist in the region and have been known to eat humans.

Most of the prehistoric fauna on Flores was thought to have been wiped out by a volcanic eruption 12000 years ago, but the stories suggest the intriguing possibility that its race of dwarfs may have lived on.

Folk tales on remote Flores tell of a tribe of hairy little people called "ebo gogo" living in caves who ate their food raw and had their own primitive language.

[Senmut]

I think you gave us the wrong link.



Oooops. Try this one.


http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20041025/hobbit.html

or

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20041025/newhuman.html

[shiningstar]

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/nation/10031634.htm
Apparently, they had Hobbits there 18,000 years ago.

What they said was they found Hobbit sized bones in Indonesia.