More research is 'in' on the Indonesian 'hobbits', thought by many to be a different species of hominid. I know there has been an HP thread on this, but darned if a quick search could find it, under Science or Ancient Mysteries.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8036396.stm
What particularly fascinated about this story in the previous thread is not only that the skeletal remains may be as recent as 8,000 years old, but also that people today claim to have seen small tribes of this hobbit species alive.
V
LOL - I heard this news on the radio yesterday and immediately thought of you, V! Only inasmuch as I remember how intrigued you were when the original story came out. IIRC you wanted to go to Indonesia to check it out. (Now wouldn't that be a great HP trip!) I do agree that the whole thing is really fascinating, I hope we find out more in the course of time.
xxx
There have been several HP threads on this topic, V, and of course I don't know what keywords you used for your search. I found several just from the word 'Flores' which featured early in your BBC link.
So just put that word in, and you don't need Advanced Search for this on specific forums, you should get a list of about half a dozen threads across the boards.
There's no point in my giving you a link to MY search results, because such links only work for the person actually doing the search, unfortunately, and it would give you an error message. 🙁 Try a search on Flores though 😉 🙂
Holistic
Hi Laura.
As you say, anyone can pick up more on this from the 'Flores' (the island) keyword. I just hadn't looked far-enough back in the respective forums. OMG 😮 ... tell me it's a software error! It seems like 12-18 months ago, but the threads are 2004-5!! Surely time doesn't pass so quickly?!
V
Hi guys,
Can I join in?
I have two observations about the BBC report.
The first concerns the size of the brains - if these were small people surely their cranial capacity (and therefore their brain size) would be small too?
I don't know, and only asking really.
The second concerns those feet. I'm on far less shakey ground here since I know a little about feet (I'm a Podiatrist) and I also did some (a very little) work in paleoanthropology a few years back.
Points:
1. The foot looks to be of normal size for a small hominid. To me the picture distorts the size so that it looks larger than it is.
2. The article talks about curved toe-bones, but there are none in the pic - that particular foot does not look as though it has curved toe-bones.
Curved toe-bones - which help with grip - are associated with a fossil skeleton called Lucy (which most interested parties will probably have heard of).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(Australopithecus
Just my thoughts.
David:)