Hobbits Existed!

[longknife]

(I actually saw this on two other scientific feeds so it's not just a Daily Mail item)



Hobbits' were a separate species: Study of 18,000-year-old teeth contradicts theory creatures were deformed modern humans



Scientists believe 'hobbits' were once a large Homo erectus from Asia

They shrank in size after becoming stranded on an Indonesian island

Contradicts the previous theory that the individuals on the island were Homo sapiens with a miniaturising disorder known as microcephaly

It is possible that there is a little bit of Hobbit among today's humans



So. It makes you wonder how many other strange creatures we think of as coming from fairy tales really existed. Shades of the TV show Grimm?



Read more: Hobbits were a separate species, claims study of 18,000-year-old teeth

 

[waltky]

Hobbits were not Homo sapiens...

Extinct ‘hobbits’ were a different species: study
Wed, Feb 17, 2016 - Diminutive humans that died out on an Indonesian island about 15,000 years ago were not Homo sapiens, but a different species, according to a study published on Monday that dives into a fierce anthropological debate.

Fossils of Homo floresiensis — dubbed “the hobbits” due to their tiny stature — were discovered on the island of Flores in 2003. Controversy has raged ever since as to whether they are an unknown branch of early humans or specimens of modern man deformed by disease. The new study, based on an analysis of the skull bones, shows once and for all that the pint-sized people were not Homo sapiens, according to the researchers. Academic studies have come to different conclusions — and scientific discourse has sometimes tipped over into acrimony. One school of thought holds that so-called Flores Man descended from the larger Homo erectus and became smaller over hundreds of generations. The proposed process for this is called “insular dwarfing” — animals, after migrating across land bridges during periods of low sea level, wind up marooned on islands as oceans rise and their size progressively diminishes if the supply of food declines.

An adult hobbit stood 1m tall, and weighed about 25kg. Similarly, Flores Island was also home to a miniature race of extinct, elephant-like creatures called Stegodon. However, other researchers say that Homo floresiensis was in fact a modern human whose tiny size and small brain — no bigger than a grapefruit — was caused by a genetic disorder. One suspect was dwarf cretinism, sometimes brought on by a lack of iodine. Another potential culprit was microcephaly, which shrivels not just the brain and its boney envelope. Weighing in with a new approach, published in the Journal of Human Evolution, a pair of scientists in France used high-tech tools to re-examine the layers of the “hobbit” skull.

More precisely, they looked at the remains of Liang Bua 1 (nicknamed LB1), whose cranium is the most intact of nine known specimens. “So far, we have been basing our conclusions on images where you don’t really see very much,” said lead author Antoine Balzeau, a scientist at France’s Natural History Museum. Joining forces with Philippe Charlier, a paleo-pathologist at Paris-Descartes University specializing in solving ancient medical mysteries, the researchers secured high-resolution images recently generated in Japan to compute maps of bone thickness variation. “There is a lot of information contained in bone layers of the skull,” Balzeau said. The results, he said, were unambiguous: “There were no characteristics from our species” — that is, Homo sapiens.

While they found evidence of minor maladies, there was nothing corresponding to the major genetic diseases other researchers had pointed to. However, while the scientists could not exclude the possibility that the “hobbit” was a scaled-down version of Homo erectus, which arrived on the neighboring island of Java about 1 million years ago, nor could they be sure that Homo floresiensis was not a species it its own right. “For the moment, we can’t say one way or the other,” Balzeau said.

Extinct ‘hobbits’ were a different species: study - Taipei Times

 

[Old Rocks]

Actually, there were never any Hobbits in mythology. They were totally the invention of Tolkien. Leprechauns and little people, but no hobbits.

 

[longknife]

Actually, there were never any Hobbits in mythology. They were totally the invention of Tolkien. Leprechauns and little people, but no hobbits.

Good point. I honestly believe that a lot of mythical creatures actually existed at one time.

 

[Old Rocks]

Or were the invention of some observant person that realized that fossils actually represented animals that lived at one time. Cyclops and mastodons.

 

[Gracie]

Amazon tribes are very small people and they are still around.

 

[waltky]

Hobbits go back further than first thought...

Age of 'Hobbit' species revised
Wed, 30 Mar 2016 - The diminutive human species nicknamed "the Hobbit" probably went extinct at least 50,000 years ago - not the 12,000 years ago initially thought to be the case.

The discovery of Homo floresiensis in 2003 caused a sensation because it seemed the creature could have been alive in the quite recent past. But a new analysis indicates the little hominin probably went extinct at least 50,000 years ago - not the 12,000 years ago initially thought to be the case. Researchers report their revised assessment in the journal Nature.

Prof Bert Roberts, from the University of Wollongong, Australia, says the new dating actually resolves what had always been a head-scratcher: how it was possible for floresiensis to survive for 30,000 to 40,000 years after modern humans are believed to have passed through Indonesia. "Well, it now seems we weren't living alongside this little species for very long, if at all. And once again it smells of modern humans having a role in the downfall of yet another species," he told BBC News. "Every time modern humans arrived somewhere new, it tended to be bad news for the endemic fauna. Things would go pear-shaped pretty quickly."

H. floresiensis - A sensational finding on Flores Island

 

[waltky]

There really were hobbits...

‘Hobbit’ Ancestor Fossils Discovered
June 08, 2016 - Unearthed 700,000 year-old teeth and jawbone found to belong to adult, two children

Recently discovered fossils in Indonesia show that the so-called “hobbit” hominin that lived 50,000 years ago had much older ancestors. Writing in the journal Nature, researchers from the Research Center of Human Evolution at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, say the 700,000-year-old teeth and jawbone fragment are either from hobbits or a precursor to the .9-meter-tall hobbits. The fragments indicate the creature was about the same size as its much younger counterpart. The fossils were found in 2014 about 74 kilometers from the cave where the original hobbit fossils were discovered more than a decade ago.

The skull, left, of a newly discovered 18,000-year-old species, known as Homo floresiensis, is displayed next to a normal human's skull, right, at a news conference in Yogyakarta, Indonesia​

Hobbits, also called Homo floresiensis, are believed to have hit an evolutionary cul-de-sac about 50,000 years ago. The recently found fossils belong to an adult and two children from a bigger species that came to Flores island about a million years ago. Then, the creature began to shrink over the following generations in a process called “island dwarfism.” Island dwarfism is well-known among animals, with some cases seeing a sixfold decrease in size because of a lack of resources. In fact, Flores was once home to a very small elephant-like creature.

The finding puts to rest the notion that hobbits were simply sick or malnourished homo sapiens. "The hobbit was real," said Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at the Research Center of Human Evolution and lead author of one of the studies, in an interview with AFP. "It was an ancient human species that is separate to ours and that no longer exists on the planet today." The new fossils could help researchers determine what the older species was and how long it took for that creature to shrink to the size of the hobbits. One possibility is that hobbits are a dwarfed version of homo erectus, the first hominin to leave Africa.

‘Hobbit’ Ancestor Fossils Discovered

 

[Unkotare]

This is still disputed science, however. More data is needed to reach a firm conclusion.

 

[longknife]

Saw three different articles on the net about the latest discoveries. Appears they were even small humanoids than those previously found.

Isn't it amazing how things in nature become part of lore leading to all sorts of stories? People born with unusual amounts of hair being the root of werewolf stories. Inbred families having to drink blood to correct severe anemia being called vampires. (Interesting point, vampire bats only live in Mexico and northern Central America so how did they come to play such an important role in European mythology?)

 

[Blackrook]

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

-- J.R.R. Tolkien

 

[ThunderKiss1965]

Short hominids existed. The Hobbit thing is a silly attempt at trying to grab attention.