Not too terribly long ago, there was news that scientists had found the remains hobbits in Indonesia. They didn’t look like Elijah Wood obviously, but they were an actual separate species of apemen, like Homo eructus.
News of this morning says that they now think these little hobbits (a.k.a Homo floresiensis ) evolved from the same African ancestors that we did. There is a common bond linking our two species back to African origins such as Australopithecus afarensis, better known as Lucy, the skeleton discovered in the 1970s and named after the Beatles song.
Problem is these common African ancestors couldn’t possibly have built and sailed boats, so how did the little guys get to a remote island in the Pacific? Well, scientists don’t exactly have that part figured out yet. Theories range from temporary land bridges they walked across all the way to just being being washed ashore after a tsunami.
Regardless of how they got there, once they were there, the island was so isolated that the little hobbits evolved and lived there well into the time of us, Homo sapiens. Folklore of the island even talks about the tiny people. Westerners scoffed at these stories, but apparently the locals knew something we didn’t. Hobbits were real.
So where’d the little guys go? Well, according to the news today there is a layer of volcanic ash above where the hobbit fossils are being found. They very well could have been wiped out dinosaur style – ash and debris killing off the vegetation and the hobbits just starving to death.
Some scientists have a more violent theory however. They think Homo sapiens came to the island and killed off all the hobbits. Timing wise, H. sapiens were covering most of Asia and they already had a pretty brutal history, killing off all the Neanderthals. Very well could be they wiped out all the little hobbits.
Well, that’s it for today’s science news. I’ll get back to reading more frivolous fluff.
