04w44:2 Homo Floresiensis Posted October 30th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 44 number 2 (Homo Floresiensis) ——————————————————————— Homo Floresiensis has been discovered | Matt Webb http://interconnected.org/home/2004/10/27/homo_floresiensi_has “Oh yes, other thing about H. floresiensis, the exciting bit: Even more intriguing is the fact that Flores’ inhabitants have incredibly detailed legends about the existence of little people on the island they call Ebu Gogo. The islanders describe Ebu Gogo as being about one metre tall, hairy and prone to ‘murmuring’ to each other in some form of language. They were also able to repeat what islanders said to them in a parrot-like fashion. ‘There have always been myths about small people – Ireland has its leprechauns and Australia has the Yowies. I suppose there’s some feeling that this is an oral history going back to the survival of these small people into recent times,’ said co-discoverer Peter Brown, an associate professor of archaeology at New England. […] The myths say Ebu Gogo were alive when Dutch explorers arrived a few hundred years ago and the very last legend featuring the mythical creatures dates to 100 years ago. But Henry Gee, senior editor at Nature magazine, goes further. He speculates that species like H.floresiensis might still exist, somewhere in the unexplored tropical forest of Indonesia.'” From 18,000 years ago… | Tim Radford http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/sciences/story/0,12243,1337735,00.html “The new creature, officially titled Homo floresiensis but nicknamed ‘the hobbit’ by some researchers, upsets the orthodox view of human evolution. It means that researchers will now start looking for unexpected human remains in other isolated regions of the world. It also confirms the belief that modern humans – the only survivors of the genus Homo – are an evolutionary exception. For most of the seven million years of the human story, there were a number of co-existing species of humans. ‘We now have the remains of at least seven hobbit-sized individuals at the cave site, so the 18,000-year-old skeleton cannot be some kind of freak that we just happened to stumble across first,’ said Bert Roberts, of the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, one of the authors. “ New Species Revealed: Tiny Cousins of Humans | Nicholas Wade http://tinyurl.com/6rklw “Once upon a time, but not so long ago, on a tropical island midway between Asia and Australia, there lived a race of little people, whose adults stood just three and a half feet high. Despite their stature, they were mighty hunters. They made stone tools with which they speared giant rats, clubbed sleeping dragons and hunted the packs of pygmy elephants that roamed their lost world.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Saturday 30 October 2004 @ 8:12 PM